Nature Photography

© Nigel Blake

Nigel Blake’s dad was a very keen aeromodeller, and as a good father, he encouraged his son to follow him. This approach is not considered wrong in principle, it’s just that sometimes the results we get are different from what was expected at the beginning. Like in the Nigel’s case - he started to create models as a boy, but after some time he made a very clever move: he purchased a Zenit camera to take reference photos of those self-made aircrafts. But once the air show season finished, the birds in the garden attracted his attention.

This attraction has not faded over time - Nigel Blake has been photographing wildlife for more than 25 years since then. You can visit his personal bird photography website, where you will find quite a few really nice photos. Well, even more than quite a few - “quite a lot” is a much more accurate description of his bird photo collection. Phoetica wish you a pleasant surfing through the Nigel’s website.

…continue ->

© 2003, M. Plonsky

I know quite a few people, who always wonder if there are other dimensions beyond this physical world and whether we can see what’s there. I would say they do exist, that’s for sure, and one of the methods how to approach them is easy in principle: you just have to magnify things. You magnify and magnify, and suddenly it’s like you are in another world. Many photographers taken up this challenge, and they also invented a name for this discipline - Macro Photography. I am a big fan on “Macro” myself, since it’s really able to produce very stunning and spectacular images - when done right. Professor M. Plonsky does, as you can see in his personal website with beautiful macros of bugs, flies, dragons and other insects. And what’s even better, you will find an instructions how you could do something like that yourself.

…continue ->

adventuregallery.net

“Knowing how to shoot a photo is just the beginning,” says Bill Hatcher, renowned rock climber and mountain photographer. If you belong to the large crowd of nature photographers, this is something you may have discovered yourself. You know that a bottomless love for natural world is another necessary prerequisite for producing memorable wildlife photos. Fine art adventure, wildlife, and nature photo website Adventure Gallery gives us another hint: you can’t do much without the Spirit of Adventure. But there is still more to it.

You will need to have an enthusiasm for life in the natural world to make all this potential to work. A lot of it. To reach the most marvelous places, some special skills like rock climbing, sailing, diving the ocean, tracking wild animals or walking around erupting volcano are required to be mastered as well. But no matter which method you pick up, you are bound to meet Beauty on your way. Thanks photography, you can share it with all of us, together with your life enthusiasm that brought you there. In the meanwhile, let’s fuel up with it at the Adventure Gallery website.

Phoetica thanks its folks for providing great inspirations by collecting all those beautiful nature photos, and for their support of nature conservation organizations.

I browsed through the Phoetica’s webserver statistics yesterday to find out which search terms my visitors typed to Google, and as a result came to this site. Funny job! And I saw that three times the search terms was “duck photograph forum”. Unfortunately, those visitors didn’t found what they had been looking for, since there was no such forum at my site back then. But this is going to change, because I thereby declare this entry to be the official Phoetica Duck Photo Forum. Actually, this is not the very first forum of this kind, since I have found one at a DPChallenge photo site, which even has a poetic name: Show us your Duck ;) But during my duck-research I stumbled across a good number of very good photos, and I would like to share the best links here.

…continue ->

© Fedor G. Pikus

Let NL be a set of all Nature Lovers. Let P be a set of all Photographers. And the third set, let’s call it S, will contain all people willing to Share their photography passion on the web for free. Physicist and software engineer Fedor G. Pikus belongs to the intersection of all those three sets, and his photo website wild-light.com serves as an exact proof of this theorem. You will find a lot of nice wildlife photos there, without too much distracting text. So let’s enjoy our daily portion of nature, and the good start are Fedor’s all-time favorite images. Those happens to be Phoetica’s favorite images as well. Thanks for sharing them will all photography lovers.

“Wildlife photographers have two things in common; the love of nature and the desire to improve our images.” This is how Jess Lee starts his article Beyond the Wildlife Portrait, just published in the Nature Photographers Online Magazine. Jess should know - his nature photos have appeared in the publications like National Geographic over past 30 years. He explains how to advance from the simple “static” wildlife portraits into more awe-inspiring photographs by incorporating behavior and the environment of the animals into the images.

This way, you can get closer to the reality of the nature, and sometimes even too close. The result may be really thrilling then. Like the Norbert Reif’s photo “Att. CRUEL: Gull gets duck-chick” mentioned in the article. All I can do here is to agree with one of the comments: “I’ve not seen a more dramatic avian image”.

“Moving beyond the simple ‘wildlife portrait’ is something that not all nature photographers may be interested in doing. But for those who embark on the search for this Holy Grail of wildlife photography, there cannot be a more challenging or potentially rewarding photographic endeavor.” - Jess Lee - (You can view more of Jess Lee work at jessleephotos.com).