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.

For many years, 35mm camera users have often been able to safely ignore the subject of camera movements. Not so for the large format folks, the relatively large film plane of a 4×5 view camera requires photographers to go to lengths even in the simplest images to get a deep depth-of-field, lengths that often include both camera movements and enormously tiny apertures (e.g., f/64). Our smaller film (or digital sensor) areas come along with a comparatively deeper depth of field. For better or worse, we may not wish to maintain our ignorance much longer.

If, like many photographers, you keep a close eye on gear announcements, you’ll have noticed the trend. While Canon had been selling three tilt-shift lenses for years, more recently they updated the 24mm tilt-shift with the ::amazon(“B001TDL2O0”,”Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5L II “):: (greatly improving it’s optical quality) and added a ::amazon(“Canon TS-E 17mm f/4L”,”17mm”):: to the lineup. In the same time frame, Nikon announced and began to ship ::amazon(“B0013BEEUW”,”24mm”)::, ::amazon(“B001BTG3NW”,”45mm”):: and ::amazon(“B001BTAZHM”,”85mm”)::. What’s behind this new excitement?

I believe one of the primary drivers of this new life is the increasing resolution of digital cameras. With three DSLR manufacturers now producing cameras with over 20 megapixels, the hurdle for “enough” depth-of-field has gotten higher and higher. The traditional solution of simply using a smaller and smaller aperture (that is, a bigger and bigger f-number) has become less and less appealing, too, as that effect (which blurs images more and more for very small aperture openings) becomes more objectionable at higher resolutions. So, what’s a photographer to do?

The large-format guys folks  among  you already know the answer. While we small-format folks often think of depth of field and focus distance in terms of distance from the camera, it isn’t required (as a matter of optical physics) that the “focal plane” of a lens be perpendicular to the direction the camera is looking in. It is possible, quite possible, to tilt the focus plane in useful ways using the “tilt” camera movement on a tilt-shift lens. If your scene (and this is a big “if”) falls primarily along a plane, such as a flat landscape of low flowers, it’s possible to adjust the focus plane to put the whole field of flowers, from near to infinity, “near” the focus plane. This allows you to keep everything in focus with the lens at a larger aperture (lower f-number, smaller depth-of-field) and keep everything sharp. As a bonus, you’ll also end up with a faster shutter speed, which may help keep those flowers from blurring in the wind.

The advent of LiveView has been a real boon to photographers wishing to use tilt-shift technologies as well. It is often incredibly difficult to adjust the non-intuitive controls of a tilt-shift lens with an optical viewfinder. Modern electronic viewfinders that allow one (on a tripod) to spend time zooming into different areas of an image enable far more precise placement of the plane of focus.

While I believe that using tilt to improve (apparent) depth-of-field is the primary reason we’re seeing more of these lenses, it’s not the only reason. It’s possible to use the same effect to reduce the apparent depth of field, rather than to increase it, an effect which many folks are now leveraging to create faux “miniatures”. Also, shift movements can be incredibly valuable for perspective correction, as well as having additional uses in shooting for panoramic stitching and architectural work.

While pricey (most of these lenses are in the $1500-$3000 range) and challenging to use, we’ll be seeing more and more of these lenses in the coming years as a part of the never-ending quest for photographic perfection. In an upcoming post (probably late this week), I’ll give you a quick demonstration of what these wonders can accomplish.

Now, there are a few legitimate legal issues surrounding someone asking you not to photograph someone or something. (You’re probably not going to be able to just walk into your town’s emergency operations center and start taking pictures.) Many cities, towns and parks require a permit in order to shoot commercially in their jurisdiction. Usually this is just to make sure you’re not going to disrupt the goings on, and if you are, to make sure that someone pays for that disruption (i.e., you).

But outside of legal reasons, there are all kinds of, well, just plain dumb reasons for you to be at the receiving end of a “STOP!”

Usually these are undertaken by overzealous private security guards ignorant of the legal framework involved. Usually a few polite “yes sir, no sir, thank you sirs” will move them on their way and let you get back to work. If you’ve just missed the sun being in the perfect place because you’re being hassled by a security guard, it is certainly frustrating. But if your shot is that dependent on the perfect light, you would have done well to contact the security office and inform them of what you’re doing ahead of time so you can get all this silliness out of the way.

Occasionally you’ll come across an officer who’s bored or just plain mean and it will move beyond that. For times like this, having a firm grasp of your rights is key. Attorney Bert Krages published his Photographers Bill of Rights years ago and it’s been travelling around in my camera bag for a while. Being able to confidently (and politely) explain your rights to them in a way that makes them realize you’re not going to be intimidated is very helpful. The NYPD also recently clarified New York City’s policy of photography.

Overall, remember that there are a lot of people out there who are afraid of the world and who see problems everywhere. Sometimes they will make your life difficult. Grace and civility will usually smooth things over and remember, photographers already have a pretty crappy reputation in the world, being a schmuck everytime you come across a badge isn’t going to help.

There are a lot of bad photographers out there. A lot. When I first got into this business it seems like everywhere I looked I saw photographers doing work that was just incredible. One of the reasons that I waited so long to start shooting weddings was because I wasn’t sure if I would be able to be as good as some of the photographers that I admired. I’m still not quite there yet. However, I look around and I seem to see dozens and dozens of photographers who aren’t even attempting to become better at what they do.

You understand I’m not talking about the hobbyists. I’m not talking about the photographer who is just getting started in the business and offers to shoot a wedding for $350. These people are learning and they’re doing their best and they’re trying to get better. As I am. As we all are. No, I’m talking about the wedding photographers who aren’t producing quality work, and this is the sad part, don’t seem to be aware of it.

How do I know they’re not aware of it? Because I look at their websites, I look at their print ads, and I see a sub-standard work. I see lens flare, lack of fill flash, lack of white balance, composition that my mother could do better with. I must assume that the photographer that’s showing these pictures to his potential clientele feels that they are his best work, otherwise, why show them?

I guess I’m just a little disillusioned. While I find it easy to believe that there are people who buy a digital camera and suddenly say they are wedding photographers, I find it hard to believe that there are people who invest in a lot of expensive equipment, advertising, etc. and yet still haven’t bothered to so much as learn what good photography should look like. Are they out there? Are they just setting their camera to automatic and snapping away with the belief that what they’re doing is good work and worthy of the high-price tag that they put on it? Are they like the person who sings karaoke every single week and is blissfully unaware that they can’t carry a tune?

Am I one of them?

I’m not talking about art or vision. I’m not talking about people who have a different idea or style than me. Those people put time and effort into realizing their own particular way of shooting. Whether or not I like it is a matter of taste, of personal preference.

No, I’m talking about the ones who are shooting the same setups as every other kid on the block and don’t seem to be able to do that well. Again, I’m forced to believe that they honestly think it’s good. They have to or else they would go online and discover what fill-flash is for or how to drag the shutter…

I guess what it boils down to is you have to trust your instincts. If my gut tells me what I’m doing is good and what they’re doing is bad then I just have to go with that. I guess their gut is telling them that what they’re doing is good. Who’s to say who’s right and who’s wrong?

But boy, it sure looks to me like they suck.

End rant.

(Note: The author is completely aware that the reader may, in fact, feel that he is full of sh*t. I’m a wedding photographer in Tampa and my website is www.boorayperry.com. I feel it’s only fair to provide the link so you can at least see where I’m at on the wedding photography scale. Personally, I’d say about a “7.” But I know I’m a “7” and I’m trying hard to rise to “8.”)