hi everyone i'm tin man lee and welcome to my inspire section
as part of the cambridge life experience i'm really excited to be giving you all
my tips and tricks and hope you can find time to try out
some photography and make some time for
yourself in between teaching first let me ask you a question
have you ever dreamed to become an adventurer
going to the arctic to see the polar bears going on a safari in kenya to see
lions and lappers you know like those you see in planet
earth and bring home photos that are as beautiful as those you see in magazines
well it had always been my dream but with my
nine-to-five job as an i.t professional working in a cubicle
and only three weeks of vacation each year for 10 years
i used to think it's just a distant dream
as i probably needed to have months of vacation
all the high-end expensive camera gear a mastery of all the camera settings
extreme outdoor survival skills and unlimited budget
but well but with my limited budget i spent it all on my camera gear in the
beginning while i spent all my time reading photo
magazines and i would go to local parks to take
photos of birds but my photos were never any good later
i learned from some professional photographers that i admired
and i developed a simple framework which allow me to get
great photos without loss of time in the field or the need to understand
all complicated camera settings and i'm gonna share it with you today are you
ready so tip number one learning how to find
animals i remember one time i spent four hours
waiting across a river in los angeles to watch an osprey sitting on top of a
telephone pole i kept waiting for the osprey to fly in
order to get a flying photo eventually the osprey flew but it was
already dark the photo turned out to be really bad
our focus grainy loss of noise later i find out
that there is a place called lake blue cypress in florida united
states that has hundreds of nesting ospreys
in a small area each year you would get non-stop photos of osprey flying landing
taking off if you spend just one morning there you'll get more
and much better photos than me waiting at that telephone pole
every day for five years so it's very important to know where the animals
aggregate and more importantly if they interact with each other
you get action shots so as a full-time professional not in the photography
field we just don't have much time to wait for a shot
right so the only way is to strategize and go to places with the most
action so anyone here heard of borrowing owls
they are really tiny and cute so i've been looking for boring hours for many
years from some bird watching news but they were always
skittish and far away not really good for photography and one
year after some research i met a friend who
told me a nest that had eight chicks and here are few
photos that i got the place was windy and sandy but tough
situation is sometimes good for photography
this is one where the parent owl took flight and looked for food for the chick
and here's one where the outlet had her first
flight i would have never gotten those photos without reaching out to friends
the same idea applies to bears for example if you go to denali national
park in alaska sometimes you would not see a bear for
days riding the bus in the park and when you did see one it's usually
miles away from the road however each year brown bears wait for
the salmon run in katmai national park and you can get pretty
close provided that if you hire a bear guy
so imagine you are wading in waist deep frigid glacier water
for six days you didn't see a single bear because you just missed
the salmon run for a few days but then all of a sudden
you find yourself surrounded by 50 bears all pretty close by bears roaring and
then their echoes deafening in the valley and then suddenly one bear
locked eye with you and started to charge
you hold up your 500 millimeter lens saturated speed at
1600 of a second to freeze the action and then the best then it punks
into the water well i got a photo like that in katmaya national park
and later this photo won the grand prize of nature's best photography
and was exhibited in the smithsonian museum of natural history in washington
dc so knowing where to go and get good
action shots is better than waiting at some areas where
animals rarely showed up so how do you know where the animals aggregate and in
what time of the year then well a good way is to purchase a
magazine or photo book of prestigious photo contests such as
nature's best photography wildlife photographer of the year you
browse through and pick the kind of images that
moves you and look at the location where it's
taken usually it is written on on the magazines
and then you start to do some online research and never
be afraid to reach out and ask also check out ebird's alert you know all
these different forums too sometimes it doesn't need to be even far
from home here are a few photos i took within just
two hours from where i live and i live in los angeles in the middle
of a city yet these wild animals thrive it's pretty amazing we just never
pay attention so this is an endangered san joaquin kid
fox photo i took near where i lived and one of my
happiest moments was an encounter with this bobcat kitten and
her family in california here is a photo of a barn
owl that showed up in the morning it was pretty rare for this nocturnal
species to show up in daytime so when they do
you gotta seize the opportunity so all these were taken
close to where i lived so can you promise me you start by doing some
research and buying some magazines and books from
photo contests after this talk well i still have my copies of this
contest magazines at my desk just right now
so now now that you know where the animals are you may say well
i can't afford those ten thousand dollar super telephoto lens
well remember the photo of the bear where i got the award
i took it with a canon 1d mark iv and the first generation 500 millimeter f4
lens if you are to buy it now the camera is just about 500
used and the lens may be 3 000 if it's still too expensive you can always rent
a lens for a weekend or just get the canon 405.6 and it is
about 900 used so these can create world-class
photos you don't really need to buy new i recommend prime lens because they're
usually sharper and faster but sony has this 200 to 600 which
covers a big range of focal length for zooms
and is less than two hundred two thousand dollars new so it's
pretty amazing now so just make sure that the cameras has at least
eight frames per second though and when you have mastered the arch of finding
wildlife you can get decent photos or even
videos with a smartphone so let me show you this these are
king penguins from forkland islands
and these are elephants in amboseli national parks
all taken with this with my cell phone and if you already own a digital slr or
mirrorless cameras try to rent a telephoto prime lens of
400 millimeters or above and definitely give it a try okay now
you may ask how to take better photos i remember
when i started i never ever thought about conversation or anything else
i just got super excited and i would press the shutter non-stop
whenever i saw an animal i ended up with thousands of photos every time and none
of them were really good so one time i joined an expensive birth
photo tours in florida for the first time and i was shocked that the tour
leader told us to only meet for two hours in the morning and two
hours in the evening at first i was a bit upset i paid all
the money like two thousand dollars and you asked me to only go
for four hours and then go back to the hotel to rest in most of the daytime
well later i learned this important lesson when i took photos in midday it's
going to cast a very distracting shadow on the animal
because the sun is from above in order not to get this
hard shadow on the face of the animal what do you do well you simply avoid
taking photos when the sun is high up so now people look at my photos and say
how come the light is always so good on your photos well because i only go
out during the good lights or the dramatic lights so skip your
breakfast and go out pre-dawn and wait a little bit and make sure to
pay attention to where the sun is the better you align yourself relative
to the sun the more pleasant the image looks like
and a lot of my photos were taken after work where i just hiked to some local
places to wait for sunset when the hours are more active as it
gets darker such as this grey horn owl and one more tip
i think the legendary france landing started it which is to
go eye level with the animal when you shoot so try to get as low as possible
when you shoot sometimes lying flat on the ground to get your photos
99 of the 99 of the time the photos would look much better with this new
perspective however i quickly learned that even when
i get the photoshop in good light at low angle my family and
friends still didn't really have any reaction looking at my photos
but people tend to react deeply to paintings like da vinci's
rembrandts why it's because these painters have mastered
the art of creating drama to trigger your emotion
for example when you walk in a dark alley you naturally
would feel scared and would walk towards the dim lights in the distance right
so some painters would paint the environment all dark
with dramatic spotlight shining on the subject
to trigger this same kind of emotion in humans
so in the same way if you can take photos like that you can trigger the
same kind of emotion by reverse engineering what these grandmaster oil
painters were doing you can grab people's attention
instantly by having this kind of drama in your photos
especially nowadays we have so many photos and in instagram and facebook
right so how do you learn more about creating
drama well my tip is in addition to reading
more photography books read some visual arts book art history
books for example the annotated mona lisa is a very good
and easy read book so here is a photo of some of using this
kind of black and spotlight so my final tip is
don't be afraid believe in yourself and take action i waited for so many years
before i finally decided to take my first trip to see polar bears
i still remember when i saw my first polar bears in alaska
tears filled my eyes and my whole body was shaking not because of fear but
because of seeing them active and alive in nature i remember we
were in a small boat in the alaskan arctic the light was
fading and we couldn't find any polar bears
we were about to return back to the cabin when we saw something in the
distance and when we got closer we saw a polar
bear and when we got even closer we saw this the polar bears went back to
sleep and then one of the cubs woke up and
gave me this look as the sun was set most of us had
already stopped taking photos but i saw an opportunity with the
afterglow in the sky and i took this one i didn't know why but it made me feel so
calm looking at this later a lady whom i didn't know emailed
me she told me her husband had cancer and they had been fighting it together
for years they sold their house moved to a city where the cancer center
was etc well they finally won the battle when
they saw this polar bear photo they couldn't help but remember the first
night they went home after the doctors told
her husband that he's cancer free they finally could have a
good night of sleep and this photo brought tears in their
eyes now this photo print is in their living
room well i would have never imagined that
this photography journey would bring me so much happiness
by making a difference in other people's lives
can you imagine what it would be like if you can make people laugh and cry
and make a difference in their lives with your photos
well if you like to learn more about wildlife photography i have a free pdf
guide on how to take shop action photos at tinmanly.com shop check it out and
thank you very much i hope to talk to you soon
and good luck in your photography journey