If you've been following me for a while, you know that I love California Condors. I feel so fortunate to be just a few hours away from where they are located in Central California. As some of you already know, they are a Critically Endangered species and North America's largest bird. Recently, the unusual threat of fires in one of their primary habitats in Big Sur has been a point of concern for these flying giants. These fires have killed a few condors and many others scatter to seek refuge. One of the best places to find them originally that also acts as a refuge is at Pinnacles National Park. 

PNP is skyrocketing with visitors who are there to hike, rock climb, see the giant spires covered with neon-colored liken, and of course, see the California Condors. This has led to making the already tiny population of condors even harder to find. Although they are more used to people because of how much they are handled by biologists for health checks and subsequently sent to zoos if they are heavily poised by lead ammunition fragments, like all wild animals, they still want their space.

​This is why I always feel lucky to encounter an individual from one of the rarest species on the planet in close range. 

Camera Settings and Technique
Nikon D500, 35mm, 1/500th sec, f/4.5, ISO 50, WB 5,550k
​I sometimes worry that I won't get any images while making a sizable trip to capture a species or landscape that I have my heart set on. But that's just the risk we as wildlife and conservation photographers run. The best we can do is prepare our asses off in hopes that we come back with at least one magnificent image, or maybe just an image that's meaningful to ourselves. This image to me is more meaningful than it is magnificent. 

I was already off hiking to the top of the pinnacles well before dawn to try and find the California Condors sun bathing in the first light of the morning. It was so cold that frost formed on my eye lashes in the first ten minutes of the hike. I relished it. If nothing else, the adventurous experience is worth the preparation. I remind myself to enjoy the journey as much as possible while in search of my dream to help California condors as much as possible throughout my career.

I get to the top, round a corner (after rounding many corners hoping to see a glimpse of a condor), and there they are just a couple hundred feet away... a handful of them perched in what looks to be their roost and soaking in the sun. This is what I've been looking forward to! I spend time photographing them from a distance as not to bother their livelihoods. After all, I wouldn't want some stranger getting up close to me while I'm trying to do my thing either. More people more in eventually and they decide to leave the area. Besides, flying to different sites, carcasses to eat and clean up, there's work to do! 

I made my way up and around some cliff sides after I thought all the condors had moved on. I hiked into an area where I wanted to stuff my lunch down when I looked to the left and, to my amazement, there was one right there in front of me about 20 feet away. I couldn't believe this juvenile was just perched there still soaking up some sun, its head folded back on itself in a resting position. I took the moment to switch out my telephoto lens for my 35mm that I barely ever use anymore and position to get a shot with the landscape it regards as home in the background.

This ONE SHOT entry is all about adaptability. If you've ever worked with forest light, you probably know how incredibly challenging it can be trying to capture subjects while generally compensating for both the darkest darks and the lightest lights. ​For me, normally I love to craft my images with a spectrum of deep darks and bright lights, and I don't mean just pumping contrast, but using my camera's customized color profiles to define the base of my style. If you don't know what I'm talking about, be sure to take the time to go into your camera's settings and look for wording similar to "Color Profile", but I digress.

Camera Settings and Technique
Nikon D500, 400mm, 1/320th sec, f/9, ISO 400, WB 5,650k
In this case, I could not use my usual color profile selection because of the already intense, high-contrast setting in front of me. I instead used the setting called "Flat", which significantly evens out the light of an image, making shadows brighter and light darker. And this typically gives off a "cinematic" feel. Since I had to use a lower shutter speed compared to the 1/2,500th+ second I usually use for moving wildlife, I made sure to keep my camera and lens steady with a tripod and smooth gimbal head. It would have been great to get close shots with a wide angle lens, but in this case, it would have been illegal, not to mention disturbing to the butterflies if I had more or less chased them down. After all, what kind of person would I be if I thought my images are more important than the health of the wildlife I want to showcase and protect?

"You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life when we allow the unexpected to happen."
​-Paulo Coelho

Hi everyone! I've been saving this images for a few months now, waiting for it to be publicly released in Hakai Magazine. It's great to be able to finally review it and talk about why the editor's chose a peregrine falcon to be featured inside a coastal and marine focused magazine. Ironically, it was published under Hakai Magazine's One Great Shot, which has no relation to this blog.

Peregrine falcons can be found in many environments: plains, deserts, forests, and even in cities where people are astonished as they look up to see the world's fastest animal diving from skyscrapers to hunt pigeons. But in North America, possibly the most important ecosystems for peregrines are ocean coastlines. Specifically, the Pacific Coast is an important migratory pathway for them, as confirmed by my friend and bird of prey researcher of over 20 years, Dan Varland. 
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Camera Settings and Technique
Nikon D500, 400mm, 1/2000th sec, f/9, ISO 6400, WB 5,000k
This time around, I'm going to talk a little about risk. I like calculated risk, wherein the probability of me succeeding is high after weighing out the odds. In this instance, in order to get the shot, I had to lean over the side of a cliff with thick gusts of wind and the awkward weight of the dSLR and telephoto lens in hand. Frankly, I took a risk with my life getting the shot of the peregrine falcon eating an invasive species of dove, but I knew I had some good physical balance on my side that I've learned over the years from rock climbing and long-distance mountain running. I also know this area well; its geography, its elements, and its dangers. That said, I do not suggest that you should risk your own life for shots. 

Another element that was crucial to getting the image was making sure that I was not a disturbance to the falcon. The safety of wildlife is never more important than our photography, or for our own curiosity for that matter. We all have our personal space bubbles, right? But in the case of most wildlife, their bubble is much bigger and more sensitive. It could have been easy to make this falcon feel uncomfortable and abandon her prey, which means she goes hungry. It also means that she has to spend the energy to to hunt a few more times, because a successful hunt happens only about once in every five tries or more. Either accidentally or, heaven forbid, intentionally scaring off a predator from its meal may mean it will starve to death. Not exactly ideal! It was respect that allowed me to get this image. And it will always be respect that will allow us to get images worth sharing.

In-depth Study
Sometimes, life gives us photographers almost exactly what we need in order to make a great shot that also possesses lasting definition. Thankfully, this is what happened here. Sure, the image isn't very vibrant, the light isn't good, the animal isn't particularly impressive at face value, and rain started pouring onto the lens, but the story is strong and seeing a mother coming in to protect her eggs is preciously rare. In fact, there is no other image like it of this species anywhere. It's entirely unique.

​Knowing that I had only seconds to set up my stationary camera after the biologist physically checked the health of the eggs, I quickly composed a shot with many elements that fortuitously lined up with each other. Before we approached the nest, I knew for sure that I wanted the human development in the background in order to tell that story of the way we humans are pushing our own expansion into every corner of the wild we can, forsaking the very beings that fully regulate the ecosystems our lives rely on.

In general, it's the photographer's imperative to make sure that the health of the lives that we're photographing are more important than the images we create. In other words, as photographers, don't mess with the lives of the animals so that it changes their behavior. With this in mind, I have just about 60 seconds to set up a shot and leave the area while the biologist directs me safely through the habitat and alerts me to potential problems. And before that, we've already come up with a game plan and I have my settings ready and waiting. 

As I go to set down my stationary camera inside a custom weatherproof housing, I'm looking for a pleasing background and see the folded grass that humbly bows down into a subframe for the Western Snowy Plover and eggs. I also see a log laying down that points towards the subframe, which leads the eyes downward to the foreground. Then I see the pinkish-purple flower and the deep yellow leaf the contrast each other on opposite ends of the frame, further lending elements that suggest a deeper richness to the ecosystem. The flower is also just a really nice pop of color in a rather drab scene due to the overcast. They're also leaning away from each other... an interesting and subtle dynamic. 

There is no way on Earth that I wanted to get this aperture and focus wrong. I focused directly on the eggs and closed down my aperture to f/8 from f/1.8. I wanted to for sure maximize my depth of field on the subjects without introducing too much focus into the background. It was important to me to have clear separation of subject and background, rather than something like a wide-angle landscape with everything in focus from front to back. So, we quickly and carefully retreated about two hundred yards back, and we sat quietly, watching from our scope. A muffled camera and a remote trigger did the rest.

In post processing, I also cropped in a bit to eliminate a bland, bright, and distracting sky while placing the center line to meet the eye of the mother.

Research and Conservation
​Western Snowy Plovers are a bellwether species, meaning that they are indicators of a healthy habitat. It might seem impossible, but we could actually lose our beaches, and subsequently the wildlife, to coastal erosion caused by warming weather and rising tides caused by climate change. If there exists the plovers in an area, we can actually research and understand what makes such a beach habitat resilient to the active climate change happening at this very moment. From that, it's possible to create conservation actions that lead to the restoration and protections of coastal dune habitats so they do not disappear. All because of this one tiny species of hardy beach-dwelling bird.

In-depth Study
This looks like a bit of a mess, but we are going to break the composition down and talk about the refining process of finding golden ratios then incorporating other compositional elements for a more eye-pleasing image. Keep an open mind! 

A person could make the case that not using the golden ratio compositional tool for landscape shots is borderline psychotic. It's a spiral based on a natural geometry found in nature (two of them can be seen to the right in the image). It also happens to be the most eye-pleasing shape in visual art. The origin of the spiral is what I want to place on either my main or secondary subjects. I also want to position my lens so that the actual line of the spiral lands on different, interesting physical elements, which helps the eye flow through the image easier. The bottom golden ratio lands directly on my main subject, the big rock covered with standing seaweed. The top one lands on the big rock jutting out from the right of the frame, it's a secondary subject that point towards the sky, and also breaks the boring horizon line, so the eye follows the purplish colors back counter-clockwise and back down into the ocean. From there, the waves take over, flowing around the rocks and on top of them, drawing further attention to the seaweeds. When you go back to look at the original image, can you feel your eye circling around the image, perhaps drawing attention to smaller details along the way? Wherever your eye happens to start, there should be a flow to the way your eye follows the rest of this scene. I use the closest rock in the image, the one I'm actually standing on with my tripod, to create an arrow that points into the rest of the scene and as a way to add more depth and dimension. Additionally, the textures of the rock combined with the yellow lichen adds some more "feel" to the image. You might be able to actually imagine what it feels like to reach out and touch it.

Research and Conservation
​Perhaps it's cliche by now, but the more time you spend getting to know an area, the better your odds at finding and creating an image that will make people stop to look. I spent a total of about two weeks spread out over a few months at Salt Point State Park. I made a lot of images and there was a lot of experimentation; flash, no flash? lava bubbles, no lava bubbles? Morning or evening? There was a lot of patience involved, but it's easy to be patient when the days spent outdoors are all just a bunch of fun. I surprised myself when I found that the best image was one that didn't really have tafoni or frozen lava bubbles in it. That's fun to say, lava bubbles.

Anyway, although this gorgeous ecosystem is already protected, it is photos of beautiful and interesting ecosystems that can directly protect an unprotected ecosystem. Organizations that devote their resources to protecting wild lands, like the West Marin Environmental Action Committee, use images of natural habitats and the wildlife within to convince lawmakers to protect the very things being photographed. Even when they are protected, they can come under threat again from, what I'm going to strongly call, terrorists of nature, by proposing destructive plans, like for oil drilling, pipelines, mines, and other leech-like outdated methods of procuring energy from our one and only home. This when we as photographers need to keep battling against those types of destructive forces. By selling, or perhaps donating, your images to organizations that need them, you can find one way to become a conservation photographer... if you're not already!

​ONE SHOT is about seizing the day and being prepared for it. Each feature focuses on just one main image and goes in depth with the settings, the techniques, and the journey.
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Wildlife photography is a difficult art form, precisely because we, as photographers, never know if we’ll actually find the wildlife we’re looking for. We might try our absolute hardest to guarantee positive results, but I think we all know that sometimes our days end with lessons about not forgetting how to be in the moment. That’s why I created ONE SHOT, so when that rare opportunity to photograph an amazing scene happens, perhaps it’s even the shot of a lifetime, this will help nudge you into a more prepared direction.

​Technique
The key to photographing birds in flight successfully is to predict their flight path and have eyes in the back of your head. When I got to the location, I learned fast that these Black Skimmers fly swiftly with purpose and sometimes like to “thread the needle.” In all the time that I watched them, whenever they took off, that meant it was their intention to go hunt. In flight, they make big, sweeping gestures and then without wavering, dive at the water’s surface and suddenly break off before hitting it, barely skimming above with their lower beak dipping in, feeling for fish. I knew I would apply the same technique to photograph this species as I do with capturing raptors. 
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Holding your camera and lens in hand, brace your arms by firmly tucking your elbows into your body and then rotate your torso at the hips, following the direction and speed of the animal. Don’t forget to hold your breath as well, that will minimize the shake of the camera. Sometimes I love to have my subject backlit for a nice glow along the edges of the animal, but in this case, I wanted to show off all the glorious detail of the hunt. So, I made sure the sun was at my back while I tried to keep the bird in front of me. Now work the scene as much a possible to develop a strong image. 

Sometimes my ego tells me, “Hey, you got enough shots.” Wrong. Ego is always wrong. You can almost never have enough shots as long as the animal is comfortable with your presence. More time spent = more opportunities for creative shots. Since I had the opportunity to spend the last few hours of light photographing the Black Skimmers, I experimented with different settings, angles, and took time to really study their lives, which brought me closer to achieving an impressionable and award-winning shot. That’s one of my goals, after all.

Research
It’s important to study up on the species you’re about to photograph. The more a photographer knows about their wild subject, the better the feel for what happens when it comes to photographing that animal. This includes being able to read the warning signs of a particular species, which will help you make the right, ethical decisions to keep safe what we love to photograph. If the presence of any one of us impacts any wild animals ability to live, it’s important to make the right decision to immediately back off. Our photos are never more important than the health of the animals we photograph. ​