A few months ago, I had signed up for a three part workshop on photographing birds of prey (eagles, hawks, owls, etc) through a local camera store (Mike’s Camera). Part 1 was a live class (on Zoom) with an instructor who specializes in bird photography, followed up by a photo session at a local falconry organization – four hours photographing a variety of birds which were either rescued and rehabilitated, or were raised specifically for falconry. The last part of the worksho was another session with the instructor, to review our best images from the photo shoot.
The initial class was great – I learned quite a bit on the best camera settings for photographing birds in flight ( I have to stop using “shooting”, especially with animals and of course, people) as well as some features of my Sony A7R which I had not used yet. The live photo session was orignally scheduled for the following week, but was rained out – the birds don’t particularly enjoy flying in heavy rain, nor do any of the attendees want to stand out in the rain with their expensive gear. The session was rescheduled to May 29…yesterday. And it was worth the wait.
West Coast Falconry
Bird pen with a bunch of hawks hanging around
The falconry facility is located in the foothills east of Marysville, an hour or so drive north of Sacramento. Their website describes the organization as “a resource for a full range of hands-on raptor and falconry classes and services”, which includes educational opportunities to learn about the birds and falconry as well as workshops for photography groups. They are located in a beautiful wooded, hilly area, and have a variety of hawks, falcons and owls, all of which are well fed and maintained by the owner and staff. Some of these are rescue birds, some raised for falconry, and a few wild birds as well. The handlers are all experienced falconers, and manage the workshops so that the birds are never stressed or overworked. It’s all about the birds at this place. It takes a lot of time and patience to work with these wild creatures, and the handlers have gained the trust of the birds. That’s a good thing – the big birds have extremely large, sharp talons and can tear their prey apart with their beaks. Handle with care.
Once our group arrived and set up their gear (lots of serious photographers), we were introduced to the owner and handlers, and did some static shots of a really cute, immature falcon.
We then headed off up a hill for a working session with a Harris Hawk – a big, beautiful bird.
The handlers use food as the lure to get the birds to either perch somewhere for static shots, or to get them to fly up or down an open area on the hill side. The group then spreads out along the flight path, and does their best to try and get the bird in flight. You basically set your camera for the highest possible shutter speed, and frames per second, point where you want to start capturing and image, and then hope for the best. The Harris Hawk was pretty slow, but still hard to capture in flight and get a sharp image especially in relatively low light conditions (very cloudy). But it was fun either way.
The next bird they brought out was more of a challenge to photograph – an Aplomado Falcon. Beautiful bird, but really fast. The handler said the bird comes into their glove sometimes at 30MPH.
The next three birds they brought out were for mostly static shots. The birds were tethered to a line, which allowed them fly a bit around the rock outcrop. First was a European Eagle Owl – unbelievably large, beautiful owl.
They followed that one up with my favorite bird- a little Eastern Screech Owl. We have the Western version in the nature areas behind my house – you never see them since they are tiny and blend in with the trees, but their call is this cute sort of chortle. My wife loved to hear them at night.
The last “display” birds were another hawk, and some type of eagle….I think. Whatever…it was huge. I think I was getting tired of standing and holding the camera by then.
We wrapped up the day with selfie shots with one of the birds ($20…which goes to buy food for the birds). I chose the falcon. Less chance of having my nose torn off.
Me and a new friend
Overall, a really enjoyable morning, and a great learning experience as well – most of my static shots and close-ups came out the way I wanted them. What did not work was getting crisp shots of the birds in flight – you need a fast lens if you are photographing fast moving objects in relatively low light conditions. I opted for travel weight when I bought the two long lenses, and you give up a stop or two for the lighter, less expensive lenses. Maybe I’ll invest in a really good long lens someday. And then hire someone to carry it for me.
One sad note on West Coast Falconry – they had a break-in recently by an animal activist group. The facilities were heavily vandalized, and they released eleven of the birds. Fortunately, most of the birds stayed close to “home”, and were safely retrieved. In my opinion, the activist group does not seem to understand that most of these animals have never had to fend for themselves in the wild since they were bred in captivity. They are well fed and taken care of by the staff, and most live much longer that they would in the wild.
I’ve been working on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques the past few days to try and increase visibility to this site. One way to do so is to start using more meaningful titles in terms of the post content, rather than the curious ones I prefer to use. This post for example, I would normally use something like “Why Ruin A Nice Hike” or simply “Why Take Photographs” since it has little to do with the nature preserve. Read on if you have some time to waste. It is quite long and rambles on quite a bit – I was really bored today. I did add a few photos. And Max makes an appearance
Photography as a hobby
All this started a few days ago, when a friend at the tennis club introduced me to one of the better tennis players, and told him I travel all over the world and take a lot of pictures. He asked me two questions that were hard to answer at first – “Why do you take photographs?” and “What do you do with them?” My standard response to the first, was that it’s been a long standing hobby, which fits well with my interests in nature focused traveling. As for what I do with all the photographs…that’s probably a tough one for any amateur photographer. It’s kind of hard justifying spending thousands of dollars on camera gear, computer/internet storage and travel, for a bunch of pictures that you might show to some friends and family, and occasionally at camera club competitions.
So these two questions have bounced around in my head for the past few days, as I spent hours each day working on SEO changes for the blog, and continued curating photos from my most recent trips. And then Saturday afternoon, I headed off to yet another opportunity to take more photos at the Cache Creek Nature Preserve, a conservancy managed natural area along a tributary to the Sacramento River. I was not really expecting to take a lot of shots – I was mostly interested in getting out of the house, doing a bit of easy hiking, trying out the new lens I had recently purchased, and maybe seeing a nice sunset. Beats my usual Saturday evenings of sitting in the house by myself and watching TV, especially now that I’m relegated to drinking mock-tails and near-beer. Blah.
My low expectations for this outing were easily met, and even exceeded a bit – I wandered around on the trails for a few hours, talked to some of the other visitors (a mix of artists and photographers), and played around with the new lens and the wildlife tracking features of the Sony A7RV camera. A very relaxing, low stress walk-about. It was quite warm, especially with the late afternoon sun beating down, so I found a nice, shady, rattlesnake free area to sit for a while (I did have a snake encounter earlier..rattle,rattle). A couple of bunnies hopped around while I was sitting there, and I just watched instead of staring at them through the camera lens. And then I thought back to those two questions. Was I just ruining a nice, early evening walk by lugging around camera gear? And what am I going to do with the thousands of images that I have stored in the Google Cloud, and on storage devices attached to my iMac? There are only so many prints that will fit on the walls of my house, and the traffic on my blog is pitiful compared to most serious blogger sites. So why am I doing this?
Why Photography?
As I watched the bunnies hopping around (I did take a couple of pictures…they were just so cute and much friendlier than the rattlesnake), I gave some thought to the “Why” question. To answer this one, I first had to ask myself (I talk to myself non-stop these days), what would I be doing if my wife were still alive?
The answer to that one is not so easy. I’m not so sure that I would have joined the Sierra Camera club if my life had not been so drastically altered with her passing, so I may not have been invited to this event. But, I went off regularly in the past – she expected and encouraged me to stick with photography as a hobby. She enjoyed seeing the results of my trips, and had a natural gift for picking out the best images to print. So maybe I would have joined the club, and she also went along on anything she could hike wearing sneakers. This was a sneaker/walk outing, with lots of shady places to sit.
As for the main question of why do photography at all, there’s a couple of good reasons why I lug all this expensive gear around on my trips:
Between the hi-tech camera gear, and complex software for manipulating images, photography is a wonderland for techie geeks. I used to have my own darkroom years ago, and spent many hours working in the dark, mixing chemicals, and dodging and burning prints to my hearts’ content. We were early adopters of digital cameras, and both of us were Adobe Photoshop users – I was pretty good at pixel-level editing. The point being that I have always enjoyed the technical aspects of photography so jumping back in, with all the spare time I have now, makes a lot of sense.
The other point regarding why I burden myself with all this extra weight on my adventures, is the symbiotic relationship between photography and adventure traveling. Some people travel for photography, and others travel for the adventure, and document with their camera. I’ve seen a lot of people on the trips I’ve been on that just use their phone, primarily for selfies – no expensive camera gear. I’m somewhere in between the two extremes – the majority of the trips I have scheduled are for places I have always wanted to see. Antarctica, Galápagos Islands, Alaska, Patagonia, Iceland – all have been on my bucket list. And all of them offer incredible photo opportunities, so I get to see some absolutely amazing places, and get to work on the skills of my main hobby.
I guess there is one other good reason – photographers love to talk shop, especially on the trips I’ve been on. For someone socially inept, anything to do with photography is a great way to meet and establish some relationships on these trips.
Smothered in photos
So that leaves the “What do you do with all those photographs” question. Again, no easy answer for this one either. I’ve discussed my solutions for storage in previous posts, and my efforts to re-organize all the folders I have in Google Drive, Google Photos, Apple iCloud, and on multiple hard and SSD drives. But that’s not what the question is about. I may have simplified my storage woes, and have a grasp on how to organize thousands of photos, but what will I do with them?
I’m sure most everyone has a box filled with old family photos, negatives, slides and maybe even movies, all on a mix of media. And the boxes usually collect dust somewhere, rarely opened, and are ultimately passed on to someone else in the family to deal with. After my wife passed, I found two boxes of photos – one with mostly her family, the other of mine. I reviewed both boxes – all of my wife’s family photos went to her sister (who probably tossed most of it), and I thinned out my family photos to a bare minimum. I have nobody to leave them to, so I’ll be tossing them out eventually.
That leaves me with about a terabyte or two of digital images which cover many of the trips my wife and I had through the years, and all of my recent endeavors. Back to that question – what will I do with them?
The older photo’s I’ll probably thin out over time, keeping just a few for my own memories. I do like to look back in time once in a while although most photos of my wife can trigger a meltdown. It still hurts a lot. As for the collection of photos from my trips, I now have a process of reducing the volume on the memory cards, before copying them onto a drive for review and curation. I usually delete at least a half of the images to start with.
Now that I have figured out how to use Adobe Lightroom, I use this software for a more detailed review of each image, and delete anything that I will never print for display, or curate for submitting for competition. Everything else winds up in separate folders for that trip. I’ve also stopped doing dual JPEG and RAW images – that cuts the volume for each trip in half.
Sorry, I’m getting down in the weeds. I’ll get back to the basic question. What will I do with all this stuff? I still don’t have a good answer.
Photo Club Competition – I submit maybe a dozen or so images each year, for the various competition categories. I don’t really take the competition seriously – sometimes I submit images that I think are interesting, just to see how they will be judged. I’m not a competitive person. And after I’ve submitted them, the images just pile up in a folder.
Contest Submission – there are lots of national and international photo competitions, most of which you have to pay to enter. I’ve done a few for the fun of it, but the competition is really tough, since there are serious, professional photographers submitting their best photos. I’m not that good, but it’s fun trying.
The Blog – I include a lot of photos in my blog posts about each trip, which is one of the reasons I take so many photos. I enjoy writing strange stories about my travels (or maybe these are strange travels), and adding photos helps to illustrate some of the amazing things I’ve seen.
Acrylic Prints – back when I had a high-end photo printer, my wife and I decorated our house with framed prints (she got to select them of course). Our last house in Gold River had a long hallway which turned into a photo gallery. Since then we started replacing prints with acrylic enlargements, and I’ve continued on with that since she passed. I’m quickly running out of wall space and will likely just rotate through the prints every now and then.
Printing for the fun of it – I’ll probably invest in a large format printer once again, when buy another table to hold it. I’d like to submit prints for competition, and make prints for anyone interested in some of the better shots.
I guess if I had enough really good photos, I could try marketing online. There are a number of sites for posting images for sale. I’m not sure I really want to get into that. This is a hobby after all. But who knows, maybe I will eventually set up a booth and sell photos at street fairs once my adventure days are over. Max seems to enjoy it.
He left the dog (Aperture) home.
And I did take a few other photos at the Cache Creek Nature Preserve. There were large flocks of Tree Swallows and Cliff Swallows flying around – fast little critters. I thought I’d try out the animal tracking feature of the Sony camera, with the new lens (50-400) I just acquired. It was kind of fun – another reason I lug the gear around. I really do enjoy standing around, trying to capture images of incredibly beautiful creatures.
The Traveling Widower 