Photo Safaris By Region AFRICA - Botswana Wildlife - Madagascar - Masai Mara Wildlife Reserve, Kenya ANTARCTICA - Ultimate Antarctica ASIA - Essential China—Iconic Landmarks & Landscapes - India—Rajasthan & Puskar Fair - Japan's Winter Wildlife - Laos & Vietnam - Mongolia—The Golden Eagle Festival EUROPE - Best of the Greek Isles - Eclectic Holland - Finland's Arctic Wildlife - Turkey—Continental Crossroads - Tuscany - White Horses of France's Camargue NORTH AMERICA - Alaska Overland - Aurora Borealis—Fairbanks, Alaska - Bald Eagles of the Chilkat River, Alaska - Bosque del Apache & White Sands, New Mexico - Brown Bears of Katmai National Park in Summer - Brown Bears of Katmai National Park in Autumn - Colorado Fall Colors - Denali National Park in Autumn - Exploring Lake Powell - Florida Birds—Best of the West - Grand Canyon at Havasu Falls - Great Smoky Mountains - Horses & Icons of the Wild West - Humpback Whales of Alaska's Inside Passage - Mexico's Colonial Heartland - Monument Valley & Slot Canyons - Nova Scotia—Photo Tour for Women - Olympic National Park, Washington - Predatory Animals of North America - Springtime in Callaway Gardens, Georgia - Ultimate Wolves - Ultimate Yellowstone - Washington's Palouse Country - World's Best Raptor Shoot - Yellowstone & Grand Tetons in Autumn - Nature & Digital Photography Seminars with John Shaw PACIFICA - Midway Atoll SOUTH & CENTRAL AMERICA - Galápagos - Patagonia's Mountain Landscapes - Ultimate Dolphins Wildlife Models Shoot - Wildlife of Brazil's Pantanal Photo Safaris By Date JANUARY - Ultimate Wolves - Nature & Digital Photography Seminars with John Shaw, Dallas, TX & Raleigh, NC - Ultimate Yellowstone FEBRUARY - Japan's Winter Wildlife MARCH - Florida Birds—Best of the West - Nature & Digital Photography Seminars with John Shaw, Phoenix, AZ & Boston, MA - Midway Atoll - Aurora Borealis—Fairbanks, Alaska - Monument Valley & Slot Canyons - White Horses of France's Camargue APRIL - Springtime in Callaway Gardens, Georgia - Galápagos - Finland's Arctic Wildlife - Patagonia's Mountain Landscapes - Eclectic Holland - Great Smoky Mountains - Grand Canyon at Havasu Falls - Mexico's Colonial Heartland MAY - Wildlife of Brazil's Pantanal - Turkey—Continental Crossroads - Ultimate Dolphins Wildlife Models Shoot - Best of the Greek Isles - Tuscany JUNE - Washington's Palouse Country - Predatory Animals of North America JULY - Brown Bears of Katmai National Park in Summer - Olympic National Park, Washington AUGUST - Washington's Palouse Country - Humpback Whales of Alaska's Inside Passage SEPTEMBER - Masai Mara Wildlife Reserve, Kenya - Denali National Park in Autumn - Alaska Overland - Essential China—Iconic Landmarks & Landscapes - Brown Bears of Katmai National Park in Autumn - Madagascar - Yellowstone & Grand Tetons in Autumn - Botswana Wildlife - Colorado Fall Colors - Predatory Animals of North America - Horses & Icons of the Wild West - Mongolia—The Golden Eagle Festival OCTOBER - Exploring Lake Powell - World's Best Raptor Shoot - Nova Scotia—Photo Tour for Women - India—Rajasthan & Puskar Fair NOVEMBER - Laos & Vietnam - Ultimate Antarctica - Bald Eagles of the Chilkat River, Alaska DECEMBER - Bosque del Apache & White Sands, New Mexico

		John Shaw Nature & Digital Photography Workshops Click here for locations and dates Mexico's Colonial Heartland March 17–24, 2007 Horses and Icons of the Wild West August 26–September 1, 2007 Masai Mara Wildlife Reserve, Kenya September 7–21, 2007 Australia Wildlife November 1–20, 2007 If you want to photograph butterflies in the field, lighting them entirely with flash is the easiest and most practical way to go. Using natural light can be extremely frustrating, to say the least. Consider the problems you face. You're trying to show intimate details so you use slow speed fine-grained film to record every nuance, every scale on those wings. At the same time you need to stop your lens down to a small aperture since as you gain magnification you lose depth of field. Let's assume you're using Fuji Velvia and shooting at f/16. Even at infinity focus, not allowing for any light loss to extension or teleconverters or other accessories, you would have to use a shutter speed no faster than 1/50 second, and that's the blazing sunlight "sunny f/16" exposure. A longer focal length lens is mandatory for working distance since the butterflies will rarely tolerate your close presence. This shutter speed/lens combination demands using a tripod, but positioning a 'pod on a small moving creature is almost impossible. Even if you could get the tripod into position the shutter speed just isn't fast enough to stop any motion. Here are two homemade brackets made from aluminum. The black one, made from heavier aluminum, has an Arca-style clamp attached while the other fastens directly to the camera's tripod socket. One solution would be to immobilize the subject and indeed you can find butterflies early in the morning when they haven't yet started moving around. However, I still see articles suggesting catching butterflies and other insects and refrigerating them until they cannot move. In my opinion this is definitely not what you want to do. The welfare of my subject matter — whether it be flower or landscape or mammal or insect — comes way before any photographic opportunity. I don't want to harm my subjects in any manner, and refrigerating creatures to the point of not moving is definitely harmful. Imagine taking a person, refrigerating them until they couldn't move, and then photographing them. Couldn't you tell something wasn't right in the picture? The same is true for nature subjects. A good naturalist can spot chilled or manipulated photos every time. Chilled subjects yield photos of chilled subjects. Flash is the answer. For small animated creatures you want a mobile, easily used, hand-held outfit based on a close-focusing lens. You could use a macro lens or a normal lens on extension or a zoom with diopters or any combination of equipment that lets you photograph close-ups. Ideally you don't want to have the camera too far from your subject or too close. Base your equipment choice on what you own, but try to end up so that your working distance at 1/2X magnification is roughly 12 inches. This is about the working distance of a 100mm lens. While you shouldn't be fanatical about this distance, I do have a reason for suggesting such. Here's why. First of all, I'm going to assume you'll use TTL flash to totally illuminate the subject. If you have an older camera that does not support TTL flash, this would be a good time to update your equipment. Manual flashes will work for close-ups, and I used them for years, but modern TTL flash units make your photographic life much, much easier. The flashes I currently use are Nikon's biggest and most powerful units, the SB-28 and SB-25, the same units I use for all my flash work including fill-flash on birds and mammals. So why is that 12 inches of working distance so important? You can position a TTL flash anywhere close to a subject and it will automatically provide the right amount of illumination to render your subject as a middle-tone. Move it closer to the subject and it quenches itself faster giving less light; move it further away and it just puts out more light. The flash-to-subject distance in itself is not so important here as is the relative size of the flash head compared to your subject. When you're using a hand-held camera the flash obviously will be moving around with you. Consequently it will be roughly the same distance from the subject as the camera. If you're using a focal length that keeps the camera several feet away from the subject the flash head effectively becomes a point source of light. The flash may be big and powerful, but it's a long distance away and you end up with deep black shadow areas. This is exactly the case with our sun; it's huge, but since it's so far away it is effectively a point source of light. If you must use longer working distances due to lens choice you'll need two flash units, one as the main light source and one to fill in the shadows created by the first. This complicates things as the equipment becomes heavier and more awkward, but it certainly can be done. Take that same single flash unit, move it up close to your subject, and now the flash head becomes effectively large compared to your subject. My SB-28's reflector head measures just a bit over 1 x 2 inches. Suppose you want to photograph a butterfly with wings spread, a subject of about 3 inches across. If the flash is roughly a foot from the butterfly the light source is now big relative to the subject. It's a giant softbox, half the size of the subject. You get softer shadows just by using one light positioned close. Your flash's instruction manual will tell you that placing the unit so close to the subject is not recommended. In fact the manual most likely says that the TTL flash will not work in this range at all. Well, this statement is not exactly true. TTL flash metering won't work correctly if you photograph with your lens set at its wide-open apertures. TTL flashes actually measure the light bouncing off the subject, then turn themselves off when the proper amount has been reached. With the flash unit quite close to the subject, and a wide aperture such as f/4 or so, the unit simply cannot turn itself off fast enough. However, this won't be a problem for you as there is no reason to work at these wide-open apertures anyway. Doing close-ups you want to stop down the lens to gain what little depth of field is available. So...set your lens to around f/16, place the flash close to your subject, and you should have no problem running a TTL system. What you're actually doing here is totally lighting your subject with the flash. Let me emphasize this point: you're NOT using fill flash (a natural light exposure with flash filling in the shadows), but rather lighting the butterfly totally with the flash. This allows you to hand hold the camera and still get sharp photographs. If the flash is the only light source, then your effective shutter speed becomes the duration of the flash. Here the larger TTL units, such as the Nikon SB-28 or Canon 540EZ, are helpful in that they are so powerful. Used close to a subject they need only throw out a small portion of their light capacity, thus flash duration times are in the 1/5,000 — 1/10,000 second range and recycle times are but a blink. Trust me, you can hand hold a 1/10,000 second shutter speed. You can set any shutter speed you want on your camera up to the flash synchronization speed, which on most modern cameras is 1/250 second. In fact, even if you set the shutter speed faster most newer cameras will default to this speed as soon as the flash is connected. Read your camera's instruction book carefully. However, you don't have to use this top sync speed. In fact I would urge you to slow it down a shutter speed or two depending on the film you're using. First of all it should be obvious that you're not going to use fast film in this situation. Suppose you want to shoot an ISO 400 speed film. Proper bright sunlight exposure is 1/400 second at f/16. But you can't use 1/400 second shutter speed, as the camera's top sync speed is 1/250. Change to 1/250 second and f/22, most likely the smaller f-stop on your lens, and you're still at bright sunlight exposure. You'll end up getting ghosting, recording both an ambient light image and a flash image. Go to slow speed film and the problem is solved. Let's say you use an ISO 50 film. If the camera is set at f/16 and 1/250 second shutter speed you're already two stops away from recording a bright daylight image. Even in blazing sunlight the flash still functions as the primary light source, exactly what you want to happen. Now when you slow the shutter speed a stop you'll let some daylight record on the film. Doing this means you're reversing the normal fill light situation from a sunlight exposure with flash fill to a flash exposure with sunlight fill. Remember that all TTL metering systems, whether flash or ambient light versions, are made to render all subjects as a medium tone. When you're totally lighting a subject with flash you can easily control the tonality of your subject by working in stop increments. It's simplest to do this using the compensation settings on the flash unit. Look at your subject, decide what tonality you want to make it (just as you would when you make a natural light exposure), and then set this reading on the flash unit's compensation. For medium toned subjects just point and shoot. But suppose you have a "light" subject. Now you need to dial in a "+1" compensation so that the TTL flash puts out enough light to render the subject lighter than medium. A dark subject would require a "-1" setting. Before you do any field work you should run some tests with your particular camera and TTL flash, as some current cameras actually have a software program which partially controls flash exposure. Find a medium toned subject, a light subject, and a dark subject. Set up a controlled situation, shoot some slide film, compensate on the flash unit as you think you should, and see what actually happens. A roll of test film is well worth the expense. You might also discover that the most powerful units shorten the flash duration time so much that you get a bit of "high-speed reciprocity failure" which simply means you have to add a bit of light to get to a correct medium-toned exposure. When I'm working butterflies with my SB-28 and 105mm macro lens, I always tweak the light with an additional +.3 stop of light to compensate. You'll need to get the flash out of the hot shoe using an off-camera TTL connecting cord. The ideal position for the flash is just above the end of the lens, pointed down at the subject at about a 30° angle. Mounting the flash in the hot shoe atop the camera is not a good idea for any sort of close-up work for two reasons. First, you'll probably have a parallax problem where the lens is aimed at one point but the flash is aimed at another. If your flash unit permits tipping slightly downwards from its normal position you possibly could use the hot shoe, but make sure a shadow from your lens hood isn't cast onto your subject. Secondly, mounting the flash in the hot shoe means that when you compose a vertical picture the light is coming directly from the side. You will rarely want this lighting. All too often little creatures turn so that you're lighting their posteriors. Not good. The best solution is to make or buy a "third hand" bracket to hold the flash unit. Since the flash reads TTL you could just hold it out there with one hand, which works fine for non-moving subjects. As soon as you're chasing a moving subject, a flash bracket becomes a necessity as you're trying simultaneously to position yourself, the camera, and the flash. A bracket is just a flash holder, nothing more, so if you're handy with tools you can certainly make your own. It doesn't have to be pretty when you finish but it does have to be practical. The easiest material to work with is the 1-inch wide, 1/8-inch thick aluminum strap, which can be bought at larger hardware or home center stores. You need to make a few bends and drill a few holes so that the bracket can be mounted to your camera's tripod socket, yet the flash itself is held over the lens. Look at the accompanying photo to see a homemade bracket. By the way, it doesn't matter in the least if the flash tube is positioned vertically over the bracket while your photographic picture frame runs horizontally. All flashes will provide more than enough coverage. You can also purchase brackets from both Really Right Stuff and Kirk Enterprises. Both companies offer brackets specially designed for certain lenses including the 200mm Nikon macro. Any bracket which attaches to a tripod collar makes shooting vertical compositions easy, as you just rotate the camera while the flash stays in the exact same position. To use this outfit in the field you set the rough magnification you need, make sure the camera and flash are turned on, the lens is at the correct f-stop, then lean in and out to achieve perfect focus. Trying to turn a focusing ring while you're handholding a camera at 1/2 life size magnification is a quick lesson in frustration. Every small movement on your part necessitates another touch-up on the focusing ring...a never-ending procedure. Autofocus is not a good idea either, as the system will hunt back and forth for focus as your body moves. It's far easier to turn off AF, hold the camera with one hand while supporting the lens with the other, set one magnification, then physically move in and out until the image comes into focus. Brace yourself as much as possible before you press the shutter. Depth of field is so limited when you are shooting small subjects that a slight accidental shift of the camera can ruin a photograph. Be 1/4 inch out of position and you create a slide destined for the trash. Just as when you work from a tripod, you must be careful to keep the camera's film plane parallel to what you've deemed is visually the most important plane of the subject. Pay extra attention to camera positioning as it is much more difficult to do when you are handholding a camera at higher magnifications. A photo with the principal plane of focus slightly off the subject, or off the eyes of a small creature, will appear unacceptably out of focus. Overall, the process of taking flash photos with a handheld rig of small, animate subjects is an extremely physical and involved form of photography. Peacock pansy butterfly photographed at Butterfly World in Florida, a great place to perfect your flash technique. As much as possible I would suggest using one flash as the primary light source. There will be times, dictated by your preferences, where two flashes are called for, with one acting as the main light while the other fills in the shadows. This will most likely be your choice if you want to work with longer focal length lenses, such as the 180/200mm macro lenses. Immediately some physical problems present themselves. How do you carry this outfit? What sort of bracket do you make to hold two flash units, especially if you're using fairly large flashes? How do you shoot a vertical? Well, it's going to weigh a ton and be awkward to handle no matter what you do. You will need to make a different bracket to hold the flashes, one strong enough to hold two flash units. Since I rarely work this way, I jury-rigged the simplest bracket I could: a straight piece of aluminum strap (the same stuff I used for my single flash brackets) with a small ball-socket head on either end. In the center of the strap I mounted an Arca quick-release clamp so the bracket can clamp onto the quick release plate of my 200mm macro lens. By mounting the bracket on the macro's collar I can rotate the camera for horizontal or vertical compositions. Actually there have been very few times when I've used this two-flash bracket with my 105mm macro lens; to flip vertical/horizontal I've used the "L-bracket" on my camera body to position the camera in the Arca clamp. Not easy, not quick, but it works fine for as often as I need to do so. Remember that both flashes have to be connected to the camera to get TTL flash metering. You can hard wire them using off-camera cords (see your instruction manual for ways of doing this), or use a TTL slave unit such as Nikon's SU-4 or even use a flash with a built-in slave like Canon's 550EZ. Most camera systems do not allow having the second flash output a different amount of light than the main flash (again, check your instruction manual), so you end up with two equal light sources on opposite sides of your subject. This creates flat, shadowless lighting which is not what you want (exactly the problem created by ringlights, and the reason why I don't recommend them). You want to lower the contrast created by the main light, not wipe out all shadows since they are exactly what creates apparent sharpness in a photograph. Total frontlighting is not attractive. Rarely would you use straight frontlighting for landscape photos, so why do so for close-ups? Some Canon flash units allow setting different power ratios when used in tandem, but otherwise you'll have to tape an ND gel over the second flash tube to cut the light. It's much easier to use one light positioned up close to the subject. Here are some hints for field work. Pick a good-looking butterfly. Seems obvious, doesn't it? Butterfly wings quickly become tattered, losing the fringe scales along wing edges. Don't photograph the ugly one. Find an area where butterflies are feeding, rather than chasing after ones that are just passing through an area. We all get fat and lazy after a meal, and butterflies are no exception. Move in v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y and keep your body fairly low to the ground. Fast moving things that loom over butterflies are called predators. Have your camera equipment all set, then gently ease into shooting position. Watch your shadow also, as it can cause the little guy to take flight. If you have to move so that it falls across the butterfly, do so extremely slowly. If your subject flushes and flies away, follow that particular individual butterfly. Keep stalking that particular one, and after a while it will most likely tolerate your approach. Questions and Answers John Shaw will occasionally answer readers' questions in his bi-monthly column regarding equipment and photography techniques in the field. He can be contacted via e-mail at this address: johnshaw@photosafaris.com. Due to the anticipated volume of inquiries John cannot answer questions individually.

	Joseph Van Os Photo Safaris, Inc. P.O. Box 655, Vashon Island, Washington USA 98070 Phone: (206) 463-5383   Fax: (206) 463-5484    Email: info@photosafaris.com Copyright © 2008, Joseph Van Os Photo Safaris, Inc.