Wedge-tailed Eagle

Wedge-tailed Eagle (captive animal)

Wedge-tailed Eagle - Aquila audax, is the largest raptor in Australia. What a majestic animal!

Yesterday, we went to Lone Pine Sanctuary in Brisbane. This photographic wildlife eldorado could not be more different to where I normally capture animals, namely in the wild.

In such a beautiful wildlife park, every unique photo opportunity comes like chips at McDonalds. You can order or help yourself to more at any time, repeat encounters with normally shy and rare animals. You can even plan the lighting and background with a bit of patience. You are seduced by cuteness and uniqueness in a multipack.



To me, it feels a bit like cheating wildlife photography. Seeing flocks of tourists taking phone selfies with birds, marsupials and other animals feels weird. Seeing people poke, chase and otherwise harass the 'faunal objects' even frustrates a bit.

Does the existence of places like this depreciate the value of wildlife photos in nature? Surely, it clarifies the context on which my wildlife photos are judged by the public. Seeing the many baby Koalas at close and eye-level distance with natural looking background and perfect light convinces me that photos taken in the wild should not even try to compete.

Koala baby (captive animal)

It somehow becomes archaic and irrelevant when hard work and luck competes with paying an entrance fee or a ticket. In many parks, you can and even should attempt to make staged and arranged photos look like wild ones. Vice versa, it is highly uneconomical and often impossible to make natural wildlife photos look like perfect studio shots.

Let's not pour more fuel into many examples of cheating and even fraud in wildlife photography. Just bear in mind: if some photos seem too beautiful to be true, unfortunately, we might (wrongly but often rightly) assume that this is what they are. In the end, what works and what evokes emotions has justification. But we should not fall for populism in photography even if that is exactly what all of us wildlife photographers are guilty of when we try to please anyone.



Does such a wildlife park replace the appreciation of real natural habitats in general or complement it? Does the modern alienation of nature combined with a narcissistic culture pose a threat or quite the contrary? Will we soon only have wildlife 'ghettos' in a rapidly developing cosmopolitan city and society? Will the public have a distorted understanding and little care of natural habitats and ecosystems?

Lone Pine is mainly a rehabilitation centre for injured animals and has also an educational function with respect to native fauna and heritage. They are doing a great job. It is so good, that I would recommend to spend a day there, preferably not around school holidays or on weekends. Maybe even take a picnic and commute there with a direct bus from the CBD to take advantage of lounge chairs at the bus stop. How innovative!

One of the Wedge-tailed Eagles, came to the park as a shooting victim. It is a bit ironic that real bullets have now been replaced with photos for the shoots. The eagle in the daily scheduled raptor show certainly don't seem to mind that much. This guy got a mouse for lunch as you might see in a few photos presented on my webpage.

Wedge-tailed Eagle (captive animal)

Photographically, my choice of a long zoom lens was an unnecessary choice out habit. It was a compromise that saved me changing lenses all the time. Quite contrary to a photo shoot in the wild, a professional would prefer a shorter, good quality prime lens under such controlled conditions.

A wildlife photographer in the bush would rather worry about how to collect stardust on mars than about too much or the wrong reflection in a wild eagle's eyes. It amuses me somehow that the result I got doesn't satisfy me from a technical point of view. And yet, it is another good example to show that context matters in photography. This was almost a studio shot and needs to be regarded and judged as such.

Do I really want to see a reflection of myself and my background in the pupils of an eagle picture? My answer is clearly 'no'. How could I plan that better next time? Many photographers would simply argue that photography skills start with Photoshop and don't end there. I disagree. Frankly, I am still short of an alternative option. A reflection board (let alone a flashlight) might distract or freak out the animal and would certainly need permission and thorough consideration to be used.



This picture is still artistically pleasing to me because the busy background is eliminated with a soft, creamy contrast to the dark animal. The portrait makes me wonder what the eagle is reflecting on and where it is focussing its thoughts. Is it happy or is its life too artificial and too close to human cameras?

Enjoy!

Coffee sipping bug

Do you drink serveral cups of coffee per day? You might suffer from the 'Coffee sipping bug'.

Please have a look at what might be the first animated document witnessing this bug at work. Admittedly, you will not find any cure for your coffee addiction. You'll be witnessing a bug, obviously enjoying to suck out some coffee sap right from the plant. This is the stuff that you might expect in a David Attenborough documentary or a National Geographic story. They would have professional equipment and obviously quite a bit more experience and talent to make this really tantalisingly irresistible - just like a cup of coffee in the morning.

My friends would say that this movie - similar to my other wildlife activities - is not sexy enough for a wider public. Surely, they are right. But...isn't that a gorgeous bug? Look at it! This guy was so passionate about getting to the good stuff, the coffee sap I assume. I love seeing passion and natural behaviour. I love witnessing and documenting true and unmanipulated life that hardly anyone else knows and has ever seen before. How could I hold this back and keep this footage for myself? Surely, with a few billion people on this Earth someone else will share my fascination and fully enjoy this video.

I doubt that many people could identify this species easily. At least to me this animal is unknown, its segmented body with 6 legs hints at it being an insect or arthropod of some sort. So, I call it a bug but am happy to learn its true identity. The animal is not more than 2 mm long, the size of a pinhead. The body seems to be covered with a shield, probably made from collected material. Some long hairlike thread is constantly probing the environment while the animal is visibly busy sticking something that looks like an antler into the coffee leaf, probing it really well and leaving a visible trace. I love passion and dedication and that's what I can see in this video.

The bug totally ignored the fact that I had pinched off the leaf from the bush and kept flashing my camera at it. The footage was taken in our garden. Some fancy music would probably suit it better than the surrounding noise, some birds and traffic. It was a bit windy too. Some parts of the bug's shield or body are obviously blown around a bit at some stage.




I tried to take pictures with my 100mm macro lens with a 68mm extension tube on a cropped sensor camera. That didn't give me enough details in magnification and I got better quality with my microscope modus on my underwater camera.

Let's be realistic: we can't keep up with large animals, we struggle with small ones, on land but even more under water. Nudibranch documentation has taught me that introducing small animals to the world is a challenge, even when they are the most beautiful and story telling animals. When they are smaller than 2mm, it is almost hopeless to have the right equipment ready in the right situation that allow to document properly and to get an audience that is able to connect with it.

My addiction is not coffee, but macro photography and wildlife documentation. Let me know if you share my enthusiasm and let me know if you like this footage (if not the bug). By sharing this story and video with your friends you might contribute to get the word out there, namely that: 'coffee sipping' is addictive, even among some bugs.

Purple sunset

• Photo Discussion Friday

Purple sunset

PDF Week 17/2016: Canon 7D, 50mm (on 18-200mm lens), 0.3 sec, f5.6, ISO 100.

He was an artistic sunrise that could not be reduced to purple rain. This morning the news that Prince has died is all over the media. When there is such a thing as commercialised music to be refreshing, Prince's music warranted a shower of innovative ideas combined with what we were used to. Some of his music was like a nudibranch for ears, tormenting at times when radio stations didn't know the limits of hammering the colour purple into our brains, smearing the beautiful make-up in that much rain. If not for the reigning of commercial pop culture, I'd be tempted to kiss Prince's musical legacy goodbye. And I know that many of my friends are among the mourners.

The colour purple stands for more than music and motion pictures. It doesn't do justice to reduce today's theme and the legacy of Prince to purple. Nevertheless, I decided to present my picture 'Purple sunset' for Photo Discussion Friday, today. Sadness comes from this photo for me personally. These days, many photographers have started to introduce their photos trying to dispel a curse - disclosing their involvement in the Adobe pact and its use for artistic purposes. It feels ridiculous to even mention it because it serves no purpose other than to ask for recognition of a photo, not even the photographer (who normally is an expert in Photoshop and photo manipulation).

Here I declare what should be obvious and irrelevant (but is not any longer): this photo came out of the camera exactly like this, is totally unedited, totally unmanipulated, no colour correction, no filters, just changed from raw format into jpg and copyright watermark added. The purple is true, the sunset colours real, the focus deliberate - as true as it gets on your computer screen.

'Nature as Art' was the theme for a competition. Let me spare you my interpretation and thoughts why this photo fits that bill for me. It was rejected, not even considered to be looked at properly. It did worse than about 99% of all the competition entries. It must be bad - so bad that it fits my bill of being discussed here. And yet, I love the photo with all its imperfections or maybe because of them. I love that the photo is honest, I love the interaction within a colour scheme, the communication of forms and lines. I love the dreamy blurriness. That is why I deemed it fit to be judged by people who I attest a fine photographic background.

The biggest gift of photography as art, to me, is not the true depiction of reality but to transpire a sense of feelings and to create a mood by which the photographer manages to connect to other people. Some forms of photography are like music. You need to listen to them and feel them. Adobe culture seems to have lost that connection. We only listen to patterns, tunes and rhythms we know and recognise. Like at music concerts, it is often the unbearable loudness and the hysterically cheering and stampeding crowd that quality is measured with. We often block tunes if there is too much of controversy in it. Prince was a star to balance that act and often managed to have the crowd follow his experimental leads.

With respect to photos, more and more, I disconnect with perfect focus, contours and colours. I am bored with the rules of the game, with the same repetitions and phrases that I personally use. To me, it feels like we are in a Neo-Realism in terms of photography. For the Adobe cult, it is not even about careful preservation of a perceived reality any longer. It is moreso about creating the perfectly artificial photo of what us as artists think the rest of the world thinks reality looks like or should look like. Maybe inspired by the Canadian Prime Minister, we could call it a Quantum-Realism, where we don't really know anything about reality but everything about the statistical probability of it and how we can make it work for us.

The many ear worms we hear daily on the radio are not supposed to block our antennas (rhinophores) for the voices around us that are true and real. They might, however, make the pendulum of art swing into some areas and forms that are hard to digest. But I am sure that we will see some deconstruction and reconstruction, some failed and some successful experiments in the future. Prince was a king to make this a rather smooth and pleasant experience. May he rest in peace and away from all the noise.

Patrik, Brisbane, 22/4/2016