Decisive Moments

 Posted by at 7:22 pm on October 31, 2010
Oct 312010
 

What makes an image iconic? Why do some nature photographs captivate viewers, even those who wouldn’t call themselves nature lovers? These are the questions that motivate photographer ’s new book, Decisive Moments: Creating Iconic Imagery. Scott has quickly risen through the ranks of pro nature photographers in just a few years’ time, and has defined himself as a unique artist in a field that is becoming ever more crowded with beautiful, but conventional, images. I had a chance to read a pre-press version of Scott’s book this weekend.

The front cover of Decisive Moments.

The book is about photography, but it isn’t a technical how-to. Instead, Scott uses images from throughout his career to explore that all-important question: What makes an image iconic? With each image, he gives readers a taste of the inventive thinking that helped him to capture the moment, and he shares his thoughts on why the image works. A non-photographer won’t be interested in every technical detail behind an image to understand how it was captured. So Scott focuses on the unique challenges that had to be overcome to capture each image – the careful planning, the specialized equipment, and the clever techniques that made the photograph possible. By focusing on these essentials, Decisive Moments will be an engaging read for photographers and non-photographers alike.

But the images alone are worth the price of admission. Many would call Scott a “high-speed photographer,” because he specializes in capturing fleeting natural moments. And yes, many of his images depend on fast shutter speeds and high-speed flashes. But I prefer to think of Scott as an animal behavior photographer. Many of his images show animals performing rarely witnessed behaviors, ones that occur only at night or in places we are unlikely to look. And some of his images show behaviors that simply can’t be observed by the unaided human eye, because they just happen too fast. Regardless of the behavior, Scott’s images reflect a keen artistic sense and impeccable technique. Looking at some of the photographs in Decisive Moments, you may find yourself spending minutes discovering all the intricacies of a moment that lasted 1/10,000th of a second!

One of my favorite of Scott's recent images, a moth attracted to an electric light.

So what does make an image iconic? There’s no simple answer to that question – if there were, we’d all be creating iconic images all the time! Scott identifies many of the elements that make his images work, but to me, the common thread in Scott’s work is a clear creative vision. He knows exactly what behavior he wants to capture and how he wants to depict it, and he goes to considerable lengths to create the images he has envisioned. He learns the biology of his subjects and uses a diverse assortment of field and studio techniques to make the image happen. With this intentional, meticulous creative process, Scott has created more memorable images in his young career than many photographers create in a lifetime.

You can buy Decisive Moments: Creating Iconic Imagery at Scott Linstead’s website .

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Scientific Filmmaking 101

 Posted by at 1:27 pm on October 26, 2010
Oct 262010
 

Imagine you’re a biologist. Nothing in your formal training has prepared you to communicate with the public about your work… that just isn’t part of a scientific education these days. So, what if you want people outside the scientific community to understand what you do? Should you tell them to read the papers you’ve published in peer-reviewed journals? That probably won’t work; even if they could find a library with access to the journals in which you publish, your papers aren’t written for the non-scientist. What if you made a movie instead? “But Neil, I have no idea how to make a movie about anything,” you might say. Fair enough, I suppose, but as of last weekend, I can confidently recommend a great way to get started.

I spent Oct. 10-17 in Bodega Bay at the UC Davis Bodega Marine Lab, participating in a workshop called “Scientific Filmmaking: An Introduction to Filmmaking Tools for the Working Scientist.” The workshop was taught by Jeff Morales, a freelance filmmaker and former staff producer for National Geographic Television, and Dr. Colin Bates, a marine biologist and filmmaker based at the University of British Columbia. There’s a lot more to learn about filmmaking than can be taught in seven days, but Jeff and Colin did a great job of introducing us to all the technical and artistic skills needed to start making high-quality films.

The goal of the workshop was to complete a “rough cut” of a short (4-5 minute) film by the end of the week, but we began with simpler exercises like building a scene, creative camera work, and sound recording. Each day, we would learn some new skills, then shoot and edit a short (~1 minute) practice exercise in just a couple of hours before sharing our creation with the rest of the group. Then, with critiques from Jeff, Colin, and each other, we learned how to improve our work next time.

I’ve posted a few of my exercises below, so you can see what I’m talking about. Caveat: they’re nothing fancy. But that was the point: we were learning the basics.

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For my final project, I worked with Kelvin Gorospe (University of Hawaii) and Annie Schmidt (UC Davis) to produce a short film about a graduate student researcher at Bodega Marine Lab, . I won’t bother posting our “rough cut,” but sometime in the next few weeks I’ll upload the final version – it needs a little bit more audio mixing and a couple of other tweaks before it’s ready for primetime.

Creating a presentable short film in about 48 hours was an adventure, to say the least! But it was a great learning experience, and one that I’d highly recommend to any scientist who’s interested in teaching the public about his or her work. To learn more about Jeff and Colin’s workshops, click here. Both Jeff and Colin really know their stuff, and even more importantly, they’re excited about teaching scientists how to make films. Thanks to them, my future video projects are going to be WAY better than they would have been without this workshop! Now if I could just make time for those “future video projects”…

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Australian Landscapes, Big and Small

 Posted by at 12:33 am on October 20, 2010
Oct 202010
 

As I mentioned in my last post, Neil and I just got back to the states from a two-week trip in southwest Australia. Our official business was in Perth, where we each gave talks about our research at the International Society for Behavioral Ecology conference. After the conference, Neil and I rented a four-wheel-drive vehicle, packed it with a scary amount of camera gear, and headed for Australia’s southwest.

This kind of adventure has become a sort of tradition for Neil and I. Our academic jobs require us to spend time outdoors searching for, catching, and studying animals, but for some odd reason, we spend our free time doing more or less the same thing. We’ve started to call these photo/film/adventure trips “Biology Road Trips,” as each trip involves us searching for the most spectacular animals, plants and environments we can find and trying to capture it on film.

Clicking on the footer below will bring you to a web gallery with some of our favorite landscapes and macros from this trip. This is the first of several photo galleries that we’ll put together for this trip. The gallery in the current post is titled :

Our goal with this series was to capture the otherworldly landscapes of the Australian Southwest. We drove almost 1500 km through some of the most amazing and alien landscapes on earth. Among the most impressive of these places were the Yeagarup dunes – the largest landlocked dunes in the southern hemisphere. This mountain of sand can be seen from space and is moving north 4-6 meters/year, literally consuming the 60m forest surrounding it. The unique ecosystems of this area are even more impressive when you look close at the bizarre and often tiny plant life that live in them. Take for example Neil’s picture of a carnivorous plant in the genus Drosera on the slops of the Sterling Range. With little nutrients in the soil, these plants have evolved to get their nutrients by catching and digesting insects using enzyme-filled, sticky droplets.

As photographers Neil and I have a very different approach. Neil’s images are well thought-out, while I’m more of an impulsive shooter. I’m often impatient and always out looking for something that looks better. Neil, on the other hand, waits for the opportune time to shoot or often studies what’s in front of him and finds a way to make it look beautiful. I’ve learned a lot from shooting with him, both technically and lesions on being patient. If you haven’t already, check out his photography website () or see his DaysEdgeProductionsBlog here.

Enjoy the photos!

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Biology Road Trip, Part 1: Landscapes of Southwest Australia

 Posted by at 10:01 pm on October 19, 2010
Oct 192010
 

After the ISBE meeting in Perth, my buddy Nate Dappen and I rented an SUV and headed south. We had only four days to spend in Southwest Australia, so we made ourselves a ridiculously full itinerary. One night at the Dryandra Woodland, one night at Stirling Range National Park, one night at Cheynes Beach, and one night at Yeagarup Dunes in D’Entrecasteaux National Park. Some 1500 kilometers later, we were back at the Perth airport, where we’d picked up the SUV just 96 hours earlier. By that point, we’d accumulated more than 100 gigabytes of photos and video, the highlights of which we’ll be sharing over the next several weeks.

As Nate explained in his post, we’ve started calling our photo adventures “Biology Road Trips,” and they’ve become a bit of a tradition. Sometimes it’s nice to take a break from working all day in the field looking for animals, you know, and just go out in your free time and spend all day in the field looking for animals! Typically, these trips involve making numerous questionable decisions, getting into various predicaments, seeing fantastic wildlife and just generally having a blast.

Southwest Australia is a beautiful and diverse landscape, with an extremely sparse human population. We encountered everything from white sand beaches to rugged mountains, from deserts to lush eucalyptus forests 60 meters high. Despite seeing some remarkable wildlife (usually my photographic focus), I found myself shooting a lot of landscape pictures; I just couldn’t help myself. We found amazing scenes at every scale, from grand vistas to tiny microcosms.

One of the great things about traveling with a fellow photographer is that they tend to be pretty tolerant when you make them stop abruptly on the highway or wait until dark for what will almost certainly be a lackluster sunset to – just maybe – transform into something special.

It’s also fun to see Nate’s images after I’ve reviewed my own; we were often shooting just a few feet from each other, and occasionally we do end up with similar images. But more often than not, our visions diverge and we create completely different images of the very same subjects. Here’s a gallery of some of our favorite landscapes – great and small – from Southwest Australia (click here or click the banner above). Can you tell which ones are mine and which ones are Nate’s before you see the watermarks?

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NANPA College Scholarship Program: 2011 Applications due soon!

 Posted by at 9:44 am on October 19, 2010
Oct 192010
 

About this time last year, I was preparing an application for the (NANPA) College Scholarship. Through this program, about a dozen young photographers in college or graduate school get to attend NANPA’s annual Nature Photography Summit. I had the honor of being selected to receive one of the scholarships in 2010, so I went to the Summit in Reno, NV in February. We had a conservation photography photo shoot at a Nature Conservancy restoration site on the Truckee River and presented a multimedia project based around our images at the end of the Summit. We got to meet many professional photographers (Artie Morris, my idol when I first started taking pictures, actually critiqued my portfolio!), as well as photo editors and other industry professionals. But most of all, the interactions within the College Scholarship cohort were inspiring — it was a great group of photographers, and a group that was very committed to using photography to communicate about science, nature, and sustainability.

This year’s Nature Photography Summit is March 7-13, 2011 in McAllen, TX: an amazing place for wildlife photography! The scholarship is a tremendous opportunity for a young nature photographer, so if you are one, or if you know one, please take a look at this link to the . The application deadline is November 8, 2010. Please pass this link on.

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A non-birder goes birding with Dr. Rick Prum

 Posted by at 3:04 pm on October 11, 2010
Oct 112010
 

Australia's famous pink parrot the Galah Cockatoo

I like birds, but I’m not a birder. Its not that I don’t appreciate them, I just think that I lack the patience to search-out, hunt-down, or wait for birds to get close. I’m somewhat ashamed of the non-birder in me, which is why I think that I’m so please with myself every time I spend time with serious birders.

I just got back to Miami from a ten-day trip to South West Australia. I few to Perth, where I presented a talk about my research at the biannual meeting for the (ISBE). This was my second time attending the ISBE conference, but was the first time I have ever given a professional talk outside of my University.  In addition to the excitement of presenting, I had the opportunity to see dozens of talks on a wide variety of research topic, and to meet some fascinating scientists. One of those scientists was Dr. Rick Prum, an evolutionary ornathologist from Yale University’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He recently won the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, which is a $500,000, no-strings-attached grant for individuals who have shown exceptional creativity in their work and the promise to do more (see video below).

Like many people who study birds, Rick’s path to evolutionary biology began at young age by watching birds—and he hasn’t lost this passion. I was lucky enough to spend a day birding with him, Neil, and another biologist names l. These three guys are serious bird watchers. It’s hard to describe the familiarity that they had with a totally exotic group of birds. And as the only non-birder in the group, I initially felt like the odd-man-out. Thankfully, everyone was patient enough to share their experience (and binoculars) with a novice.

From left to right- Alex, Neil and Rick trying to identify a new bird

One of the terms that birders use quite a bit is “lifer,” which refers to any bird species that they have never witnessed before and are seeing for the first time in the wild. Many serious birders set out to find “lifers” with the ultimate, but unlikely goal of checking every bird species off their life-list.

While at Bungendore Park, I asked Rick a naïve, but seeming logical question, “is it possible to see every bird species?”

The answer is somewhat complicated. Rick went on to tell me that, to start, we don’t know all the species in the world. Even when we consider only documented birds in field guides, there are probably many cases in which several species are lumped into a single species, or alternatively, a single species may turn out to be a variety of species.

Dr. Rick Prum listens to a bird song at Bungendore Park

These problems, of course, are dwarfed by the logistic, economic and time constraints actually required to travel and search for such an enormous number of species. There are around 10,000 living bird species, living in almost every environment, making them the most widespread and diverse group of terrestrial vertebrates.

Luckily, the prospect of not seeing all the birds on the planets doesn’t bother Rick. After all, seeing “lifers” is what many birders love. That’s what’s great about  birds – there are so many species on planet earth that people like Rick will always have new ones to find.

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The other side of the world

 Posted by at 8:20 pm on October 8, 2010
Oct 082010
 

A Yellow-billed Spoonbill (Platalea flavipes) in a freshwater marsh in Perth, WA.

I just returned to LA from a 2-week trip to southwestern Australia, where I gave a talk at the in Perth, WA. I got some great feedback on my talk and met some really excellent people. And for a few days before and after the meeting, I got to see some of the coolest animals, plants and environments I’ve ever seen! Lots more to come on that front…

Halfway through the conference, we got a break to explore the area, and I went birding with , Nate Dappen, and Rick Prum. I met Rick for the first time at the conference, and it’s always fun to go birding with a really serious ornithologist. Rick is on the faculty in Yale’s , and he studies sexual selection, structural coloration, and the evolution of feathers in extant birds and extinct non-avian theropods. Rick gave a really interesting presentation based on his arguing that sexual selection research needs a “null model revolution” – essentially, that much of current sexual selection research is based on an unwarranted assumption, whether explicit or implicit, that sexual signals always indicate some aspect of quality.

Nathan Dappen photographing wildflowers at Stirling Range National Park near Albany, Western Australia.

Rick’s wife, Ann Prum, is a scientific filmmaker. She recently directed the excellent PBS Nature documentary “Hummingbirds: Magic in the Air,” and has also created several other programs for networks like National Geographic and the Discovery Channel. Check out some of her work at her website, .

I’m including a couple of pictures from my travels, but be assured that there is much more to come… Nate and I saw some incredible stuff during our post-conference travels, and we shot a couple hundred gigabytes of still images and video along the way!

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Lizards playing possum?

 Posted by at 12:07 am on October 8, 2010
Oct 082010
 

Ibiza Wall Lizard from E'spart island Playing dead for a photo

On my first trip to Ibiza, I discovered that Ibiza Wall lizards seemed to play dead when I placed them on their backs to photograph them (see video below)

from on .

Was this reaction a result of some sort of reflex action, otherwise known as tonic immobility, or was it defense mechanism to avoid predations, otherwise known as thanatosis? In order to figure out which of these phenomena best explained this behavior, I conducted a little study. This quick experiment was recently published in the Journal Herpteloglical review.  If you’re interested, you can check it out: 

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