Thaddeus McRae photographs a large spider during the first day of our two day "photography for ecologists" workshop.
On Saturday August 7th, Neil, Molly Mehling, and myself flew to Austin, TX to teach a two-day photography workshop at the 96th Annual Ecological Society of America (ESA) meeting. On Sunday, we instructed a full-day workshop – Photography for Ecologists: Capturing Powerful Images. Photography is powerful tool, but not all photographs are created equal. When we are trying to communicate something with images, bad photos are often worse than no photos. By showing these ecologists a few basic artistic and technical techniques, our goal this first day was to help these participants become better photographers. We asked participants to bring their own cameras – whether they were digital SLRs or simple point and shoots.
One trick for taking better photos is to get down onto the same level as your subject.
Most of the workshop was held in-the-field at the UT Austin’s Brackenridge Field Laboratory, an urban field research station for studies in biodiversity, ecosystem change and natural history. Aside from the 105-degree heat, the workshop was a lot of fun and (I think) successful. The range of ages, career stages, and photographic skills of the participants varied widely. This kind of diversity made it a challenge to cater to everyone’s photographic skill level, but it also allowed students to ask one-another questions and share their own knowledge. For most of the day, we split people up into small groups and let them wander around taking pictures while we floated from group to group offering advice on new techniques and image composition. Between Neil, Molly and I, we have a wealth of lenses, camera bodies, and other photographic paraphernalia. Throughout the day, we lent this equipment to the participants, allowing them to see what they could accomplish with different equipment.
One of our participants takes a photograph of a Texas Spiny Lizard.
In the afternoon, after a long hot day, we returned to the Austin Convention Center and reviewed everyone images. I was impressed with some of the results. Many of the participants captured some striking images. There were of course, many bad images. But this is true of all photographers, even the most skilled. Luckily, not all bad images need to be thrown away – they can be post-processed in editing software. For the last hour of the workshop, I led a basic photo-editing workshop using Adobe Photoshop.
Two graduate student participants practice shooting with some of our lenses. One of the big fallacies about photography is that a nicer camera will make your images look better. The truth is that a good lens plays a much bigger part in creating beautiful images.
On Monday night, we held the second workshop: Photography for Ecologists: Putting Images to Work. The aim of this workshop was to provide some visual communication theory, practical resources, and small-group discussions about (1) the role of images in documentation and research; (2) the uses of photography in public outreach; and (3) participatory photography methods. We talked a little bit about how photography is such a powerful tool to communicate both with our peers and to broader audiences. We then broke-up participants into small groups so that they could focus on what images they could create that would best tell the story of their research to either their peers or someone outside the scientific community. One of the main points we wanted to get across was to get people thinking about creating intentional photographs rather than just taking snapshots. We are trained to think deeply about words when we write, but much less thought goes into communicating with image. Hopefully, participants now have a few new ideas about what they can do with their photography!
One drawback to this second meeting was that it was held from 8-10pm on the first night of the conference. That’s late after a long day of watching science talks. Still, 26 people showed up to our workshop. It was great to see people enthusiastic about spending more time communicating with images. Hopefully next year we’ll get an earlier time slot!
With some students gathered around, Neil and I demonstrated how to use flash and some artificial lighting to creatively expose thisGreen Lynx Spider.
[...] Neil and Nate travel to Austin, Texas to teach a Photography for Ecologists workshop at the Annual Ecology Society Association (ESA) meeting. Neil then heads for Puerto Rico to finish [...]