Dark Beavers and bright water

I don't know if there is a satisfactory answer to this problem but I will throw it out and see what we can learn. A few weeks ago I was photographing the local beaver family. The beaver have nice, dark brown fur. It was late in the day(about 1&1/2 hours before sunset) and the and beaver were on a submerged tree trunk. The beaver were shaded by trees so that no direct sunlight was on them. As far as I can tell the water was reflecting a relatively bright blue sky. My problem is that in order to capture the detail in the fur of the beaver I had to wash out the water. If I exposed so as to give the water a light blue color then the beaver became so dark that much of the detail of their fur was lost. I could not find a good compromise despite extensive bracketing in 1/3 stops. The film was Fuji Sensia.

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I am considering using fill flash but I am wondering if the water might not also reflect the flash. Does anybody have any experience using fill flash on a subject on the water? Also, if the flash

scares the beaver away my fellow citizens might not appreciate their loss!

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Perhaps I have to face the fact that I am exceeding the range of the film and search for better light conditions. But, unless the beaver decide to come out during the middle of the day that will be

tough.

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Your thoughts and comments will be appreciated.

You can polarize so that (under the right conditions) you darken

the reflections from the water, yet don't darken the beaver much.

You will lose a couple of stops overall though, which may be

a problem if the light is already low.

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Flash won't reflect back at you from the water (I assume you aren't

shooting vertically downwards!), so it's an option - though you will

probably end up with pictures that look like they were taken with

a flash, which isn't always aesthetically the best, and you may

annoy the beavers (no big deal, just stop if they react to the

flash by diving or slapping the water with their tails).

Much of the light reflected off the water was probably polarized, so a polarizer (adjusted properly) may well have brought things in line. A pop of fill flash (at -1 stop) would probably have helped as well, although I don't know if you were close enough for it to make a difference, and it may have scared off the critters.<p>

If you can duplicate the situation (assuming the beavers cooperate) I'd try sticking a circular polarizer on your lens and adjusting it to minimize the light reflections off the water. Good luck.

I don't think that a polarizer is going to help you much. If you adjust it to get rid of the reflections from the angle of the camera, you are also going to lose the sky reflection, which is what makes the water appear blue.

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There are certain limitations that we have to live with with film, especially with slide film. Sometimes we can cheat a bit, with things like graduated filters, but in this case, I think you're stuck.

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Fill flash could help. I think that either the beaver in sillouhette, or the washed out water with good detail in the beaver, could both be nice slides. If they're not, it could be because the beaver is too small (he/she is logically the subject of the photo). Perhaps going back with a longer lens, or a closer shooting position would also help. If the beaver is the main part of the photo, a little washed water won't be bothersome. The beaver can be smaller in the sillouhette style and still make for a good picture. If you go for sillouhette, be sure to wait for the light to give dramatic color.

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If you want to get some detail of what is going on UNDER the water, you could try the cross polarization strategy (polarizing material over a powerful flash, with polarizer mounted on lens, and rotated to be perpendicular to the material on the flash). I think you will need to experiment, and I doubt that you will have enough power with a typical self contained flash unit.

Fill-flash is definitely the way to go, this is exactly the

problem it was designed to solve.

Setting your camera exposure to render the reflected blue sky as a

mid-tone and your flash at somewhere between one and two stops under-

exposed on the beaver (flash off camera would help a lot) should

get you a nice shot.

Last night the Tripod Camera Club had its annual Awards Banquet (see their web site - I posted the address over in the neighbor to neighbor section some time ago). The winning work from the year's worth of competitions is sent out to be judged by another club, and the top 10 photographs in each of the PSA categories are rank ordered. The winner for the year in the nature slides category was a shot of a beaver in the kind of light that you describe. The photographer's decision was to shoot with a long enough lens so that the beaver was about a quarter to maybe a third of the frame. I know his gear, and my guess is that it was either with the 100-300 f/5.6L, or the 400 f/5.6L.

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The exposure was to get good texture and color in the beaver's fur. There is some color in the water, but part of it is washed out. It is washed out in a natural way, and the washed out area does not take the attention away from the beaver.

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Obviously the photo worked well, and the unbiased judges from another club liked it well enough to pick it as the best of the winners from Tripod's 96-97 competitions.

<img src="http://bobatkins.photo.net/photos/beaver1.jpg" align="left"

hspace=25 vspace=5 border=1> It is certainly possible to get an

image which does show detail in the beaver and does not wash out

the reflected sky. This image does just that, though it's hard to

see on a small scan like this one (it's the only one currently on

my server), but the original shows good detail. It was taken with a 500mm lens, and I think it's cropped

a bit (I don't remember getting quite that close!). You have to

get lucky with the light though and find a diurnal beaver (this

one came out in the afternoon) who doesn't like sitting in the

shade. If this guy had been in the shade, I might have tried

projected fill flash, but I'd probably have waited for him (or her!)

to move. I think I watched this beaver family all afternoon and

probably shot 2 or 3 rolls of film. By the way, if anyone knows

of any beaver locations in NJ, I'd like to hear about them. This one

was shot in Maine.

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