Posts Tagged: link tip

Landscapes — No Comments
9
Nov 10

2010 Wildlife Photographer of the Year

The most prestigous award possible to win as a wildlife photographer certainly is the “Wildlife Photographer of the Year” award, an initiative led by the Natural History Museum of London, sponsored by different companies each year which is why you might find people referencing it as the “BBC Wildlife Photographer of the year” or the “Shell Wildlife Photographer”. That’s the same. The unoffical community abbreviation seems to be WPOY.

The online gallery with the winners and the winning images of the 2010 award has just been published, make sure to surf by and have a look, it always is worth a visit:

But don’t get depressed thinking you will never make it – It is easy to think that if you would only live in South Africa you certainly would win that award more easily than, let’s say, living in The Netherlands. Is this really true? Let’s have a quick look at a) where the winning photographers actually come frome, and b) where the winning images were taken.

If we have a quick count of the home countries of the winning photographers, and summarize to, well, continents or areas, you get this result (pardon me for counting photographers multiple times in case they won more than one award, my spreadsheet currently doesn’t allow more detail). A certainly strong European flavor in this competition:

Area # Photog’s
Europe 51
USA 17
South Africa 8
Australia 4
India 2
Israel 2
Brazil 1

But where the photographers are from is not as relevant for our discussion as where the images were actually made. So, drilling down on the area the winning photos were made in, no surprise Africa comes up first. But right then, European wildlife and landscapes make it on the ranks of the award.

Area # Photos
Africa 12
Southern Europe 11
Central Europe 8
Central America 8
Scandinavia 8
USA 8
South America 7
UK 6
India 5
Indonesia 4
Australia 3
Indian Ocean 2
Israel 2
Antarctica 1
Southern Pacific 1

Antarctica? For sure. One winning image.  Underwater, at a southern sea coral reef? Certainly. One winning image. Canary Islands? Yikes, three winning images!

Conclusion: You do not necessarily need to book a transcontinental flight to stand a chance in this competition. Look closer to your home, and for you Europeans out there: Embrace the European Wonders of Nature!

Of course, alternatively, if you don’t think you will make it at home you could travel as far as the Australian Kent Miklenda who shot this awarded image on the Lofot islands, northern Norway:

Gear / Workflow — No Comments
10
Apr 10

Delete that image!

After having refreshed the image archive, there was just one more thing left: Revisit Texas. Long time readers might remember my disk space investigation one year ago, which led eventually to me buying my beloved little Synology DS 207+ NAS with 2 TB of disk space. Now, after having added those 5000 JPEGs to the disk, I was wondering how the disk space utilization came along, and whether I was threatened with another disk upgrade soon…

In case you are having the same thoughts, I have made the script I used to calculate that statistic available on the newly created download page at Alpenglow.info as freeware. I’m interested in feedback, so please give it a try and let me know if it works for you!

So here is the result of running the statistics script on my NAS:

disk_space_usage_2010Oh – positive suprise! The aggregated disk space curve actually flattens roughly mid-2009, despite my fears of faster image data growth after I had upgraded the camera to more Megapixels and Megabyte per image. What is the explanation? Well, it’s actually two:

  1. I did not have as much time for my hobby as I did before, and definitely did less photo shoots and excursions since then. I am inclined to change that again, and the next workshops are already booked :-)
  2. I definitely improved my workflow: Instead of importing the JPEGs into Photoshop Album, keywording and assigning the 1-5 star rating in there (usually keeping even the 1 star images), I rather go through the images using the RAW viewer Nikon ViewNX first, and use the “1″ key (which assigns a red category marker) for those images that are definitely not worth keeping. After I have made one pass through the images, I immediately use the filter selector to select all red category images, and delete them from the disk. Phew!

Now the one real challenge is to flag as many images for deletion as possible. And I definitely got better at this, being more critical towards my own images and recognizing when images will not be suitable for presentation and thus don’t satisfy my own quality criteria (and have no nostalgical value yet )  – to say it with the words of Florian Möllers, a workshop leader I once had the pleasure to experience on a nature photography course in the Bavarian Forest national park (I think to remember that Florian himself was quoting the late Fritz Pölking – please make sure to pay Fritz’ website a visit, there is definitely a wealth of information about nature photography there):

Tapfer sein! (Be courageous!)

Which translates to: Delete those images! Get rid of them immediately! There will be better days, and better photos!

Gear — No Comments
12
Mar 10

Body and lens selection for bird photography

Now, this is a peculiar coincidence which must not go by untapped: Scanning my backlog of link tips, I stopped at the pages Markus Jais has made detailing the options of camera bodies and lenses out there suited for bird photography. Admittedly, I had bookmarked his page over a year ago, and came back to it only today – just to find that he has updated the page to include all new Canon and Nikon camera bodies just yesterday! Same thought, different mind.

As I remember my months-long investigations and head scratching before deciding for the Sigma 100-300 f/4, I can only recommend to surf over to his page and have a look at his article on body selection, and the one on lens selection. I can agree with most of his conclusions, except maybe that you should also consider a Sony Alpha 700, which has the image stabilizer in the body stabilizing any of the long lenses.

Markus is an active member over at the Bird Photographers Net forums, which is certainly where I met him. Oh, and I just see he is living close to Munich as well!

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