My 4- week and 8-week on-Line courses began the first Wednesday of June, but it's still not too late to sign up. Or, you can wait until the beginning of July to enjoy the remarkable experience of learning on-line and getting direct feedback on your photography from me.
For example, want to make money in photography? Want to feel more confident in exposure? Learn how to expose correctly when you shoot into the sun like the photo below. Interested in learning more about Photoshop (like putting fireworks in the sky or removing lens flare).
I teach several 8-week and 4-week courses on-line for Betterphoto.com
The way the courses work is this. Every Wednesday, you receive a lesson that consists of text and photos, explaining various principles in either photography or digitral manipulation. At the end of each lesson there is an assignment, and you have plenty of time to take pictures and upload them for my critique. You can use photos you did specifically for the assignment or images that you have taken previously.
On-line photo courses are like virtual classrooms but not in real time. Other students can see your pictures, read my critiques, and comment on your work. Similarly, you can comment on the pictures of other students.
One of the wonderful things about these on-line courses is that students participate from all over the world. In a single lesson's uploads, you may see pictures from Bryce Canyon or Brazil, or from Singapore or South Carolina. It's a very simulating environment as well as a learning experience, and it will help you become the photographer or digital artist that you want to be.
On the Betterphoto.com website, you can read the lesson outline of each course and see sample photos. In addition to going to Betterphoto.com, you can also access the courses I teach drectly by going to my website, jimzuckerman.com, and clicking on the link 'Courses'. at the top of the home page.
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Stopping the action
Freezing a fast moving subject and getting a sharp picture is one of the most difficult things to do in photography. Many factors come into play that have nothing to do with compositional skills or artistic vision. It's really all about photographic technology and hand-eye coordination.
When you are using a telephoto lens to fill the frame with a small or distant subject, the depth of field is extremely shallow. That compounds the problem because every millisecond that goes by, the subject's position changes.
If your fast moving subject is moving across your view -- left to right or vice versa -- maintaining focus is not that difficult. The distance from the subject to the lens changes little and therefore your autofocus mechanism works well. If you are trying to maintain focus on a subject that is coming toward the camera, that's the biggest challenge of all. More sophisticated cameras have a feature called AI servo or autofocus tracking, and this is supposed to hold the moving subject in focus as you shoot. How accurate is this? Well, let me say that I don't trust it. It works up to a point. I can't tell you how many pictures I've lost because even on my very expensive Canon 1Ds Mark II -- which has extremely fast autofocus -- the camera just can't focus consistently on birds, horses, a child on a swing, and lots of other things as they move toward me. As the subject gets closer to the camera position, it appears to move even faster and I've never been able to follow focus during this brief time when milliseconds, or even nanoseconds, define whether or not the subject is sharp.
So, what is the solution? I can only speak for myself, of course. Other pros may have their own techniques. I put the camera on the AI servo mode and use it intermittently. Instead of continually holding down the AI servo function, I will push it for two or three seconds, release it, and push it again so it re-focuses on the closer position. I find that it can often snap into focus faster than it can keep track of the moving object on a millisecond by millisecond basis. This is especially true when I'm using a long telephoto like a 500mm. The African white pelican you see below
was done that way, and even though this is a relatively slow flying bird, it was coming straight toward my 500mm lens. I chose to shoot at f/4, a large aperture with shallow depth of field, so I could get a fast shutter speed with my 200 ISO setting. This meant that I had to be right-on in terms of focus, and by using the AI servo mode intermittently I was able to take several sharp pictures as the bird landed in the beautiful low angled sidelighting.
Do I use a tripod for action photography? Absolutely, unless for some reason it's not feasible. Even thought I may be using fast shutter speeds, a heavy lens can become a serious burden. Your neck and shoulders will get very sore and pretty soon you won't be able to support the camera and lens without introducing too much unwanted movement. For relatively small telephoto lenses, say 300mm and less, any ball head will work on your tripod (tripod heads with levers will drive you crazy and make you hate photography). For longer lenses that are also very fast (like the 500mm f/4 or 400mm f/2.8) you need either a Wimberly head or a King Cobra from Mike Kirk Enterprises. Both of these specialized tripod heads make the heavy lens you're using seem weightless. You have complete mobility to swivel the lens in any direction as fast as if you were hand holding it.
One technique I also use for
focusing when shooting action is to pre-focus on a
certain place and wait for the
subject to move into it. This
takes some practice -- and
several shots -- but it can work. The two shots of the Harris hawks above were done this way. The bird was flying too fast for autofocus to work, so I used this method and was successful. Every time the bird flew within range, though, I only had one brief instant to take a single shot. It's sort of like gambling -- the odds are stacked against you -- but sometimes with good hand-eye coordination it can work. I find that if I try to take two, three, or four shots with the motor drive, I am less successful than if I took a single shot at the right moment.
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Self Critique
I have always loved this picture of a bobcat in a snowstorm in Colorado. It was taken in the wild, and it was particularly difficult because the wind-driven snow made focusing a real challenge. This was shot when I was still using a medium format film Camera and using manual focus (what was I thinking?). The wind and the snow made my eyes tear, hence the difficulty in establishing critical focus. At one point, I mistakenly turned my Mamiya RZ 500mm lens into the wind, and immediately the front lens element was coated in snow that froze right onto the glass. I had to hike two miles back to my car, turn the heater on, and wait until the ice melted. Then I went back out and saw this cat.
The elongation and intense concentration of the bobcat is great. I also like how the cat's shape fits nicely with the tree, but the one that that has always bothered me about this picture is that one piece of wood sticking up and almost touching the cat's small tail. I find it distracting and, to be honeset, visually annoying. Now that we have Photoshop, it can be cloned out. When I took this picture, however, Photoshop was on the drawing board but photographers weren't using it yet.
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AMPHIBIAN AND REPTILE SEMINAR in St. Louis
There is one space left in my August 23 and 24 hands-on workshop in St. Louis, Missouri to photograph some of the most exciting macro subjects ever -- brilliantly colored poison dart frogs (they are not poisonous in captivity because they don't eat a jungle diet) and exotic reptiles. This workshop will teach you how to set up and light these fascinating creatures, and you'll take the best macro shots of your life.
http://www.jimzuckermanworkshops.com/
Check out the link above, and you can also email me directly to reserve this last spot: photos@jimzuckerman.com. First come, first served.
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DIGITAL TIP of the MONTH
I had a computer crash last week, and I learned an important lesson. I had been backing up my system and my photos on an internal hard drive that was linked to the main drive by a mirrored RAID. This means that whatever you do on one drive automatically gets backed up on the other drive.
This works great ... except when one of those drives fails. Hard drives will fail -- it's just a matter of time. It could be five years or it could be tomorrow. The drive that failed was 45 days old. The drive which is still good doesn't show up on the desktop, and that's the problem. The data is still there but it's not accessible. I've had to spend an enormous amount of time trying to get this problem solved (which is why this newsletter is late), and at the moment the engineers at Apple are helping me. I'm sure it will be OK in the end, but the solution, I now realize, is to have an EXTERNAL drive as well with all crucial data backed up. I actually have all my photos backed up on an external drive, but the book I just wrote (due out next year -- the subject is the best Photoshop plug-ins) is only on these internal drives. I can't reformat the drives because the book will be lost. So, it's fine to back up on an internal drive as long as you also back up on an external drive as well.
I will no longer be using the mirror RAID system. Instead, I will be buying a $30 program called Chronosync to backup my data on external drives.
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Upcoming Events
I will be teaching a photo workshop in Venice, Italy during Carnival at the end of January, 2009. You can read about the workshop and see a lot of amazing pictures with this link: http://www.jimzuckermanworkshops.com/carnival-in-venice-2009/
My wife fell in love with photography as a result of seeing the incredible costuming in Venice. It's a dazzling experience. She was never interested in taking pictures until she witnessed Carnival, and now she understands why I stay up to all hours of the night working on my pictures when I get back from a trip. Now she does the same thing. Of course, this is a good and a bad thing for me. We now share a passion for photography, but the amount of money I have to spend on equipment doubled!! She will
be on this trip so if you come, you will enjoy meeting her.
I'm sure the Venice trip will sell out, so if you are seriously interested in photographing one of the most exciting visual and cultural events anywhere, sign up now. There are only four spaces left.
Kenya Photo Tour
My photo tour to Kenya in Sept. has had two last minute 
cancellations. I know this is late notice, but if you
want a photographic adventure of a lifetime
(and Kenya is now safe according to the State
Department), here is your opportunity. We have
only three photographers per vehicle, and that
makes shooting a lot easier.
If you are interested in joining the tour, contact me directly
at photos@jimzuckerman.com and I will send you the information and pricing. This tour is primarily a wildlife adventure, but we also visit Maasai and Samburu villages where you can do some out standing people photography.
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Harris hawk in flight