My wife and I just got back from a trip to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. It was a great trip except for the airlines and TSA - perhaps more on that in another column. Besides giving me some needed rest (wasn't I semi-retired?) it also provided me an opportunity to get back into my photography hobby. Now that I am home and can see the photos I took, I can see some of the things I would have done differently.
I shoot with a Nikon D70 digital SLR and my wife with a smaller Canon camera. Our division of labor is that she shoots the general tourist-type shots, whereas I look for the few "wallhangers". One of the first issues was that I couldn't carry my normal camera bags - airline limitations on carry-on bags forced me to just put the camera equipment into my regular luggage; this was not a problem but I missed having a convenient camera bag when on-site.
I have two lenses that I use, and each lens has a set of filters. With the wide angle lens at an effective zoom of 27-105 I was able to get some really great scenery shots, but in some cases I would have liked a wider lens - I will probably look for a very wide fixed (not zoom) lens in the future. My telephoto lens is 105-450 and with it I was able to get some great long shots of bison and elk. But I forgot to bring my monopod (single leg tripod, for the uninitiated) which made me shoot at faster shutter speeds to eliminate shaking.
Faster shutter speeds bring another problem - depth of field. (Wiki that phrase if you want more information.) Using a faster shutter requires that you use a lower f-stop (i.e. wider lens opening) which gives you less depth of field. The end result is that the animals were sharp and in focus, but the backgrounds blurry. This in itself is not necessarily bad and focuses the viewer's attention on the subject. But the scenery out there is so beautiful I wanted it all.
Swapping of lenses and filters quickly grew to be a pain; I finally ended up leaving the polarizing filter (great for enhancing sky shots) on the wide angle lens, and just using a normal UV filter on the telephoto. Keeping a polarizer on the lens also can contribute to depth of field problems as the filter is inherently dark, but most of the shots were focused at infinity and so this was not a problem on the wide angle lens.
One of my main problems was the brightness of clouds and water vapor around the geysers. It is very easy for the camera to overexpose these areas (called being "blown-out") and I was always careful to watch the histogram display on the camera to minimize this - but it still happened more than I thought. You should tend to underexpose this type of shot and bring out the dark areas in post-processing.
Another issue was dust on the camera sensor. This has never been a problem for me, but I probably did more lens swapping in Yellowstone than ever. Reviewing my photos I find that some sensor dust is definitely there. Unfortunately cleaning the sensor is something that you just can't do in the field. Professional photographers would probably use more than one camera in this case instead of swapping lenses. I can Photoshop out the offending dust but it's a chore to have to do it on many photos.
I am happy to report that there was no problem getting the digital "film" compact flash cards through airport security. I have a small wallet to hold those cards, and in each case I asked the TSA people to hand inspect the wallet - and in each case they refused. So it became a choice of putting the wallet through the x-ray scanner or keeping it on my person and going through the magnetic sensor. I chose the x-ray scanner (on their recommendation) and all seems to be OK. But this was a concern for me. To eliminate any lingering effects, I will re-format the cards after I upload the photos.
I don't have the "wallhangers" picked out yet, but I am sure they will justify all the effort!
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)