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Award winning photographer, Satish Menon, selling fine-art prints and sharing photography insights with other photography enthusiasts.

Monthly Archives: July 2014

On Renting Super Telephoto Lenses

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I get this question often and thought I should write a brief post about it.

There are some lenses that are extremely expensive for most photography enthusiasts to afford and hence they are very interested in renting these. Especially for a big safari trip to Africa. For example, the 500mm and 600mm prime lenses used for wildlife and sports photography. The main misunderstanding among those considering a super telephoto lens rental is the feeling that the only gap between them and great wildlife/sports photographs, is the lens. This is plain wrong.

Simply having a great lens is not sufficient for you to make great images with it. What you really need is lots of practice with that lens for a prolonged time, until you are familiar with using it proficiently. Exposure and focusing problems aside, one of the hardest skills to master in wildlife or sports photography is the ability to track a fast moving bird or object. In the beginning stages, even with my 70-200mm f2.8 lens coupled with a 2x teleconverter, it was a real achievement for me, if I could spot a flying bird with my eyes and then immediately point my lens towards that bird and barely be able to see that bird through the viewfinder. Even getting this far was difficult, let alone getting the bird in focus and furthermore, ensuring that the eyes of the bird were sharply focused with a glint in it. Look, handling super telephoto lenses in the field successfully, requires loads of years of practice and renting them for a first and last Kenya trip does not make sense. You will spend more time fumbling with your equipment than enjoying your visit.

So what to do – Buy yourself some inexpensive wildlife lenses and practice with it locally for months and months before you go. For example, the 70-200mm f2.8 lens with a 2x teleconverter is what I use. You can go for something similar. I recently heard that 3rd party lens manufacturers have a very affordable 100-300 mm f4 lens that can be coupled with a 1.4x teleconverter to give you a 140-400mm range. If you do this with a crop-factor sensor, you effectively have a 600mm reach. Now, if you can really afford to buy a 600mm lens for the $10,000 price tag, go for it. But, please don’t buy it one week before your once-in-a-lifetime Tanzania trip. Buy it a year before and practice in your local park, until you get good at it, before you go.

So when to rent – Despite what I have said so far, there are situations in which renting makes sense. Here are some examples –

You already have a 600mm lens and for some reason, it broke just one week before your big Safari trip. Go ahead and rent the same one.
You don’t want to risk carrying your big lens on an airline with all the restrictive carry-on luggage limits. Leave your lens at home and rent one at the Safari location, if available.
You usually use a 17-55mm f3.5-5.6 lens and based on the dark situations involved in your next night photography trip, you feel the need for a faster lens. Go ahead and rent the 17-35mm f2.8 lens.
You already have a 600mm lens, but your manufacturer has introduced a newer version with additional features. You want to test whether the new features are worth it for you. Go ahead and rent the newer version lens and try it out for a couple of weeks, before you decide to upgrade yourself.

You get the idea. Don’t rent a lens in a focal length range that you have never photographed just for that once-in-a-lifetime trip. It simply won’t work.

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American Avocet in flight, Don Edwards Wildlife Refuge, Alviso, CA, USA. I made this image a few months back. And, I have been practicing photography for nine years. It took me that long to succeed in a well timed shot like this. I could not have done it with a rented super telephoto lens.

Turkey Vulture, Alviso, CA, USA. One of the most difficult things in wildlife photography with telephoto lenses, is to be able to frame a fast moving bird or animal well. Years of practice is required.

It takes three visits …

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When a new place is to be photographed, doing a great job on the first and only visit to the place is indeed rare. I know this from first hand experience. Whenever I visit a new place, I rarely succeed making a great image on the first day. Usually, the first day is spent in just acclimatizing myself to the new location and developing a broad idea of the possibilities of the place. On the second and third days that I am in the new location, I start to make images. When I visited Yellowstone for the first time, I made good images on the second and third days, not the first day that I got there. When I photograph locally around my house, a bulk of my landscape photographs are made over the weekend and typically one day of the weekend (such as a Saturday or a Sunday). Therefore, my best local landscapes are made when I revisit the same location three consecutive weekends.

Earlier this month, I photographed the Big Basin Redwoods State Park, which is located about 90 minutes from my home in San Jose, CA. On my first visit to this place, I hiked with a friend and my son for several hours and had no images taken. On our return, just by luck, I found a tree and the surrounding forest interesting and made a vertical panoramic stitch. I would have been perfectly happy not making a single image in that visit, but I took advantage of the opportunity and made this image.

Big Basin Redwoods State Park, Boulder Creek, CA, USA. Image made on first visit to location. Usually, I am happy making no images on the first visit.

This image was made by shooting several vertically overlapping images that were stitched together in Photoshop. Not a bad image for my first trip, but most people expect a lot of images from just one trip.

Now, on the way back from this first trip, I observed that the morning fog had settled on part of the road and furthermore, since the sun had risen quite a bit by our return, we also witnessed godbeams in several parts of the road. However, due to earlier commitments, we could not stop to photograph. I made a mental note of the location on the road and the time we saw that light, promising to come again soon.

The next day, I made my second visit to the same location, timing myself based on the previous days’ observation. Lo and behold, the same light appeared on several sections of the road and I was able to make several images with greater ease and higher success. Here are a few of them.

Early morning fog along road, Big Basin Redwoods State Park, Boulder Creek, CA, USA. Image made on my second visit to this location.

Trees and Morning Fog, Big Basin Redwoods State Park, Boulder Creek, CA, USA. Image made on second visit to this location.

Crepuscular rays, Big Basin Redwoods State Park, Boulder Creek, CA, USA. Image made on my second visit to this location.

These are just some of the images made during my second visit. It was much more successful than my first trip.

Interesting thing is that I noticed a great vista point in the location that had bad light when I was returning from both my first and second visits. To photograph from that vista point, I decided to make a third trip.

The following are couple of images I shot from the vista point, on my third visit.

Foggy morning, Big Basin Redwoods State Park, Boulder Creek, CA, USA. Image made on my third visit to this location.

Foggy morning, Big Basin Redwoods State Park, Boulder Creek, CA, USA. My last keeper image from my third visit. My most favorite image from the three visits.

My last keeper image in this series also happens to be my favorite image from the series. To reach this image, I had to make three visits.

In general, if you are looking to photograph a new landscape location, give it at least three visits.

Several things happen as you advance from the first to the third visit:

You get very familiar with the roads and the access to key locations
You get very familiar with the photogenic possibilities of the location
You get very familiar with how and when the light is going to start and advance
You get time in between the visits to pre-visualize a composition

In summary, allow time for the new location to grow on you. Give it at least three visits.

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Changing A Portrait Background Using Photoshop CC

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I made this image of a Demoiselle Crane and wasn’t happy with the way the background turned out. Overall, I got the eyes to be sharp and the background to be blurred out, but I would have preferred not to have the gray at the very top. I decided to rectify the background in Photoshop CC and here is how I did it. By no means do I mean that this is the only way to alter a background in Photoshop. This is just the way I chose to do it.

Demoiselle Crane (as shot). I was not satisfied with the gray in the top background. The following is the process I used to make the background uniform.

I began by taking a slice of the preferred green from the left side of the image and creating an identical sized frame full of that green. There are many ways one could have created this background image, but here is how I did it. I cropped a small portion of the left of the bird and in Photoshop CC, scaled that image to the same size as the main bird image.

Background for the image, created by cropping a small portion of the background from the “as shot” image. Then, rescaling to match the dimensions of the main image.

Now, I have two files in Lightroom (LR), the first one being the as-shot image of the bird and the second one being this background. Choose both of them in the Library module of LR and right click to open them as layers in Photoshop.

Opening the main image and the background image as layers in Photoshop CC

Opening the main image and the background image from Lightroom as layers into Photoshop CC

The two layers can be seen in the layers panel of Photoshop CC.

Layers in Photoshop CC

Using the layer mask icon of Photoshop CC, open a layer mask for the top layer, which is the layer for the bird image.

Adding a layer mask

The layer panel will look like this. The white is the layer mask.

Layer Mask seen in the layer panel

Then, Select > Color Range, to make a selection in the layer mask.

Using “Color Range” to make a selection

This results in the following automatic selection.

Initial selection using “Color Range”

In this selection, white is see through, while black is blocking. Imagine the layer mask to be on top of the layer. Wherever there is white in the mask, the underneath layer is revealed and wherever there is black in the mask, it is hidden.

So, this mask reveals most of the bird, but notably, the eyes will be hidden and parts of the neck will be partially hidden. This is not what we want. Despite this, the initial color range selection is of great help, because the edges are detected well and we don’t have to laboriously select the edges and make all kinds of ugly errors in the process.

Notice the three eyedropper icons just below the “Save” button. The dropper with the + sign when enabled and used, will add some colors of the image to the mask selection and the dropper with the – sign when enabled and used, will remove some colors from the mask. I played some with these two droppers and ended up with this mask.

The mask, after tweaking with the eyedroppers.

Still not perfect. I want the whole bird to be clearly visible. The gray areas of the mask will partially hide the bird. To correct this, I pick a feathered brush and painted white in the gray areas inside the bird, making sure that I don’t go too close to the edges. I end up with the following mask.

Mask, after painting with white inside the area of the bird

Sidebar Tip – when you want to paint on the mask, sometimes, it is not visible on the screen. To make it visible in the main screen, press the “\” key, which is usually above the “Enter” key. This makes it visible in red and white. To make it visible in black and white, now use the “`” key, which is usually above the “Tab” key.

This corrected mask (above) is pretty good. I now have a mask that will precisely reveal the bird. Coming to think of it, what I really need is a way to reveal the background from the background layer, and so I decide to invert this mask.

Inverting the mask

I want the white area to be perfectly white. So, I take a brush and paint the background area totally white in this mask, being very careful not to paint over the edges.

Final mask that looks good.

At this point, go back and look at the layers panel. If we want to hide the bird and reveal the background, this mask needs to be in the layer that has the background. But, now, this mask is in the bird layer. This can easily be corrected. Drag the mask from the bird layer to the background layer.

Moving the layer mask to the background layer

Now, the layer mask is in the correct layer. Still the image looks the same as the original. No change. That is because the bird layer is on top of the background layer. Let us reverse this. Push the whole background layer, including the mask, to the top.

Reversing the order of the layers in the stack

To be clear, in the top layer, the background layer and the mask both exists. The mask has black all over the area containing the bird, meaning – the bird is blocked in the top layer, while fully revealing the background. Therefore, we are able to see the background from the top layer. The black area, since it blocks the top layer from being visible, reveals the underneath layer, the bird itself.

Done.

Final Image of Demoiselle Crane

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