Bugle in the garden

Copyright Nathan Montgomery, 2008

For my final shot from our trip to the zoo, I switch from the animal to the plant kingdom. Several of these flowers were growing near the entrance to the zoological park, and on our way out, Stephanie was nice enough to let me play around with photographing them for about 10 minutes. I am a big fan of a flower with an intricate stamen. It's always a focusing challenge, especially without a tripod, as was the case with this shot.

Another big cat

Copyright Nathan Montgomery, 2008

Here's another picture from our visit to the zoo, this one of an American bobcat. I took the picture through fiberglass, which makes for some odd reflections (note the double branch in the upper left). It's just average, but with classes starting, I'm not likely to get much time to photograph, so I can't be too picky.

Aslan's Portrait

Copyright Nathan Montgomery, 2008

It's not often that I really like a picture that I take. I have almost 5000 images on my computer and backup hard drive, and of those, there may be 50 that I would call good and probably no more than 10 that I am really quite happy with. Having just taken this picture a few hours ago, I'm not ready to put it in that top tier. My opinions on pictures tend to mature with time, and already, I can tell you that this shot has some technical issues (for instance, it's not sharp at all).

All of that said, I really like this photograph. I took it at the North Carolina Zoological Park in Asheboro, as Stephanie and I spent our last day together before classes start. The lions are always most active just after the gates open, so we always make sure to leave our place early enough to be some of the first visitors to view their exhibit. This morning, the male was kind enough to look right at us for about 20 seconds while standing in the shade and out of the spotty light found in most of the exhibit at 9 AM (ideally, portraits are front lit, but I'll take shadowless shade over spotty light any day of the week). I had just enough time to get two shots of him staring right into my camera. The first was underexposed, but this, the second shot, was exactly what I wanted.

And that's why I'm really happy with the image. Some will criticize it as a boring, bullseyed portrait, but that's what I wanted- a picture of a lion staring right at me. There are some imperfections due to the limitations of what I had to work with (low light meant ISO setting that added some grain, no tripod cost some sharpness, etc.), but even so, this is the rare shot where I couldn't be much happier with the shot I took, all things considered.

Princess of the Pasture

Copyright Nathan Montgomery, 2008

This is the fourth shot that I plan to submit for the Vet School photo contest. I took it at about 12,000 feet, on a mountainside above the small city of Keylong in northern India. Two young brothers- neither probably older than 10 or 11- were leading this and several other cows high into the mountains for a day of grazing

Indian cows are simply beautiful animals. Their eyes, in particular, are striking. I can't help but think that we might similarly revere our cattle if they looked like the Indian variety.

A word on cropping here. This shot has only minimal cropping- the original shot was 4x6 format, and I've cropped here to 5x7. Otherwise, it's unchanged. Deciding how to crop was tricky. I cut off the cow's feet in the original photo. Some photographers would be troubled by that decision. Personally, I thought that the striking part of the animal was what I've shown here, and I thought a broader perspective de-emphasized what I hoped to emphasize. I also considered cropping the legs out entirely, but I really like the line marking the midline, projecting down the neck from the blue and yellow yarn towards the sternum. Compromises yet again.

Professional Pachyderm

Copyright Nathan Montgomery, 2008

This is the third of the four images I'm planning to submit for the NC State Vet School photo contest. I took it in Manali, a small city in northern India that the British called a "hill station", to denote it as a starting point for expeditions into the higher peaks of the greater and trans Himalayas.

Artistically, I am really quite happy with this shot. I like the subject, I like the framing (probably as good as one can hope to get on a crowded city street), and I love the young boy peering down at me from high on the elephant's back. Technically, on the other hand, the picture has some issues... most of which speak to the difficulty in capturing a moment on film. Take a closer look, and the young boy as well as the driver are not sharply in focus. Additionally, at larger magnifications, it becomes clear that the elephant was flapping its ear, leaving the top blurred.

How could I have avoided those problems? Well, the people aren't sharp because my aperture was too open. The ear is blurred because the shutter speed wasn't fast enough. My shutter speed was a rather pedestrian 1/50 sec. By cranking my ISO up from 100, even if only to 160 (the upper limit of what my camera can handle without getting grainy), I could've cut out some of the movement.

I guess that these technical issues speak to the importance of anticipating a shot. I didn't know that this shot was going to be there until an instant before I took the picture. On that timeline, you can't set the camera after you see the shot- you have to see the shot before it's there. I didn't, so I'm left with the shot I took, which has its strengths despite its flaws.

Carolina Crab

Copyright Nathan Montgomery, 2008

Here's one more shot from our week on the North Carolina coast.

Readers may recall that last year I submitted a few shots for an animal photo contest at the NC State Vet School. This is one of four shots that I plan to submit this year. Another is a hound photo I posted several months ago, and the other two, I'll post later this week.

Ready to Bloom

Copyright Nathan Montgomery, 2008

This is another flower shot that I took last week in Salvo. I actually took about two dozen shots of these flowers, but most were open blooms. Unfortunately, with the wind, I was stuck with an aperture setting that just wouldn't give me the depth of field I needed to get the long stamen in focus.

At the end of my time in the field, it occurred to me that these younger blooms were the ideal subjects, given the conditions. I do like the subject, but the one real flaw in the image is the background, which is a little too busy. I knew it was going to be a problem, so I grabbed a shingle that I found on the side of the road, and tried to use it to give me a solid background. It was a tricky maneuver, but my camera's 2-second shutter delay gave me just enough time to hit the trigger, get the shingle in place, and then hope that the wind didn't pick up in the interim. Unfortunately, when I got back to my computer, I realized that I'd put the shingle too close to the plant, and rather than getting the dark, blurry background I wanted, I had a picture of a plant that looked like it had a shingle behind it. So... I'm left with a busy natural background instead.

Outer Banks Wild Flowers

Copyright Nathan Montgomery, 2008

North Carolina's Outer Banks are a treasure unknown to most Americans. While some of our neighbors to the south have beaches more familiar to Tom in Topeka, I wouldn't trade our state's coastline for any in the continental U.S. 

We spent the last several days with good friends in one of North Carolina's really wonderful beach towns- Salvo. A lovely place to spend a week anyway, the border islands were made even more beautiful than usual this week by blooming wildflowers along the pristine beaches of Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

With sailing, swimming, biking, running, and so many other things on the agenda, I didn't spend a lot of time taking pictures this week. However, one morning, I did sneak away for about an hour to snap some shots of a field of wildflowers still wet from overnight thunderstorms. Strong winds off the sound made my work a bit challenging. I needed high ISO settings and wide open apertures to get the shutter speeds necessary to handle dancing flowers. The resulting short depths of field left me with a lot of blurry images, but a few shots had some redeeming qualities, including this one.

Hatteras Light

Copyright Nathan Montgomery, 2008

Hatteras Light is the tallest lighthouse in the United States and the tallest brick lighthouse in the world.  As one of North Carolina's most recognizable images, it's also probably been photographed more than any other structure in the state.  With over-photographed subjects, it's always tough to take a picture that isn't just a ho-hum image that every local has already seen a hundred times.

I spotted the location for this shot when we were on the Hatteras Light viewing platform with some friends earlier this week.  When we got back down all 240 steps, I worked my way through some brush (and caught some poison ivy in the process) to the spot, only to find that I didn't have an unencumbered view of the lighthouse.  I considered moving closer to exaggerate the distance between the two dead trees in the image, but then, I lost the perspective on the stump in the front and center of the frame.  Inevitably, like most photography for those of us who don't get hours to scout out locations, this shot became about compromises.  I think I succeeded in finding an unusual perspective on a familiar subject, even if it is a bit flawed photographically.