It all depends on your point of view...

Seattle Space Needle, Pentax ME Super, Fuji Velvia, Sigma 24mm, 1/60s f22, ©Tony Sullivan 1991

A bit of a blast from the past for this post! I was asked about the importance of viewpoint the other day, and I was trying to think of something to illustrate that a slightly different viewpoint can make a big difference to the final shot.

Consider the shot above. I visited the West Coast of the USA many years ago, and Seattle was one of the more photogenic cities on our itinerary. When we visited the Space Needle, photo opportunities were everywhere - but how was I going to make the best of them?

I took this shot by actually lying on the ground below the bright red sculpture known as the Olympic Iliad, looking up. Yes, I got a few funny looks, not least from my girlfriend! But there was something about the juxtaposition of red, white and blue that I just had to explore. 

The Space Needle Tower was deliberately skewed to aid the composition, and the deep blue polarised sky, the white of the tower and vibrant red of the sculpture combined to make a much more interesting shot than the usual 'touristy' shot that people take - Including me! Compare the shot above with the following two more conventional images that I also took (hey, I was new to this. Give me a break!):

 

I know which one grips me more... 

So don't be afraid to get down and view the world from a worms/child's/pet's eye view; or conversely, get a high viewpoint and look down on your subject. The effect is best with a wide angle lens (wider the better), and is particularly marked with a fish eye lens - very small changes in viewpoint can have massive changes in perspective with this type of lens.

Experiment with viewpoint - it can make a huge improvement to the impact of your pictures.

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Photo of the Day: Dutch F16 fires flares

D700, Nikkor 300mm f4; @ f8, 1/3200sec ISO 800

This shot was taken at the Bournemouth Air Show, 2010. I love the way that the flares, having just been dispensed from the jet, are close enough to light up the underside of the fuselage. 


The air show is extremely popular and attracts thousands every year. However, this year, the weather was ATROCIOUS, with flying being largely abandoned on the Sunday. However, there were the occasional bits of good weather when the planes made an appearance. One of the stars of the show was an F-16 Fighting Falcon from the Royal Dutch Air Force, painted in a very patriotic (for the Dutch) Orange colour. This was a very noisy fast mover, and took full advantage of the fact that the Bournemouth Air Show is held over water - so it could demonstrate the firing of anti heat-seeking-missile chaff flares (this is not normally done at inland shows, for obvious reasons - gravity means they have to come down somewhere!)


I chose this show to experiment with some of the settings for my Nikon D700. In particular, I was looking to come up with the best combination of settings for capturing fast moving flying objects, like birds (or jet aircraft), since I had had mixed results in the past. The next time I had a Sea Eagle in my viewfinder, I wanted to be sure of getting some sharp shots!


I experimented with Shutter- and Aperture- priority exposure modes, and also with the various auto focus capabilities of the D700. I found that the 51 point 3D Dynamic area mode, and the Auto area mode, both produced excellent results -  with even very fast moving objects moving in 3 dimensions, they locked onto and accurately tracked the target. This, combined with Continuous servo autofocus, Aperture Priority metering, and a high-ish ISO of 800, gave me pin sharp results with plenty of detail at long range. I was very impressed, especially considering the dull quality of the light that day. The camera was obviously seeing things that I couldn't!


Another little experiment that day produced some very unexpected results. I was using the Nikkor 300mm f4 lens - an excellent lens, very sharp, and light enough to be very transportable and hand holdable. However, sometimes, 300mm is just not enough reach, and anything bigger, (e.g. 600mm f4, or even 400mm f2.8) is just too big and heavy to hand hold for any more than a shot or two. So I occasionally use teleconverters - the excellent TC14 II and the TC20 II (which I have now replaced with the Mark III version). The TC14 was supposed to work with the 300mm f4, and it did, but the TC20 was not supposed to work. Being a x2 teleconverter, that would mean a two stop loss of light through the lens, resulting in f8 at best. All the official literature said that this was just not enough light to make autofocus possible, so it would have to be manual focus only. 


Now, I don't know if any of you have tried hand holding a long telephoto lens and trying to manually focus it on a fast moving subject, but it is not something I personally have ever had any success with!


Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I plugged the TC20 II teleconverter onto the 300mm f4 and found that it happily, and rapidly, auto-focused on the target and continued to do so, producing sharp results every time. I have since quizzed as many Nikon experts as I could about this, even at Nikon UK, and they all say this shouldn't be possible with that lens/teleconverter combination. But it was!


The only reason I can think of is that the D700, like the D3 series cameras, has an FX sensor, which is quite a bit bigger than the DX sensor in most of the rest of the Nikon range. This enables the D700, among other things, to have outstanding low light capabilities - the damn thing can almost see in the dark! But I was thinking, this may also provide enough light for the Auto focus work with, when the DX sensor does not... 


I am not, in any way, a technical expert on how modern DLSRs work, so this is purely an educated guess on my part. Any techy geeks out there with an answer to this conundrum, please let me know - I would love to be able to go back to the guys at Nikon and explain it to them! ;-)


Well, that's it till next time. I hope you like the shot. I am hoping for better weather/light at this years show - if any of you are coming down to Gods little acre on the South Coast of the UK - let me know, I'm a mine of information. I look forward to seeing you there...

Website Update

I have just spent several fractious hours trying to embed this blog into my personal website. It didn't really want to play, and put up a good fight, but I have eventually managed to beat it into submission (mostly - still needs a little tweak here and there). So now you can read my ramblings/musings/rantings both here and at http://www.tonysullivanphotography.co.uk. Or both, if you are a glutton for punishment...

As a serendipitous byproduct of my endeavours, I discovered all sorts of fun new things that iWeb 3.0.3 can do in it's latest incarnation (some of which have fixed the irritating little glitches that have plagued my site since about iWeb 2, a few years ago). iWeb 3 is now quite a powerful web authoring tool - not a Dreamweaver, by any means, but easily powerful and full featured enough for most people doing most things, and capable of producing quite sophisticated websites. And very simple to learn, in the best Apple tradition.

So now the music plays properly, and *Drum roll* THE SLIDE SHOWS NOW WORK!!

Properly, that is... not showing tiny little bloody thumbnails that are no good to man nor beast. You should now be able to get a fully functional and interactive full screen slide show experience. (Let me know if you can't)

About bloody time, too. Saved me having to rewrite the whole thing from scratch - which, quite frankly, was SO big a job, I probably would never have got around to it. It started off as a three page simple site several years ago, in iWeb 1.0, but has slowly grown into the unwieldy monster that you see today.

So a big 'Yay!' is in order for me, Obi-Wan the Web Wizard! I feel a celebratory glass of wine or six coming on...

Now I need to find some new funky things to do with it - any suggestions?

I have embedded Google Map type widgets all over the site, but there must be more that I can do with it than that. If you can think of any improvements to the site, do let me know - either as a comment here, or via one of the email widgets on the site (usually at the bottom of a lot of the pages, or the contact page)

While you're doing that, I'm going to pour myself a big 'ol glass of Merlot and go back to my master plan for World Domination and Galactic Conquest. It still needs a lot of work...

Photo of the Day: Sunburst Turtle

Nikonos V, 15mm UW-Nikkor, f8, 1/90s, TTL Fill Flash via Sea & Sea YS-120. Fuji Velvia 100.

This shot has always proven popular with my friends as a wallpaper or screen saver. It was taken on a trip to Sipadan Island, a tiny coral outcrop in the Celebes Sea, south east of Borneo. 

This particular shot is one of my faves. I had several similar, but silhouetted shots of turtles from beneath against either a sun-burst or just the sky, but for some reason I left the flash on for this one, and lit the turtle from below. The effect, I think, is much better than the silhouette shots - more balanced, but still with a sense of hugeness of the open ocean and the vastness of the sky. I love the clouds in the background, too. Because this was taken in days when I used film, of course I didn't realise what I had until a day or so later, when I got the slides back. I sometimes miss that anticipation of waiting for the results. These days, with the immediacy of digital capture and instant feedback/review, you lose some of that anticipation and elation when you get the film back.

We actually stayed on the island, back in 2007, but a year later the Malaysian government closed the island to visitors and made it a wildlife sanctuary. If you want to dive it now, you have to stay on one of the nearby islands, Mabul or Kapalai, and boat across to dive. It is seen by many as one of the best dive sites in the world. 

If you like turtles, it certainly is one of the best places in the world to see them. This is probably because the scientific research/conservation programmes conducted on the island have probably altered the ecosystem in favour of the turtles. All the eggs laid by turtles are dug up and then incubated, safe from the predations of the (huge) monitor lizards and other predators that infest the island, that would normally eat many of them. When ready to hatch, they are then released into the sea as baby turtles. But because they have been 'saved' by human intervention, there are many, many more turtles released into the sea than nature would have intended, so many more actually survive the hazardous first months in the sea. Hence, the waters surrounding Sipadan are 'Turtle City', and it really is a great place to take turtle photos. If fact, is is difficult NOT to get turtles in the shot, sometimes. 

Charlie the Monitor Lizard. He lived in the roof of our cabin. And he was a small one (5ft or so)

There are many other species, of course. I came back with photos of reef sharks, schooling barracudas, bat fish, coral formations, parrot fish, etc... But the huge number of turtles does have an effect on the coral. I personally witnessed several large turtles chomping away on the coral and leaving it destroyed in their wake - normal, since this is what turtles naturally do, but because of the huge numbers, the coral does look a little the worse for wear. Perhaps we should leave Mother Nature to look after the turtle population herself, and not interfere quite so much? Controversial, I know, but I saw the coral desert that surrounded a lot of the island, and a lot of that damage was due to too many turtles. Ironically, divers were getting the blame for this damage. I am sure that some divers did do some damage, but nowhere near the damage I saw the natural local inhabitants do - not just turtles, but huge schools of bumphead parrot fish also descended on a tasty coral out crop like a swarm of giant locusts every day and left little in their wake. Maybe it is a good idea to stop divers staying on the island. But it is not the divers that are wrecking the coral.

OK, rant over. It IS a beautiful place. You could walk around the whole island in under 20 mins. But if you only took 20 mins, you were entirely missing the point - it truly is a tropical island paradise. Far better to linger awhile, lay in a hammock, listen to the waves gently lap on the white sand, gaze out to the horizon, and plan your next adventure...

Photo of the Day: Rhesus Macaque at Angkor Wat

Nikon D200, 70-300mm f4.5-f5.6 VR@183mm, f4.8; 1/125s

This rather thoughtful looking Macaque was part of a troop of monkeys that inhabit the surroundings of the Angkor Wat temple complex in Cambodia. They are very tolerant of humans, and the more inquisitive of them can get very close! They can also be very acquisitive when the mood takes them - thieving gits! The day was quite overcast after a rainstorm, as the monsoon was running a bit late and we were still getting rained on every day. It gave the complex a freshly washed, very green, yet quite moody countenance. Very SE Asian, very 'Apocalypse Now'. This being my second day there, I had more temple shots than I could shake a stick at (almost exclusively crap, as it turned out), so I decided to go and explore some of the surrounding forest on my tod.

As I wandered into the trees, I almost immediately came across a family group lounging around, looking cool, and this guy was the coolest. He was on a low branch about 1.7m away, and had no problems with the nosey tourist sticking a telephoto lens in his face. If you look really close, you can just make out the western aspect of Angkor Wat reflected in his eyes. I took several shots of this guy, mostly with him looking straight down the camera lens, in the classic portrait style, but this is my favourite - more thoughtful and coy. What do you think?

Warning: Virgin Blogger alert!

Hello World! 

This is my first blog, so please bear with me while I learn all this funky new stuff...

Why am I here? Well, at the request of several friends, really. I do a fair bit of travelling, and take a lot of photos while I'm there, and usually post them to my website when I get home. However, several pals have intimated that I really should get a wider coverage, and suggested this 'ere blogging malarky as a suitable vehicle for personally taking over the world wide web. 

So here I am. We shall see how successful it is in time.

I have to say - it probably won't stay strictly a travel/photography blog. I have a tendency to offer my opinions on all sorts of topics, and occasionally feel the irresistible urge to have a damn good RANT. Twitter and Facebook have been a good outlet for these outbursts, from time to time - but sometimes one just needs more than 140 characters to fully and satisfyingly vent ones spleen... So be prepared! 

As far as photography goes, I am a Nikon equipped travel, wildlife and underwater photographer. I occasionally experiment with other genres, with varying success.

If you want to see some of my work, and can't wait till I learn how to post some shots on here, then shoot on over to www.tonysullivanphotography.co.uk and have a rummage around. I have to say, the site is getting a little dated, and the slideshows in particular don't seem to work as well as they once did. It really needs a complete rewrite, and I will get around to that eventually. But it will give you a flavour of what I am all about.

I am also a bit of an apprentice geek, on the quiet. And an unapologetic Mac fan boy. So you may find me posting opinions/advice on all manner of shiny new toys that may appear in my life (or yours) from time to time. Feel free to disagree with me - variety is the spice of life ;-P

So here begins a new chapter in my online life...

I'm looking forward to it. Design