People, Wildlife & Nature Gallery

Photographing people indoors is pretty difficult without using high-speed, grainy film or spotlights. People that aren't asleep area always moving, talking, turning a page in a book... noone is perfectly still unless they're asleep and sometimes not even then. But photographing the motions people make can tell a story too. In the image above, I've contrasted the personalities of two generations of my family; in the foreground are my grandparents' generation, sitting at their ease in conversation, while a cousin of mine in the background rushes around madly setting the table and bringing out dishes for dinner. I exposed this image over more than a full minute, getting lots of detail in the room surrounding the people, and getting a lot of movement from the person in the background. The photograph below shows my parent's generation of the family. I liked the timelessness of the beach, water and sky around my family in this image. I like using natural light like this, even lamplight, because it gives almost historical feel to the photograph, and black-and-white film always gives a period feel to film that color doesn't have. Wildlife makes great subjects too. Plants and animals are great subjects, and I take photos of them for their own sake as well as photo reference that I can use later for illustrations and graphic design work. Animals are more difficult, unless they're sleeping, because of their movement. Wildlife in zoos requires panning of the camera to follow their movement, or a larger aperture to get a shorter exposure time. Cats are curious of just about anything. Put something in front of them, and they have to at least sniff it to get familiar with it. My camera is the same thing for them, although I helped them out a little bit by rubbing a small amount of kitty food on the rim of the wide-angle lens I used. I wanted to show that sense of absolute concentration and curiosity my cats have when they're learning about something new. I used a wide-angle camera lens and a small aperture so that I could really close to her face and still stay in focus, with the lens' curvature making her almost cross-eyed in her determination to figure out what this new thing is I'm showing to her. Trees, bushes, plants and flowers have such interesting colors and patterns. In this photograph below, I took an exposure of a tiger lily at sunset, making the photograph saturated with a warm yellow glow. Using the same wide-angle lens, I took an extreme close-up so that the flower itself was in focus but the whole background of trees and other bushes was blurred.