INTERESTED IN LEARNING how to be a surf photographer, an underwater photographer or a travel photographer?

You couldn’t find two more expert tutors than Ted Grambeau and Darren Jew and they’ll be leading the SOL Bali 2020 event, 31 May to 7 June 2020.

The workshop is designed to provide you with a skillset that will enhance your ability to create new and inspiring work in all types of photography.

Fronting the famous Keramas beach break, Komune Resort and Beach Club Bali is a superb venue for the workshop – a perfect location to be immersed in a week of ocean, surf and lifestyle photography and learning.

The two experienced and talented professionals will guide you through a comprehensive and practical curriculum that will establish the mindset, vision, skills and tools that aspiring ocean photographers need in order to take their imagery to the next level.

The workshop will cover defining your purpose and goals, in-water shooting, underwater shooting, top-side work, lifestyle shoots with talent and products, capturing surf action (including night surfing), creative camera techniques, creative post-processing and effective workflows.

The workshop will be supported by Foto Frenzy’s Jasmine Carey and representatives from Aquatech water housings will also be offering an extensive range of popular housing and camera set-ups to shoot in and around the ocean with.

For more information, visit Ted’s website for details, or follow this link: https://www.tedgrambeauphotography.com/photographyworkshop

Puffin, Fugle Fjord, Svalbard
Fujifilm X-H1, XF100-400mmF4.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR, f8 @ 1/650 second, ISO 250

The more nature photography I do, the more I realise how much our subjects move. Even these puffins swimming quietly along on a glassy afternoon needed a reasonably fast shutter speed to freeze the action completely.

For many people, nature photography relies on technical perfection. Not always, but for photos like the samples here, you want your subject to be tack sharp, at least on the eyes and beak where it counts. So, how do you do it?

First up, ensure your lens is focusing properly. When you use a telephoto lens (this was a 100-400mm), it magnifies both your subject and any errors in focusing. So, if the autofocus system locks onto the bird in front, the bird behind might not be sharp. Worse, if the autofocus locks onto the shoulder feathers, the eye may not be sharp. Depth-of-field with telephoto lenses is very shallow, and the closer you are to your subject, the shallower the depth-of-field.

In this situation, I used a single spot autofocus point, which was a struggle because I was shooting from a floating zodiac (which is better than a zodiac that's not floating, of course). Slight movements of other passengers compound the movement of the birds and it can be challenging to keep the autofocus point on the eye of the bird. There were a lot of misses, but I knew this would be the case, so I took LOTS of frames and at least a couple were sharp!

Image stabilisation is also great because it helps keep your camera still, but it doesn't help if the subject itself is moving. At 100% magnification, any movement is a problem, so 1/500 second is probably as slow as you should use for any wildlife photography (conditions permitting), but if I had this opportunity again, I'd go for 1/1000 or even 1/2000 second. Most cameras will work very happily at higher ISO settings, allowing these faster shutter speeds.

You don't always see Puffins up in Svalbard, or so they told me the day before, but no one told the flock of twenty or so Puffins that were swimming not far from our ship! 

Interested in a trip to Svalbard? I have two options, one this year in August, one the year after in July! Check out the voyages I'm doing with Kevin Raber (click here) on M/S Quest (Rockhopper Workshops) in 2020 and with Aurora Expeditions here in 2021.

MobileStudio Pro 2019 with Capture One running. Photos from a recent trip to Bhutan.

As a Wacom Amassador, I get to play with all their latest toys and I’ve just taken delivery of the newest 16” MobileStudio Pro (MSP). It’s what I take away with me when travelling because the screen is the closest in a laptop I’ve found to my wonderful EIZO monitors back at the ranch. It gives me a really great rendition of my photographs, meaning they are not overly contrasty or colour saturated like some of the popular laptop screens. Don’t get me wrong, if I want my photos to look highly saturated and contrasty, I can do that on the MSP, but the default setting is very neutral in contrast and colour  - and that’s exactly what I want as a photographer.

What I also want is to go on a trip and not fill up my hard drive with photos and videos. I always seem to run out of space!

If I’m shooting on my Fujifilm X-T3 with a 26-megapixel sensor, I am usually okay, but once I pull out the Phase One XF 150MP, my drive fills up a little more quickly! Invariably I’m copying my photos across to an external drive, like Lacie’s Rugged SSD – and I will continue to do that as I need a backup. But wouldn’t it be nice to have the whole shoot on the MSP and not have to plug in an external drive at all?