Uploads from Marsel van Oosten, tagged wild

Little Guy

nobody@flickr.com (Marsel van Oosten) — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 02:22:43 -0800

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This is one from our White & Wild Japan tour.

Little over a week I will be leading our annual photo tour to Japan again, where we photograph the famous snow monkeys, whooper swans, the endangered red crowned cranes, and Steller's sea eagles. We've been going there for many years, and it's one of our most popular (and most copied) tours. It also happens to be one of our own favourite trips, so we can't wait to see these little guys again!

The snow monkeys are a real joy to watch, not only because they're constantly active in and around the natural hot springs and that there's a lot of interaction between monkeys to observe and photograph, but also because they resemble humans so much and you can really tell how they're feeling and what they're thinking. Well, almost. The young monkeys are particularly enjoyable to watch because they're very lively and curious.

If you talk to any wildlife photographer, they will tell you to shoot at the eye level of your subject - never shoot down. They're usually right, but rules are meant to be broken, and that's what I did here.

I deliberately chose a very high viewpoint to look straight down at this young snow monkey in an attempt to make it look even smaller. An advantage of this approach was that when the monkey looked up at me, it was looking in the direction of the sky, and that's where all the light comes from - natural fill flash for those big eyes.

If you're interested in joining me on our next Japan trip and learn more about wildlife photography, please check out my website for more information and tour impression video clips:

Squiver Photo Tours & Workshops

This year's trip is fully booked, but you can already reserve a spot for the 2014 tour.

Hope to see you there!

Marsel

©2013 Marsel van Oosten, All Rights Reserved. This image is not available for use on websites, blogs or other media without the explicit written permission of the photographer.

Nowhere To Run

nobody@flickr.com (Marsel van Oosten) — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 06:57:33 -0800

Marsel van Oosten posted a photo:

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Fortunately, there was no need for me to run, because I was sitting safely inside a hide in Finland. Had I been hiking in the forest on my own, this would have been a totally different situation.

Still, even from the safety of a hide, looking straight into those eyes of a wild brown bear is pretty impressive. This bear appeared shortly after midnight (there is virtually 24 hour daylight in June) and it didn't notice me until I took my first shot. It suddenly stopped and looked at the hide, probably wondering what that sound was and if it would be edible. :-) A few seconds later it disappeared into the greens again. I was happy that I had fought my desire to go to sleep.

If you're interested in joining me on one of our photo tours and learn more about photography, composition and post processing, please check out my website for more information:

Squiver Photo Tours & Workshops

Hope to see you there!

Marsel

©2013 Marsel van Oosten, All Rights Reserved. This image is not available for use on websites, blogs or other media without the explicit written permission of the photographer.

Who's that, mommy?

nobody@flickr.com (Marsel van Oosten) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 09:09:20 -0800

Marsel van Oosten posted a photo:

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One of the great things about Katmai National Park is that only a handful of people live there, and that the brown bears never experience all the usual negative human behavior - after all, in the end it's always the humans that create the problems.

Every year we run a bear photography workshop in Katmai NP and the guides we use are extremely knowledgable and know everything about bear behavior. As a result the bears are very relaxed with our presence and most of the time don't even seem to notice us - they're simply totally not interested in us. The bears just go about their daily routine and sometimes get incredibly close.

Everyone will tell you that when you see a sow with two cubs, you're pretty much screwed. And they might be right, but not here. Here the bears don't see humans as a threat, just as objects in the landscape. On many occasions bears came as close as 10 feet from where we were watching them.

In this particular case we were photographing a sow with two cubs and decided to all lay flat on the grass, both for the low perspective and to be less intimidating for the bears. That proved to be a good decision, because the sow walked closer and closer to us, up to the point that even my 200-400 was too much focal length for the scene.

Boars can be potentially dangerous to young cubs, which is why this family was constantly alert. Here they spotted a boar in the distance and they were briefly looking at it, trying to figure out whether it was moving into their direction or if they would be save. In the end they just continued grazing and slowly moved away from us again. A truly wonderful wildlife experience.

If you would like to join us on our next bear workshop, the one for 2012 is already fully booked. There are still spaces for the 2013 trip though.

Flakes

nobody@flickr.com (Marsel van Oosten) — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 05:21:59 -0800

Marsel van Oosten posted a photo:

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Just a quick one from Japan.

I was going through my old files just before I left and found this one. For some reason - don't ask me why, I don't have a clue - I shot this at f/2.8. As a result the DOF is very shallow and I'd prefer to see more. Shutter speed was 1/320, so that shouldn't have been the problem. Must have been the cold that shut my brain down.

My initial reaction was to throw the shot away, but then I realized that I often think that we (the serious photographers) tend to overanalyze our images, especially in a technical way. The fact that I, or any other photographer, would prefer more DOF (or more contrast, or more sharpness, etc.) in an image does not mean that magazines, newspapers, stock agencies, print buyers or friends and family members feel the same way. The more specialized or professional you become, the more obsessed you get with the small details, details other (normal :-) ) people might not even notice. Just a reminder to not overanalyze my images to death.

Anyway, I like the reflection, the pose and the snow flakes (especially the combination of the latter two) - so it will go into my selections folder, despite the shallow DOF.

Looking forward to meeting these guys again in a few days.

Greetings from sunny Tokyo!

[D2X, AF-S VR 70-200/2.8, 1/320 @ f/2.8, ISO 400, handheld]

Check out my website if you would like to join me on one of our photo tours and workshops

Macaca fuscata iluminata

nobody@flickr.com (Marsel van Oosten) — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 06:28:06 -0800

Marsel van Oosten posted a photo:

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One of my biggest concerns with wildlife photography, is that most of the subjects have been photographed to death and the pictures are starting to look more and more alike. The differences between what is considered a good photograph and a not so good one often concern the technical aspects; better exposure, better shooting technique, better focusing, better processing, etc. We seem to have accepted this, as most of the comments on wildlife images concern exposure, sharpness and processing. Good composition is a more creative aspect of photography that will create better and more original images, but even with that the possibilities are becoming more and more limited as the pile of photographs of any given subject is growing and growing and growing.

I go to Japan every year to photograph snow monkeys, cranes, swans and eagles, and as a result I have a lot of images of these subjects. My standard preparation is to find out what photographs already exist of the subjects I'm about to photograph to see what has already been done and where the possibilities lie to create something different. Composition and viewpoint are usually good starting points, but with many subjects, all the compositions and viewpoints have been tried before.

In an effort to create more original images of often photographed subjects, with more room for creativity, I decided last year to experiment with a technique that macro photographers use all the time, but which is very uncommon in mammal photography: off-camera flash. I have posted some earlier efforts here before, but here I tried to push it one step further.

Light is the very essence of photography, and as photographers we are depending on the quality of the light for the photograph to work. Instead of waiting for the perfect light, and hoping that the subject will be there when it happens, preferably with the perfect pose, I decided to take matters into my own hands and create the light myself.

Here's one where I used off-camera flash in a very unconventional way on a Japanese macaque. I positioned the flash behind the subject to emphasize the steam rising from the water's surface and I used some major underexposure to render the monkey as a silhouette with a nice rimlight.

Curious what you think.

Nikon D3, AF-S VR II 70-200/2.8, 1/125 @ f/11, ISO 200, SB-900 (off-camera)

Check out my website if you would like to join me on one of our photo tours and workshops

River Siesta

nobody@flickr.com (Marsel van Oosten) — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 03:52:02 -0700

Marsel van Oosten posted a photo:

As I'll be leading a bear photography tour to Alaska again in a couple of months, I thought it might be a good idea to go through the images from the previous visit and have a second look at the ones I selected then. As always, I noticed that there are shots that I didn't select back then - apparently I didn't like them - but that I do like very much now. And there are shots that I did select, which I don't think are very interesting anymore. Fortunately, there were also some shots that were part of my initial selection that I still like, and this is one of them. It's interesting to see how your taste changes over even a very short period of time.

Instead of waiting for that salmon-leaping-into-the-mouth-of-a-bear-shot, I decided to focus on a spot with the least action; a sleeping bear. By choosing a relatively slow shutter speed, I was able to blur the water (while retaining subtle texture) to give a moody feel to the scene and emphasize the motionless state of the bear. I used a polarizer and small aperture to get my shutter speed down.

Nikon D2Xs, AF-S VR 70-200/2.8, 1.4x TC, polarizer, 0.6s @ f/16, ISO 100

Check out my website if you would like to join me on one of our photo tours and workshops

National Geographic - 12/2009

nobody@flickr.com (Marsel van Oosten) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 07:40:03 -0800

Marsel van Oosten posted a photo:

The December issue of National Geographic (Dutch edition) features three pages of the brown bear images I shot in Finland. This is one of the shots that they selected, showing two playing brown bear siblings, just after the rain had stopped. The one on the left hit the one on the right on the head, causing a spray of drops from the wet fur.

The image was shot from a hide in an open swamp area, close to the Russian border during the Squiver Wild Brown Bears workshop.

Check out my website if you would like to join me on one of our photo tours and workshops

The Fog

nobody@flickr.com (Marsel van Oosten) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 07:24:30 -0700

Marsel van Oosten posted a photo:

I just returned from this year's Wild Brown Bears workshop in Finland, and I suddenly realized I still haven't sorted out all the shots from last year's trip. So I figured I should start with that. :)

This is the one shot I was after for the duration of my stay at this particular location. Every morning there was this great ground fog with gorgeous backlighting, and every morning I was hoping for a bear to cross from one site to the other. After three days it finally happened, and I almost missed it. This particular area has a much lower bear density than where I usually do my workshops, so there was a lot of waiting involved. That's ok of course, but eventually I got a bit bored and was happy to see a small bird in front of my hide, and started to photograph it. I don't know why I decided to check the scene in the background again, but I did, and I suddenly saw a bear walking into the scene. Five shots later I had already forgotten about all the waiting on the previous days and I just couldn't keep my eyes from the lcd. :)

Check out my website if you would like to join me on one of our photo tours and workshops

It Came From The Forest

nobody@flickr.com (Marsel van Oosten) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 03:06:04 -0800

Marsel van Oosten posted a photo:

This is the second shot from my brown bear series in National Geographic (Dutch edition). Just like the previous image, it was shot from a hide in a large swamp area, deep in the taiga forests of eastern Finland.

It was late in the evening and I was staring out of the window of our hide, looking for any activity. When I saw the trees moving in the distance, I knew there had to be a moose or a bear walking in our direction. I liked the distant forest habitat, so I decided to choose the 200-400 over the 600 and include some of the trees. It turned out to be a light colored brown bear that emerged from the darkness, which stood out nicely from the green tones surrounding it.

Nikon D3, AF-S VR 200-400/4.0, 1/320 @ f/4.0, ISO 800, beanbag

Check out my website if you would like to join me on one of our photo tours and workshops