Step 1 – Have the Right Lens

Shooting from your car, in most cases, means that you’ll be pretty far from the wildlife. So if you can’t get close, make sure you have a lens that can bring you closer to the action. I use my trusty Nikkor 80-400mm VR. I would suggest at least a 300mm lens or else you might be disappointed with your range. And now with both full frame and cropped frame bodies, I would strongly recommend using a cropped frame camera to give you that extra reach. My 80-400mm gives me 600mm of reach on my D300s body.

Step 2 – Stabilize Your Lens

Bring a soft surface to put on your rolled down window. I have a small DIY sand bag about the size of my hand that I place door window’s edge” this does 2 things, it prevents the lens from scratches  and also gives you stability. You can simply use a Ziplock bag filled with dirt or even an old shirt or towel. If you want to go all out and can afford it, have a look at the Groofwin Pod.

Step 3 -  Bring Some Human Food

Bring a lunch or some snacks. This may seem basic enough but it has happened to me before being at Omega Park and my stomach just wouldn’t stop growling out of shear hunger frustration. This can get annoying and makes for a less enjoyable photography experience. Not to mention scare the animals away!

Step 4 – Bring some Animal Food

Bring some food for the animals. Verify first with the park to see if you’re allowed to feed the animals. Some smaller private parks or animal watching areas will allow it but most government run parks won’t.

Step 5 – Check the weather

Sounds basic enough but we can’t always wait for that perfect weather day. It might get cold or even worse, start raining so bring some warm and dry clothes. It can get chilly in the Spring or Fall with your window down so check the Park’s weather and dress accordingly. Shooting through your car window is not a pleasant experience but it might be your only option if the weather gets to nasty. If so don’t forget the Windex!

Step 6 – Rent a Hybrid Vehicle

If you’re away from home on vacation and you’re renting a vehicle, try getting your hands on a hybrid like the Toyota Prius. Why, you might ask? Because when you’re driving slowly, the car runs on the battery without any sound or vibrations to scare the animals away.

Step 7 – Find the perfect Spots to Shoot

In most parks, animal activity is generally in specific locations. Check out geo-tagged images on Flickr or other photo sites and note them down on your smart phone or the ancient pen and paper option. You can also ask park staff and they might know where some of the rarer animals have recently been spotted.

Step 8 – The Stakeout

I can guaranty you that your best shots won’t be just by slowly driving by, stopping a few minutes to shoot that dear or heron then moving on. Trust me on that! If you want to capture wildlife behavior like birds fishing, you’ll need to be part of the environment. Be one with nature Grasshopper. The trick is to stop the car, turn off the motor, set up your gear and wait patiently. Try not to move too much inside the car either. Let the car become part of the environment like a rock. This is when the magic will happen. I remember staying over an hour in one spot.

Step 9 – Zoom In

Zoom in as much as you can. Try to fill the frame with your subject to eliminate background distractions. Zooming in and setting your aperture to a low number (f2.8 or f4) will create a nice soft bokeh thus keeping your subject in focus with a blurred background.

Step 10 – Composition

One of the reasons why we go to a park is to capture animals in their natural habitat. In many parks you’ll be faced with the challenge of  dealing with non-natural things like picnic tables, other cars, roads, fences, etc… So once you’ve found your spot, take the time to scout around it and find the perfect angle to get a natural background for your shots. You might not always be able to but it still makes for a good exercise that will because instinct after a while.

So there you have it! How to take wildlife photos from your car in 10 easy steps. I invite you to share your tips and photos links in the comments below.

If you enjoyed this “Steps” article, you can check out all the other “Steps” articles right here!

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The Lighting Setup

I wanted something up to  date for lighting so I kept it fairly simple. I set up two 1 x 4 feet strip lights with grids on either side roughly 30 degrees behind me. The strip lights were roughly 2 feet away from me. I decided to use strip lights instead of just a direct flash because I wanted a bit more diffusion… less harshness.

I stood about 10 feet from the light grey background to get a darker grey by avoiding light spill from the strip lights. I then proceeded to adjust my lights to my camera settings. I wanted a deep DOF so my settings were: f13, 1/200 sec, ISO 200. With that done, I found that firing my flashes at 40% power work perfectly. All I needed now was a fill light to eliminate the strong front shadows in the face and on the clothes.

So I set up a 2×2 softbox on a boom about a foot above my head on camera left to get some nice deep shadows under the chin and in the eyes (for a bit of edge and mystery! hahaha). In some of the final shots, I didn’t want shadows under the eyes so I lowered the fill light a bit. Since it’s a fill light I knew the power had to be less than the strip lights. 10% power about 2 feet away was perfect ! Here’s the lighting diagram.

The Planning

Once the lighting was to my liking, I needed to plan how I would pose. So I took some notes while looking at every piece of clothing I was going to shoot. Of course this just gave me a general idea of some poses to guide me and the rest would be improvised as I felt it. But this planning exercise was very important and should not be overlooked as it helps define your shoot. I then put a marker on the floor to set my focus point and to know where to stand after checking each shot. I would suggest shooting tethered with the laptop or monitor facing you so you don’t have to run behind the camera after each shot.

Shoot wide and crop later. With the size of sensors today, we can easily afford to crop into our photos so shoot as wide as you can. Remember that it’s better to crop than to have that perfect shot with a body part out of the frame. Doh!

The hardest part of the whole shoot was to get into character. Models don’t have it easy, I can tell ya! Respect! Remember that I took 163 shots and only liked 22 so that means that only 13% of the photos were good. My trick to get into character was to put some awesome music and let loose for a few minutes before shooting. Dancing really wound me down.

Here are some of my favorite shots. I kept the same lighting setup of all the shots.

Before you ask me how I post processed the final images, let me tell you! In Lightroom, I only did basic curves adjustments and reduced the red (-20) and orange (-30) saturation. Then in Photoshop, I used Topaz Adjust with the default portrait_drama setting to give it that extra pop. Topaz Labs are awesome! The best plugins I ever bought for Photoshop.

So go ahead and go take a few self portraits for yourself. You’ll have fun and you’ll learn about posing. You’ll be able to appreciate your models a lot more after that I guaranty it!  Share your self portrait links in the comments! We’d love to see them!

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You’ll see that it’s not at all complicated to create this HDR look in Lightroom. All you need to do is play with a few sliders. It’s all done Basic Panel. This is my workflow but you can do it in any order you want. I start off by bringing some of the shadow details out by using the Fill Light slider. Don’t be afraid to crank this one up.

Then I slightly increase the blacks or more contrast.

After that, if off to the Contrast slider and lowering it slightly.

Time now to boost the Exposure so that the image is properly exposed.

After properly exposing the photo, you might get some blown out highlights so the next step is to use the Recovery slider.

Now that we got most of the basic settings done, it’s just a question of tweaking Clarity, Vibrance and Saturation to your liking. And voilà! you’ve just created your pseudo HDR image directly in Lightroom.

To make things easier for you, I’ve created 2 HDR Lightroom presets to download. CLICK HERE to get them.

HDR1 is for high contrast scenes like a bright sky and a dark foreground. HDR2 is more grunge-like similar to what Topaz Adjust does. Both versions have a vignette option as well. Here are some before and after shots using these presets.

HDR1

HDR1 Vignette

HDR2

HDR2 Vignette

Here’s how you import Lightroom 2 presets. Unzip and place presets in a folder on your computer. In Lightroom, right click on any of your current presets and select Import… Find your folder with the presets and select them then click OK. Done!

You liked this post? Then check out these ones as well!

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• Creating HDR Images Directly in Lightroom – Video Tutorial

1- Adding Texture to a Reflection in Photoshop

2- How to Create HDR Images in Photoshop

3- Split Toning in Lightroom

4- Creating HDR Images in Lightroom

5- Lighting Tutorial on the Brooklyn Bridge

Click on the photo to view the tutorial.

Wishing you a 2010 filled with wonderful images!

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• The CLASSROOM

Since this was a step by step guide describing various cosmetology techniques, I had some free time in between shots to experiment and click away. Why do a separate session just for those shots when I could save time and shoot them in between the step by step shots? What was challenging was to work around the working hairstylist without interfering too much. I couldn’t direct the models. I just had to get what I could and anticipate what they might do.

For most of these drama shots, I basically just kept one strobe on  with a 2×3 softbox that I would move around. You’ll also notice that almost all of those shots were done in back lighting to get even more shadows. I would position the strobe between 90 and 45 degrees in front of the camera.

Here are a couple of shots that I did using this one light approach.

As an early Christmas present, here’s a time lapse video  done with my iPhone 3G using the iTimeLapse app. Fun stuff!

You liked this post? Then check out these ones as well!

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