Gary Dunnett, CEO NPANSW
It is a truth universally acknowledged that those who care about nature crave connection with natural places. Or something to that effect.
NPA is far from the only conservation organisation that traces its roots back to bushwalking clubs. Experiencing the best of natural landscapes and their inhabitants was, and remains, a powerful motivation for advocating for their protection.
I’ve always turned to bushwalking and diving as ways of immersing myself in nature. For reasons I don’t fully understand those experiences are most satisfying when they result in some lasting record of the places. My preferred capture technique is photography, and over the last few years my bushwalking and diving have largely transformed into a means of carrying a camera to interesting sites and sights.
Powerful and ubiquitous as cameras have become, including the ones on the backside of our phones, there are tricks that can really help with getting the most out of those experiences. Which brings me to this little series on photographic techniques for nature lovers.
Seasons, light and ideal subjects
Mid-summer is my least favourite time for photography. The soft beautiful light of dawn arrives far too early in the day, and it is always difficult to manage the harsh and contrasty light that flows through the day. Plus which it is hot, and, at least in the peri-urban national parks I usually frequent, you rarely get the place to yourself.
Nonetheless, most of us have a break over the Christmas- New Year period, which is pretty much the definition of mid-summer. A few days in and I was desperate to get out and wracking my brains for a productive option. A heavily overcast sky offered the answer. Whenever the big diffuser in the sky is in place I think about forests if I want to do landscape photography, and waterbirds if I’m after something a bit more mobile. Further checking showed very light winds and the top of the tide in a few hours. Everything I like for photographing waterbirds, and soon I was heading south to the shallows of Lake Illawarra.
So why waterbirds? Lots of reasons, beginning with the variety of species and their relative abundance. Their preferred habitats are the edges of rivers, bays and wetlands, all of which offer easy public access. They return again and again to the same sites to forage and roost, often aggregating into large mixed flocks at the top of the tide. With few exceptions (White Ibis aka the bin chook) waterbirds range from stunningly elegant (egrets) to charmingly grotesque (spoonbills), making for great imagery. Those diverse shapes reflect a huge variety of foraging behaviours, the details of which are only discernible in the frozen moments captured by camera. I would never have guessed that Great Egrets so relish tiny pipefish, or the ability of Godwits to tweezer buried Solider Crabs from the sandflats. And finally, waterbirds live around water, and when the breeze drops and the surface turns into a giant silvery mirror, I just can’t resist the reflections.
The attraction of waterbirds
The southern shores of Lake Illawarra are very shallow. Sandflats dominate towards the lake entrance, shifting to finer muddy sediments as you travel westwards. The shoreline is fringed by a mosaic of seagrass beds and open areas; a remarkably productive wonderland for all the wading birds that forage over, on and under the rich lake sediments. Egrets, herons, spoonbills, ibis, stilts, godwit, curlew, plovers and a variety of small migratory waders thrive along these shores.
Egrets are a personal favourite. Two species are common around the lake, the Great Egret and the (not surprisingly) smaller Little Egret. Great Egrets are the statuesque stalkers of the shallows, moving with ponderous slowness right up to the moment when that coiled neck strikes with lightning speed to spear unsuspecting prey. A few moments observation will pick up the rhythm of their movements and help capture that decisive moment when the beak plunges into the water.
At first glance the Little Egret looks like a half sized version of the Great. You’ll soon see that their behaviour is totally different, far from slow stalkers these are hyperactive dancers across the shallows. Their pursuit of fish and shrimp takes place in a flurry of leaps, bounces, dashes and fluttering.
Two wonderful subjects, but ones that come with technical challenges. They are wary of people and forage over large areas, which means that you need a reasonably long lens to have any hope of ‘filling the frame’. Something with a focal length in excess of 200mm is required, and preferably over 300mm. This puts you into the realm of interchangeable lens cameras (once called SLRs) and superzooms rather than camera phones- an unfortunate limitation for much wildlife photography.
The challenges of water and light
The other big difficulty is getting the right exposure for your images. The egrets are bright white, while the sky and water’s surface are far brighter than you may realise. The problem when shooting a white subject against a big bright background is that your camera is an idiot. Otherwise phrased, it just isn’t set up for this situation.
The issue begins with the way in which the camera finds a proper exposure. Most scenes have a mix of different colours, tones and luminosity. Cameras respond to this complexity by averaging the total brightness. There are a few ways they do this, with most algorithms biased towards the objects in the centre of the frame. Your camera will use terms such as matrix and spot metering to describe this process. The objective is to produce an image that is overall mid-grey in tone. Strange as this might sound, in the vast majority of cases this works well.
Back to our white birds against a giant silvery background; standard metering doesn’t work so well! Far from blowing out the white highlights, what the metering system produces in this situation is dark grey birds against a disappointingly dull background. All those subtle whites and silvers that enchant the naked eye are reduced to an ominous grey.
There are a few ways of combating this issue. If you use editing software to process your images the easiest is to simply lift the exposure by a stop or two until it ‘looks right’. You may need to also raise the shadows to reduce excessive contrast.
These adjustments won’t produce the best outcome, especially in the lifted shadows which will become very grainy or ‘noisy’. My preferred method is to adjust the camera settings before shooting. Most digital cameras will have an exposure compensation button or the ability to adjust compensation in the menus. I start by dialling in a plus 1 exposure compensation, check how this looks on the camera screen, then dial further up or down as needed. If you don’t have access to exposure compensation you can achieve the same outcome by selecting manual mode and making shutter speed, aperture or ISO selections to produce a brighter exposure than the camera recommends. In practical terms this usually means a higher ISO. Again, shoot, check and adjust.
Out at Lake Illawarra
So how did this all pan out on that late December afternoon? Parking near a deserted high school I quickly spotted a Great Egret patrolling the shore and two Little Egrets dancing around the shallows. I was lucky enough to freeze the Great Egret in its strike, and got several shots of the cavorting Little Egrets.
Further out into the lake there was a large raft of Black Swans. The light breeze broke their reflections into black and white lines, producing my favourite image of the year.
The bright conditions allow for very fast shutter speeds of a 2,000th of a second or more. Perfect for photographing birds in flight, which I did as flights of Bar Tail Godwits, Pied Stilts and an incredibly loud calling Eastern Curlew passed by my vantage point. Birds will often fly past much closer than they would ever let you approach while they are feeding, which is wonderful for filling the frame but takes a bit of practice.
Wildlife photography requires knowledge, skill, equipment and, above all, patience. All of which apply to the waterbirds of Lake Illawarra. Yet these species, in this type of habitat, offer the closest thing you’ll ever get to guaranteed wildlife results. A great set of species to begin with, and ones I always relish returning to.