This past October, I went to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards in London. My camera trap image of a black bear in the Redwoods of California had been given an award. Last year, my close friend and former assistant Steve Winter had won the big prize with a camera trap image of a snow leopard. We both have invested years in finding ways to make elusive, wild animals photograph themselves by crossing the path of an infrared beam, triggering a disguised camera nearby.

The awards are presented in the fantastic main hall of the British Natural History Museum, under the giant dinosaur; a fabulous setting with all the mood that a great award ceremony should have. This year the winning image was another camera trap image, an Iberian wolf. Iberian wolves have come back from the brink of extinction and this image had the added energy of the wolf jumping over a fence. I was stunned by the image and immediately asked to meet the photographer.

VIEW THE “STORY BOOK WOLF” IMAGE HERE

Jose Luis Rodriguez was gracious and told me he had made the image over many months and many failed attempts by making an arrangement with a sheep farmer. He relayed that he had put “bait” carcasses inside the vacant sheep paddock for many nights while he attempted to get the image he had dreamed of. It is a perfect image. The wolf is in mid-air at exactly the right point. This is very hard to do with camera traps because the beam and the speed of the animal give results that are not perfect. Remember, the photographer cannot be there to adjust anything and most wild animals do not come back and do the same thing twice.I have a well-known image of a wild tiger jumping from a cliff directly into the camera. I got one frame in three months. One.

The jumping Iberian wolf image seemed impossible, but I accepted it because I was proud of the photographer for disclosing that he had “baited” the animal.

My stance on ethics has always been that there is an issue if you cannot stand up and tell the world what you did. The ethics line can blur, it is not black and white. Each situation is different. Full disclosure is always the best approach.

Today, a few months later, the image has been disqualified, the photographer banned, and a wonderful award has been tainted. The wolf was tame, the wall and fence was inside a Madrid wildlife park. After the award was announced, intense scrutiny came down from Spanish photographers who revealed proof that it was Ossian, an animal actor, and that the scene had a distinct tree line that existed in the wildlife park. A sad day.

I have often struggled with the methods wildlife photographers use to make images in contrast to my upbringing as a photojournalist. I once attended a heated ethics discussion in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The panel on the stage made up of wildlife documentary producers finally answered my question about disclosure with the edged: “they will turn off the tele” if we tell them what we do. I have personally tested this. The audience does want to believe what it sees. I was stunned to the point of tears by this exchange.

Remember, I’m not taking the ethical high ground as if I’m a magician and can speak to the animals. Great wild images are hard to make and I have the luxury of time paid by my patron. In Congo, I once put a dog inside a hastily constructed cage and left it in the forest as bait for a leopard. My hope was that the dog would not die and that I could get the very elusive leopard on film, the central character in the ecosystem I was trying to document. I did this with the idea that I would always tell my audience what I did. It turned out to be a very long, funny story but the dog escaped unscathed and we didn’t get the image. Next, I sprayed leopard urine from a zoo on a trail near some leopard dung and we got one frame of a male cat. That became a double page spread in the magazine.

One must be willing to declare the process of making their images; it is an act of essential self-awareness. I firmly believe that not revealing the process leads to darkness whether or not the truth is eventually exposed.

Wildlife photography presents the nature photographer with many challenges. One of the foremost is getting close enough to the animal to create an effective image, while not disturbing the animal, affecting it’s behavior, or putting oneself in danger. Because wildlife is often most sensitive to the presence of things that look like humans or other large mammals, when possible many wildlife photographers will make use of a blind–a general term for any sort of structure, tent, or what have you, that renders the photographer less visible. Numerous styles of blinds exist, some are as simple as camouflaged tarps that disguise the form of the photographer, while some are elaborate structures. While dedicated blinds have their place, I’ve often had good success photographing using my car as a blind.

Much to my surprise, many animals (and I’ve observed this both with birds and large mammals) are much less frightened by the appearance of a car or truck than they are by a human figure.

A little preparation goes a long way. There’s nothing more frustrating than driving through a beautiful wilderness area, spotting wildlife, and finding that you’ve left your camera in the trunk. I tend to travel with two cameras. When wildlife opportunities seem likely, I’ll be sure to have a body with a long lens just behind my seat so I can reach it in a hurry.

Having spotted a subject, my first task is to figure out where and how to put the car in a favorable orientation. I don’t slam on my brakes, often this means I’ll need to pass the animals and make a U-turn to approach. If I do need to turn around, I’ll go a fair ways past the animals before turning around to avoid attracting the animals’ interest.

In finding a place to stop my car, I’lll look for a wide place out of danger from traffic (no photograph is worth risking your life for!), with me on the far side of the car from the animal, and preferably one with a bit of room to adjust the position of the car as time goes on. While being away from the animal in the car reduces the range of directions I can shoot, it also means that I can get out of the car and shoot (if I decide to) without making myself visible to the animal. If it’s close to the road, I’ll start a fair ways from the animal, moving the car a little closer–infrequently so that the animal has time to get comfortable with my presence. (My Prius helps here, I can often move the car using only the electric motor, which is very quiet.) Both the egret and the bighorn images here were taken after a fair bit of working my way closer to the animals.

Once you’ve stopped the car, start shooting. Shooting with a big telephoto lens from a car is almost as effective as putting up a tripod in terms of getting gawkers–attracting other other cars and people to join you. And almost as a rule those folks won’t bother staying in their cars.

The bighorn image was shot with a full-frame camera and the Canon EF 300mm f/4L IS USM Telephoto Lens for Canon SLR Cameras the egret image was shot with a reduced-frame sensor and the Canon EF 400mm f/5.6L USM Super Telephoto Lens for Canon SLR Cameras.

Neither image is greatly cropped, yet in both cases the animals are uninterested in my presence. I know that wouldn’t be the case if I’d been on foot.

Again, be very careful. Wildlife present a big shiny distraction to the driver, both to yourself and the to other vehicles around you. Remember that your first priority must be the safety of yourself and that of the vehicles around you. Shoot only when you’ve gotten yourself safely stopped and you’re into a safe location. Once you’ve done that, you’ll likely have a great shooting opportunity.

The coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) of California’s north coast include the tallest trees on Earth, with several examples of individual trees over 370 feet tall and provide amazing photographic and sometimes challenging photographic opportunities. This weekend I’ll be travelling to the California’s north coast (roughly betwen the towns of Trinidad, California and Crescent City, California)  to visit the constellation of four parks (Redwood National Park, Prarie Creek Redwoods State Park, Del Norte State Park, and Jedediah Smith State Park) that to my mind represent some of the finest redwoods photography opportunities available. In this article, I hope to give you a taste of those incredible areas and add a few words about the opportunities and challenges they present.

Starting from the south, Redwood National Park is the most natural place to begin our virtual tour, the National Park Service maintains a visitor center there (actually just south of Orick, CA) and in Crescent City which can provide excellent information and maps of both this park and the three state parks as well. A trip along the Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway (which runs through Redwood NP and Prairie Creek SP) makes an excellent first introduction to the redwood environment, as the road wanders through enormous columns of tree creating a vast virtual room, carpeted with fern and trillium. The strangely-named Cal-Barrel Road (a quick turn off the parkway) offers an excellent introductory location to start your explorations.

Here you will quickly discover three challenges in photographing redwood groves: scale, contrast, and the incredible sensitivity of ferns to even the slightest breeze. With respect to the contrast and wind your best bet will be to work on a cloudy (or foggy) windless morning. Contrast is a particular problem on sunny days, as the few bits of sunlight that get through into redwood groves are often many, many stops brighter than that most of the scene.

At Davidson Road near the south end of the park you’ll find the Roosevelt Elk Grove which (as the name suggests) often provides opportunities to (carefully!) photograph elk. From that first grove also consider the short walk to Trillium Falls which is a small, but elegant, waterfall which can be particularly beautiful near the very end of autumn (late October or early November). Davidson Road continues as an often-rutted dirt road out to Gold Bluffs Beach and runs along that beach for a few miles to the parking area for Fern Canyon. The bluffs warm nicely in sunset light (on the rare occasion the coast doesn’t fog in) and elk are often found along the road here, often much closer than you’ll find them over at the Elk Grove. The road ends at a parking area for a short, mile-long hike into Fern Canyon, where a small stream has carved a steep narrow canyon, 20′-30′ high in places, the canyon walls lined with fern. Expect to get your shoes wet here. Bring boots or Tevas, depending on the weather, as you’ll be making several stream crossings along the way.

At the north end of the Redwood NP, just south of the town of Klamath, don’t miss the opportunity to explore the park’s Coastal Drive, which follows the top of the ocean bluffs. While the steepness of the cliffs makes it difficult in most locations to get a wide scenic view here, there are often excellent detail opportunities, and the Face Rock Overlook just off the drive provides a stunning view south along the coast, again offering (weather permitting) excellent sunset potential.

While you could easily spend weeks exploring Redwood National Park and Prairie Creek just in the areas I’ve mentioned (and there’s more to see, for sure), in my upcoming second installment I’ll talk about my single favorite redwood park. I’ll also talk briefly about seasonality and other logistics.

Mono Lake is one of the most famous California nature photography sites, that fame is a consequence of both it’s photographic and environmental history. Environmentally it supports the second largest population of California gulls (the first, paradoxically, being in Utah), that support was threatened by the diversion of streams that provide water to the late for use by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, 300 miles away. Photographically, tufa, the strange limestone formations exposed by the lowering lake level, the backdrop of the Sierra Nevada to the west, and the gull population provide a rich source of photographic opportunities.  In this post, I hope to excite you (just a little bit) about the area, and suggest a few places you might want to begin your photographic exploration of the area.

The most frequented area of the lake is the “South Tufa Area”, located along the south side of the lake.  While often a busy and well-frequented area, the number, size and variety of the tufa formations there are  unparalleled.  Your biggest challenge many times of year will be other photographers, but the area is large and gets interesting light both at sunrise (both toward the Sun and toward the Sierra) and just past suns, when the geography and elevation often provide strong, saturated earth shadows such as the one in the image I’ve included above.

A second location is what’s referred to as the “Old Marina” area, accessed from highway 395 just north of the  Mono Basin National Forest Scenic Area Visitor Center.  This area does not contain the dramatic tall tufa of the South Tufa area, but the numerous formations in water provide interesting opportunities and challenges for sunrise silhouettes, and post-sunset earth shadows again are often very strong here. Because this area provides the most direct scenics looking directly east, it offers opportunities for shooting directly into the rising sun, or toward the rising moon.

A great area “off the beaten track” is found just east of Black Point along the north side of the lake. From highway 395, take Cemetery Road east past the cemetary, it becomes a dirt wide graded dirt road. After passing the tall hill that is black point, a thinner brach of the road heads back south towards the lakeshore and ends in a small parking area, from there it’s a simple 10-minute walk down to the lake shore near Negit and Paoha Islands. Again, smaller formations in water dominate here, and my best experiences in the area have been before, during and after sunset.

Most of these areas are available save for intermittent periods during the winter. While access can be limited in parts of winter, the combination of the strange formations and winter snow can be quite powerful. Fall is also popular, with good reason (there are a few lovely areas of aspen near the lake), but far more crowded for the photographically minded.

For bird photographers, gulls arrive in number in June, their chicks hatching in June on the islands inside the lake, and increase in numbers probably through August, only to by the end of September. While there’s a fair number of gulls along the shore, canoe tours after breeding season is over provide access to greater numbers of birds. Eared grebes are an August-early November opportunity. Avocets in breeding plumage are common in March and April.

Do stop by the Mono Lake Committee’s visitor center in Lee Vining as well, they can provide excellent information on current birding, flower and road conditions. They also offer photographic workshops (that attract beginners through pros), and they often have a photographic exhibit from the area as well.