How did you get started in Nature Photography?

[cliffcalhoun]

<P>First, I've enjoyed reading all of the experiences and advice that

has been given on this website by everyone. I've learned a lot and I

hope that it continues. Especially the positive outlook and

attitude. Thanks!!!<P>

 

<P>My question to everyone is: what got you hooked on nature

photography? What was the first experience that made you think "man,

I can't get enough of this"!<P>

 

<P>For me, I bought a Canon Photura (Yeah, you heard me right!)and I

started taking nature photos during my vacation. I didn't plan

this. I bought the camera on a whim, and had no idea what I was

going to do with it.<P>

 

<P>However, I got hooked on the idea that I could "frame the world"

according to MY perspective. Of course, none of the "snapshots"

turned out very well, but I became hooked and started buying books on

nature/wildlife photography. From there, I discovered the work of

John Shaw, Art Morris, and so many others.<P>

 

<P>It's a very enjoyable hobby. I feel something special by just

"getting out" and observing nature/wildlife. To capture an

outstanding image is icing on the cake!<P>

 

<P>So, what's your story?<P>

[Hector Javkin]

I was hooked before I started. I had wanted to engage in nature photography all through college and most of graduate school, but couldn't afford it, in part because I had been overpaying income taxes. I filed amended returns for three years and received a refund. I bought an OM1, 50 mm, 135 mm lenses, a big clunky tripod, and booked a trip to Alaska. I went to the zoo, tried the 135 on a bear, and realized that in the woods I would need a longer lens. Money was getting tight, so I bought an f6.3 400mm Spiratone, which was much better than I had expected. I practiced with different films before leaving, and settled on Kodachrome 64, because projection would give me the biggest images for the cost. I borrowed a 35 mm Zuiko just before leaving. Photographed on the ferry from Seattle to Juneau, in Glacier Bay National Monument, in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, and on an all too short trip to Denali National Park (then called McKinley). Hired a pilot in Talkeetna to fly around Mt. Denali, for some aerial shots I still love. Took a day to shoot a news story for a tiny newspaper owned by some Alaskan friends, but then went back to hiking and photographing. Brought back better landscapes and plant photographs (amazing mushrooms in Glacier Bay!) than animal pictures, and realized how difficult animal photography was. I'm still an amateur, still learning, and still love it.

[benny_stevens]

Cliff,

Surfing the web and stumbling upon all these magnificent sites with nature pics woke me up. Suddenly I remembered (!) that I had always loved nature, but for some reason I forgot to look and enjoy. I was into bl/white street photography but I thought I could do nature photograpy too if I just put my mind to it. I'm just starting with it now and have been gathering some more appropriate (second hand) photo gear for landscapes and macro. I'm determined to make pictures that are as appealing as those who seduced me on the Internet, but I love it already.

Benny

[clivecc]

Well I was born and brought up in Zimbabwe (Sothern Africa) where wildlife was prolific in the 70's (and still is despite poaching). Moved to South Arfica early 80's: ditto!! I mostly did bird watching through binoculars but soon realised that I wanted to capture that beauty on film. The rest is self explanitory starting with an old Vivitar 600mm (f8.0) to my new Canon 600 (f4.0) etc over the last 5 years or so. I now find myself in San Diego (work permit) and enjoy the Wild Animal park and many wonderful sites here. Not quite Africa but I get some wonderful photo opportunities!!!

 

As a Christian I marvel at the handiwork of our creator and give Him praise and glory.

[hon_k._siu]

Nature is about us, we are part of nature.

 

I like nature because of its color, its moods, its changes, its vastness, its subtleties. I like nature because of its varieties, its mountains and seas, its lakes and rivers, its woods and its trees, its animals and its flowers.

 

Add to these and the love with cameras and photography, it is an irresistible combination.

 

In the past few years, I get more interested in the paintings of the French impressionists, esp. van Gogh. The color they used.

 

All of these above lead me to say, "man, I can't get enough of this"!

[paul_ashton]

Cliff - an interesting question indeed! I count myself as one of the lucky ones who used to spend a lot of time in the field as a geologist. All those years I took lots of photos of rocks and an occasional one of the surrounding nature. As the years went by I started to notice what I was missing! Now I spend five days a week in an office or on a plane and look forward to weekends when I can be outside with my camera. To me nature includes everything from the rocks up, but more and more I have gained an interest in the living part of nature, particularly birds. I know that most people probably start with the birds and may or may not recognize the things I started out with, like rock formations, erosion features, etc. The exciting part of nature photography is that you can identify with so many different aspects of nature, so that you may start out with the intention of photographing wild flowers but end up concentrating on a waterfall cascading over limestone ledges.

 

The other reason my wife and I share is that nature photography can be very restful - waiting for the perfect picture can be most relaxing. And when we take a good one, the time spent has additional value.

[hans___]

Cliff, I started out in nature photography fairly young. Raised in Alaska, I grew-up watching my father taking pictures of things during family camping trips in the wilderness, but anyways...I was taking a general Alaska biology class, a sampler type thing that 8th graders take to figure out if their into nature-type stuff. A semester assignment was to cut photos out of magazines and write paragraphs describing whatever was in the photo. I considered the assigment extremely silly, but since it accounted for about 1/3 of the "points" for the class, I knew I had to have something to turn in by the end of the spring semester...one day on a cold feburary I picked up my father's old Pentax Spotmatic with a 200/4 and started taking pictures of a Moose in the backyard, then the Steller's Jays and Black-capped Chickadees that frequented the birdfeeder on the back deck...

 

Later, that April after my parents realized that I'd been spending lots of time taking pictures (taking the city bus across town to different hotspots around Anchorage and not getting home till far after dark in the dead of winter), they presented me with a then modern Pentax MX/w winder, 400/5.6, 135/3.5, 50/1.7, 28/2.8, extension tubes and a nice Velbon tripod all in a nice Domke bag; just in time for the big spring plant "explosion" and bird migration events that happen in the southcentral Alaska in May! At the end of the semester I just dropped my "book" of 40 pages of everything from macro shots of Alder catkins to Bald Eagles courting, about 3 per page with nicely typed (I also learned to type) one paragraph captions in my teacher's box and immediately went on a trip. During the summer I found I'd gotten an 'A' in the class, even though I had turned only half homework assignments, and none of them on time. The next school year the teacher gave me a hung, telling me she'd distributed my assigment throughout the school district, and handed it back to me - there were notes of postive remarks from seemingly every biology teacher in the Anchorage area.

 

Since then taking nature pictures has had a firm place in my "bag of tricks"; I continued my education in biology - I'm a landscape ecologist these days - and my work has taken me all over Alaska from out on the pack-ice north of Barrow to Atka way out in the Aleutians, to the rainforests, tidewater glaciers and fjords of southeast Alaska where I live now, and most everywhere inbetween. Since I have a fascinating day job that I love, I haven't been tempted to "go pro"; selling my work only occasionally, and doing free nature photography for my employers. At conferences and symposia I have a reputation for truly excellent (and well attended) slide presentations of study results and the biotic and abiotic environment in which the studies occur.

 

My take on nature photography is very similer to what Paul says here, but I phrase it like this; taking pictures gives me something to do when I'm out in the field. Perhaps I have an undiagnosed attention deficit disorder or something, because if I'm busy playing with camera gear, I get more relaxed and enjoy the time being out surrounded by natural ecosystems more. Hans

[jenni_walterreit]

Cliff, you're probably going to get tons of answers to this question (hope so for fun's sake!).

 

I'm kind of a novice in photography in general and nature was what got me hooked on the whole genre. Oddly, two+ years ago I received a subscription solicitation in the mail for "Outdoor Photographer"--most likely 'cause I'm a member of several environmental organizations--I never had anything to do w/ photography, though. But I read the letter and there was this loud "click!" Yes! Outdoor photography!

 

I borrowed my father-in-law's old, completely manual Olympus OM1 that weekend (he just happened to be visiting) and I was hooked. What got me was the world that opened up when I started paying attention to details (gee, something we should all do regardless, but I'll dispense with the rhetoric). Plus, all the technicalities of photography are just plain interesting! And oh, yeah: expensive! Oh, well.

 

Since then, unplanned, I've begun selling my images in a couple local shops and have been lucky enough to use my OTHER love (and paid profession), writing, to begin ghostwriting a book with a nature photographer who I really admire. I took a week-long seminar with him and stumbled onto the fact that he needed a ghostwriter for his next book. Lucky me!

 

Anyway, I go out in the mornings mainly. I live in a small town in the midwest without sweeping landscapes or waterfalls, but a river runs through our town and I've made friends with some who live along it so I can sneak around their lawns at dawn and find images of geese and fog, etc. It's meditative and I like it and that's all that matters, right?

 

Good luck in your pursuit of nature photography!

[chelsea]

My interest in nature photography came out of my interest in nature and my attempts in nature art. Growing up in the backwoods of Ontario, I roamed the woods and fields, checking out everything I could find. Back when I was a kid field guides weren't readily available, so things had to be sketched and checked at the library. In order to draw or paint things to look correct, you need to know exactly what they look like, so I started taking pictures. Crappy pictures. Didn't have a clue. When my boyfriend came home one day with super-duper Minolta, complete with zoom lenses, push buttons, and computer chip plug in cards, I figured it was time to sign up for the local night school course on photography to figure out how this electronic beastie worked. By the end of the course I got hooked on photography, and joined the local photography club, where I continuously pick up more tips. Carrying a camera and tripod around is a bit easier than hauling a backpack full of field guides.

 

I've found that getting into photography of nature has made me far more alert. In browsing through the field guides trying to identify what I've found, I'm coming across other species of plants, birds and animals that should be found in our area. It has a snowball effect, the more I find, the more I learn, the more I'm looking.

 

It's fun to show others what you've found, especially being able to show others who share your interest in nature some good images. And winning ribbons in nature photo contests tends to be a nice little boost to the ego as well.

[marcus_erne]

First of all I was for some reason already drawn to photography in general when I was a boy in the early 70ies in Germany. I got an old roll film camera from my dad to use during a vacation in Austria. Of coarse none of the pics I took came out! What a disaster...

 

A few years later I found myself on another trip with the local sports club without my parents, but with an Agfa Instamatic: red buttom, aperture for sunny and cloudy days etc. This was the start.

 

By the time I was 20 or so, I went on a Italy backpack tour with a classmate and my (nowadays) wife. I had again the Agfa and additionally my stepfather's Minox 35GL with me. I loved the outcome of the pictures taken with the Minox so much that I bought my first SLR soon after: a Ricoh XRP with a 50mm f2 and a 35-200mm Tokina zoom lens.

 

Then a period of trial and error and travel-photography evolved over the next few years. Nature was always a part of it.

 

In 1993 while my wife was on a student exchange in Poland I traveled with another friend through Central-Spain (Extremadura). The whole journey was set-up as a photo trip. Among other (historic) places we went to a National Park (Montfrague) where I saw the first time in my life a rich wildlife and (almost) untouched nature. The main attraction of the park was besides the great landscapes the birds. I mean really large birds: eagles, storch, huge vultures etc., it was really impressive for a city-boy like me and the resulting slideshow was just great.

 

In 1996 we came to the USA, I switched my gear to autofocus and we were able to travel since then through some of the big National and some nice State Parks. Yellowstone was eventually the cornerstone to convert even my wife! We spent a week out there watching wildlife, experiencing the rich landscape and taking hundreds of pics...

 

Now we were both completely hooked to the beauty of performing a great hobby within "mother nature".

[jeffrey_forseth]

Ever since I took 8th grade biology in '69-70, I was turned on to National Wildlife and International Wildlife, taping cutout pictures on my bedroom walls. I also read books like King Solomon's Ring (Lorenz).In 9th grade I bought my first bird book after an interpretive session with a naturalist. In 11th grade I had an influential teacher for Ecology, who turned me on to Sand County Alamac (Leopold), and my ethics were engrained. Much time in the field and studying wildlife became a passion, and any endeaver became another excuse to be in the outdoors. I also spent a period as a wildlife interpreter at a nature center.

 

All this while I only had cheap cameras, until our first child was born and we bought a decent system. From there it's been all practice, practice, practice.

 

Because of my love for nature in early years, I now have an outlet to share these experiences, and my goal is to be printed in my earliest influence - National Wildlife

[stephen_lew]

I started getting into Nature Photography increasingly as I started going into more and more unusual locations. The more unusual the location or spectacular the site, the harder it is to describe what you have seen in words. The harder it became to describe the beauty of the mountains and canyons and cliff faces that offer such great images, the more and more photography became a valuable medium to express my experiences. My main photographic focus is on adventure sports in the outdoors, and photographing such a topic really allows you the opportunity to take people to places they would not otherwise have a chance to get to.