Photo Safaris By Region AFRICA - Masai Mara Wildlife Reserve, Kenya - Namibia—Land of the Himba - Cape Town—Photo Tour for Women ANTARCTICA - Ultimate Antarctica ASIA - Angkor Wat & Bagan - China's Winter Tigers & Giant Pandas - Japan's Winter Wildlife - India—The Palace on Wheels - Snow Monkeys & Giant Pandas - Essential China—Iconic Landmarks & Landscapes - Great Rivers & Mountains of China & Tibet - Mongolia—The Golden Eagle Festival EUROPE - Britain's Winter Birdlife - Eclectic Holland - Wildlife of Hungary & Transylvania - Transylvania—Romania of Myth & Legend - Venice - Tuscany - Turkey—Continental Crossroads - Provence - Spitsbergen—The Pack Ice Voyage - Ultimate Puffins - Albania, Macedonia & Montenegro NORTH AMERICA - Ultimate Wolves - Ultimate Yellowstone - Horses & Icons of the Wild West in Winter - Nature & Digital Photo Seminars with John Shaw - Monument Valley & Slot Canyons - Great Smoky Mountains - Grand Canyon at Havasu Falls - Predatory Animals of North America - Action & Adventure Sports - Humpback Whales of Alaska's Inside Passage - Glacier National Park Field Workshop - Denali National Park in Autumn - Brown Bears of Katmai National Park in Autumn - South Dakota Wildlife—Bison Roundup & Mount Rushmore - World's Best Raptor Shoot - Nova Scotia—Photo Tour for Women PACIFICA - Papua New Guinea SOUTH & CENTRAL AMERICA - Patagonia' Mountain Landscapes - Baja California—Whales, Wildlife & Wilderness - Easter Island & Machu Picchu - Mexico's Colonial Heartland Photo Safaris By Date JANUARY - Ultimate Antarctica - Ultimate Wolves - Ultimate Yellowstone - Angkor Wat & Bagan - Britain's Winter Birdlife FEBRUARY - China's Winter Tigers & Giant Pandas - Horses & Icons of the Wild West in Winter - Nature & Digital Photo Seminars with John Shaw - Japan's Winter Wildlife MARCH - Baja California—Whales, Wildlife & Wilderness - Monument Valley & Slot Canyons - India—The Palace on Wheels APRIL - Nature & Digital Photo Seminar with John Shaw - Patagonia' Mountain Landscapes - Eclectic Holland - Great Smoky Mountains - Wildlife of Hungary & Transylvania MAY - Grand Canyon at Havasu Falls - Transylvania—Romania of Myth & Legend - Venice - Tuscany - Turkey—Continental Crossroads - Snow Monkeys & Giant Pandas JUNE - Predatory Animals of North America in Spring - Action & Adventure Sports - Essential China—Iconic Landmarks & Landscapes - Provence JULY - Spitsbergen—The Pack Ice Voyage - Ultimate Puffins AUGUST - Humpback Whales of Alaska's Inside Passage - Glacier National Park Field Workshop - Denali National Park in Autumn SEPTEMBER - Masai Mara Wildlife Reserve, Kenya - Brown Bears of Katmai National Park in Autumn - Great Rivers & Mountains of China & Tibet - Albania, Macedonia & Montenegro - Namibia—Land of the Himba - Mongolia—The Golden Eagle Festival - Predatory Animals of North America in Autumn - South Dakota Wildlife—Bison Roundup & Mount Rushmore OCTOBER - Papua New Guinea - World's Best Raptor Shoot - Nova Scotia—Photo Tour for Women - Nature & Digital Photo Seminars with John Shaw - Easter Island & Machu Picchu - Mexico's Colonial Heartland NOVEMBER - Wet & Wild—Andean Condors and Iquazú Falls DECEMBER - No tours scheduled for December 2008 JANUARY 2009 - Cape Town—Photo Tour for Women

		Ultimate Antarctica January 5–February 1, 2008 One of the obvious pleasures of photography is capturing what we see and recording an image on film that we can share with others. That image may be an artistic vision of our world, or a literal snapshot of a scene, event or activity. While photographers often attempt to put an artistic spin on their work, sometimes a great image is simply one where the photographer gets lucky and captures a unique moment in time. Remote devices, camera trippers and high-speed electronic flash units certainly assist us in the latter contingency while broadening our photographic aspirations even farther. With a camera-tripping device it's possible to capture events that we in fact do not see, actions that occur either when we're not present or that occur so quickly that the action is too fast for the human eye. This opens up a whole new world of nature and wildlife photography, one that Mary and I find especially exciting. With a camera tripper and a flash (or several flashes to be more exact) you can catch the flip of a chameleon's tongue, the flight of a bat, the leap of a frog, the passage of a bullet — almost anything seems possible. The trick is knowing how to use these tools to get the images you envision. There are several camera-tripping devices on the market. I've used four over the years, including the discontinued Dalebeam, the WaveSensor marketed by Bogen, the Shutterbeam (successor to the Dalebeam) marketed by Woods Electronics, and the Photo Trapper marketed by Bill Forbes. Folks handy with electronics can rig up their own using a photoelectric eye, a laser pointer or a motion detector. All of these parts are available from a local Radio Shack, but frankly I'm not handy enough to do any of that. For me, it's cheaper and easier to use one of the excellent commercially available units. These units use one or more of the above devices. The WaveSensor uses a laser pointer, the Shutterbeam uses either an infrared beam or a microphone, and the Photo Trapper uses a laser pointer, an infrared beam, a motion detector or a microphone. For units using a laser pointer or infrared beam, subjects must pass into, or pass out of, the path of the beam. This requires that the beam be pointed accurately at an area where you expect your subject to be. Most devices require a reflector or sensor at the opposite end, but the Photo Trapper has one accessory that does not. One of its many beam devices, called the 3 in 1, works by simply aiming an infrared beam out into space for three or four feet. When something intercepts the beam, that object reflects the beam back to a sensor and the camera or flash fires. As simple as it seems, all beams have a shared problem — an object can trip the beam anywhere along its length, including next to the transmitter or the reflector. I'll talk about ways to correct that later in this article. The microphone feature fires the camera or flash when a certain volume of sound trips the unit. This can be fine-tuned until either a barely audible noise or a loud crack fires the camera. As you might expect, this has much less applicability to nature photography than an invisible infrared beam does. All camera trippers require a camera with a built-in film drive that can be operated electronically so that when the trigger fires, the film advances to the next frame. Any motor drive or power winder with an electronic release, as opposed to a mechanical cable release, should work for this. That seems simple enough. You should be ready to go, right? Well, it's not quite as simple as that. When a camera is wired to any camera-tripping device there is one little problem, called propagation delay or lag time. This delay or lag time is the length of time it takes for your camera to actually fire after the device is tripped, and this time can be considerable. What happens is that something trips the device, either by breaking a beam or making a noise, and an electronic impulse is sent to the camera. That's immediate, but what is not immediate is the sequence of events that follows. The camera must close down the lens to the correct aperture, the camera mirror must flip up out of the way, and the shutter must open to expose the film. This takes milliseconds that can end up being as long as 1/10th of a second or as short as 1/60th of a second for most 35mm cameras. Believe me, a lot can take place in a sixtieth of a second, let alone an incredibly long tenth of a second! Leaf-shutter type cameras, like the Hasselblad, have faster propagation delay times since the shutter is in the lens, in contrast to most SLR cameras where the focal plane shutter is in the camera body. Medium format cameras like the Hasselblad also provide a larger film area for a subject to be trapped within, an issue I will discuss a bit later. One SLR does have a fast lag time — the EOS 1N RS, which has an incredibly short 6 millisecond delay. That's achieved because this unique camera has a pellicle or two-way mirror so no time is lost while the mirror flips out of the way. Let's assume for a moment that you're not going to run out and buy a Hasselblad or an RS camera, but you'd like to use one of these devices with the camera you already own. To do so, you'll have to take into account the actual lag time of the camera you own. Most of the suppliers I listed above provide formulas for deriving lag time, generally made by dropping a golf ball or similar object through the sensor and calculating how far it travels before the camera fires. Flash helps here by freezing the subject's position exactly, but be sure you are on first or front curtain synch when you do so! Most cameras have two lag times. One is for a 'cold' or 'unarmed' camera where the camera's LCD is not illuminated; this is the longest lag time. You will have a faster lag time if your camera is 'armed', and the LCD is 'on' or illuminated in your viewfinder display. You might achieve an even faster lag time if you can lock your mirror up, rather than having your camera do so at the moment prior to the actual exposure. Still, the lag time or propagation delay will be long, and probably no better than 1/60th of a second. Once you account for the lag time, you must then predict how far your subject will travel during that period before your camera actually fires. For example, if your camera has a lag time of 1/30th of a second, a bird traveling 15 mph would fly about 8.5 inches during that time! (Note: You can calculate that distance by multiplying 15 mph x 5,280 feet, dividing that by 60 minutes, then by 60 seconds, and then by 30, to get the distance traveled.) Shorter lag times, like the EOS 1N RS's 6 milliseconds, would fire a camera before the bird traveled 3 inches! That's a considerable advantage when composing or framing an image. When I used a camera with a long lag time to photograph chameleons catching insects with their tongues I had to place the infrared beam almost directly in front of the lizard's snout. Then, when its tongue fired out, the lag time of the camera was accounted for. Sometimes the lizard moved a bit closer than expected and the lizard's snout tripped the beam, firing the camera prematurely. Invariably, the chameleon would then fire its tongue and catch the insect long before I had a chance to readjust my camera. Lag time problems were even more significant when I filmed bluebirds flying into one of our nest boxes. Here I had to position a Shutterbeam and reflector so that the bird broke the beam before it flew into my camera's frame. There were two problems here. One, I had to predict how far the bird would fly after it broke the beam and the camera fired. Two, the bird could break the beam anywhere between the reflector and the device, so the bird could be out of the frame, or misframed, even if I predicted the correct distance it would travel. That's one big advantage with a medium format camera like the Hasselblad. One can frame far more loosely, since the image as it appears on film will be the same size on 2¼ film as it appears on 35mm film, if made with the same focal length lens. Of course, the image size relative to the film size will differ. On the 2¼ film a given subject may look small, but it'll be frame filling when cut and remounted in a 35mm slide mount. Unfortunately, I don't own a Hasselblad with an electronic motor, so my action shots are made with a 35mm camera. I wanted to film other subjects in action, like leaping frogs and striking rattlesnakes, but my camera's limitations discouraged me from even trying. Long lag times made it impossible to predict, or accurately frame, a rattlesnake's strike or the sprint of a basilisk lizard. That's why I went with a Canon EOS 1N RS camera since its lag time was so short, about 1/200th of a second. I could more realistically expect to capture my subject shortly after it broke the beam, although nothing was certain. Having the tools does not necessarily guarantee anyone getting the shot, as I would discover as I worked the various subjects. There is one way to capture fast moving subjects without any lag time at all, and that's by wiring a flash directly to any of these units. When something breaks a beam and trips the triggering device, there is no mechanical delay, the flash simply fires. Of course, film isn't exposed unless the camera's shutter is open, which requires the camera being set on Bulb. You could also use a very, very slow shutter speed but this would require that you trip the shutter seconds before the flash fires. If the action doesn't take place while the shutter is open, you'll waste the frame. That's not a big deal but in practical terms this technique just doesn't work very well. As you might suspect, Bulb or very slow shutter speeds require dim lighting conditions — not the type of light in which you would expect to film chameleons eating or bluebirds flying to their nest. Indeed, using Bulb is the perfect solution when you're photographing a subject in the absence of light. I've used the Bulb setting when photographing bats flying from their roost and flying squirrels gliding in to my pecan squirrel feeders here at Hoot Hollow. You still have to be careful when using Bulb. Even at night there is some ambient light and an exposure that runs too long will overexpose the film, or create a ghosting effect as the background color bleeds through the flash image. It goes without saying that if you're using Bulb, you must use flash! I was faced with this very problem a few years ago when attempting to photograph barn owls at a nest box. I had wired my EOS 1N RS camera to a Shutterbeam and for nearly a week the Shutterbeam fired a roll a night, while I worked on another project hundreds of yards away. For whatever reason, the camera malfunctioned and all of my images came out black. I was under a deadline and needed the shots, so I decided to go the old reliable way, Bulb. Now I had to operate my camera, since the flash was now connected to the 'Beam. Sitting inside a Rue photo blind I looked into the night, watching for the dark silhouette of the owl against the night sky. When the bird appeared, I tripped the camera shutter. I waited for the owl to trip the beam and fire the flash, but that didn't happen. Instead, the bird, hearing the click, veered off and circled the area, wary of the strange click that came from near the box. Since I was on Bulb I let the camera stay open, but after a few minutes of waiting I realized that the distant city lights, the night stars, and whatever ambient light existed would, in fact, register on film. I closed the shutter and resumed my wait. Long minutes passed and the owl reappeared. I fired again and the owl veered off. I tried one more time that evening before calling it quits, figuring that this forty minutes of 'conditioning' would not be harmful to the half-grown young inside the nest box. The third night I tried again, and got off one frame. The next night, I shot three frames over a two-hour period while I sat, my eye pressed against the porthole of my blind, watching a night sky for the shadow of an owl. Having a flash wired to the 'Beam is pretty much foolproof, and the barn owl images worked. Unquestionably, doing so was much more tedious and exhausting than it would have been to hard-wire the camera to the 'Beam. But I knew that as long as I had the camera on Bulb, when the owl tripped the 'Beam, I'd get the shot if the bird flew within my camera's frame. And that is a big if. Remember, these units are triggered whenever something breaks the beam, regardless of whether it's close to the unit itself or to the reflector at the other end. Imagine spanning an eight-foot area with a beam and framing the center four feet. The camera does not cover the two feet on either side of the target area. But your subject could pass outside your target area, or part of it could, resulting in a shot that would look cut off. Fortunately, there is a way around this, and that's crossing two beams so that the target must break both beams simultaneously for the flash or the camera to fire. The three units, the WaveSensor, the Shutterbeam, and the Photo Trapper all handle this problem differently. The WaveSensor uses a second laser pointer, an optional accessory available from Bogen. The Shutterbeam requires a second unit that's then wired in series (Woods Electronics will do the wiring). The Photo Trapper probably has the most efficient system of the three, since the unit itself has ports for three separate beams or lasers, providing triple beaming if that'd be required. These three systems have their special advantages and disadvantages. I'm not as familiar with the WaveSensor as the other two units, but the one limitation with this device is the number of thin wires that end up connected to the machine. On the positive side, by using a laser pointer to position the reflector it is fairly easy to position the trip beam accurately. You also have the confidence that it's a Bogen product, and that company stands behind servicing, parts, etc. I've used a Shutterbeam and its predecessor, the Dalebeam, for years. The Shutterbeam is easy to use, and has a tunable infrared beam that makes for a very sensitive trigger if required. Although the 'Beam can be dialed down so that a human hair can break the beam, the problem is to get the reflector to 'see' and bounce back this fine, invisible beam. I've not had an occasion to need this, but I imagine that working with a very narrow beam could be difficult. For larger beams, quite adequate with leaping frogs, striking rattlesnakes or flying bats, I've had no problem. One unique feature of the Shutterbeam is an audible alignment tone that can be activated to assist you in aiming the beam. The tone beeps rapidly when the beam is misaligned, and decreases to a series of slow beeps when the beam is aimed correctly. That's an extremely handy feature when spanning the kind of gaps I was dealing with when photographing the barn owls. The Photo Trapper's most exciting feature is the variety of triggering devices it employs. I've used the laser pointer or two pointers in cross beaming, for capturing mud dauber wasps returning to their nests with mud or with captured, paralyzed spiders. I really liked the 3 in 1 sensor that can be used with a reflector at great distances, or can be used without a reflector for spanning spaces less than four feet. This is especially handy in situations where placing a reflector opposite a transmitter would be difficult or impossible. I've used the 3 in 1 on flying squirrels, aiming the beam straight up along the squirrel's flight path to the feeder. The Photo Trapper is the heaviest of the units, using either AC (the other two can be powered by AC also) or a 12-volt motorcycle battery. These batteries are heavy, but they are long lasting and rechargeable. Remember, too, that the Photo Trapper only requires one console, and two or three laser pointers or infrared beams or a combination of the two can be attached. The Trapper is also the only unit that allows unmanned Bulb photography. While I haven't had a chance to use either this or the timer program that allows for completely unmanned shooting, I am looking forward to using the Bulb feature at a later date. Regardless of the unit you use, your most effective images may require using flash to capture the action. In one of our next columns we'll tackle high-speed flash, both for low light and nocturnal subjects and for diurnal subjects as well. For more information on any of the devices mentioned, visit their websites at www.bogenphoto.com, www.woodselec.com and www.phototrap.com. Any questions? We'll answer these in a future column. We're looking forward to hearing from you!

	Joseph Van Os Photo Safaris, Inc. P.O. Box 655, Vashon Island, Washington USA 98070 Phone: (206) 463-5383   Fax: (206) 463-5484    Email: info@photosafaris.com Copyright © 2008, Joseph Van Os Photo Safaris, Inc.