Recently IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature requested a few images of critically endangered vultures of mine for the use in their Species of the Day project. You can read more about this awareness creation project here. Starting 1st of Jan 2010 everyday they are sharing information about one species which is (critically)endangered.
Today (1st Feb 2010) they are sharing information about the Indian Vulture (Gyps indicus). If you have a web site you may promote this effort of IUCN as explained here in their page. It also displays a new image of an endangered species on your page every day ! I have added it to my home page and liked it a lot !!

Daroji Sloth Bear Sanctuary, Indiapages

Couple of weeks back I made a visit to Daroji Sloth Bear Sanctuary in India. This time I wanted to make some different perspectives of Daroji bears. Here is a gallery of images made there which includes old images made at Daroji too. This time I tried to focus more on light and composition to show bears differently. Click on the link below to see some of these perspectives !

Daroji Sloth Bear Sanctuary, India

**As of now my D700 is dead showing “Full” on any formatted empty CF cards**.

I googled around to find whether this issue is reported, but I could not find one. Please let me know if any of you have a solution to this issue.

I tried removing both batteries  (I use MB-D10 with my D700 too) and upgrading firmware to the new version. It does not help. Looks like I need to take my D700 to support center now

BTW, I don’t see this issue with my D300 ! 16GB UDMA card seem to work just fine without “loosing” remaining frame counts..

Thanks in advance for any solution to resolve this issue…

- Ganesh H. Shankar

Macro Photography

Recently a friend of mine wanted a set of images of birds for making a calendar for his organization. I went with a collection of about hundred odd images of birds. My friend showed those images to another person in their organization (looked like a person in their marketing department) and asked his views on what images to select. This person browsed through my collection spending a second or less on a few of my images and gave a quick judgment on what is a “beautiful image” and what is not ! In his scale the above image does not look good and the below one is a good image because he felt two birds is frame is better than one. While I don’t have a preference or great liking for both of these images (now), my first reaction was this person needs a course on “appreciation of images”. My second reaction was – who am I to dictate right taste for him ? He is right based on his scale of reference, more so being a potential customer. While I don’t make my living from nature photography today I immediately realized the challenge of professional nature photographers who live on nature photography alone.

Several of us do nature photography since it is a passion for us. My belief is one produces quality work if her mind and soul is in that work. Can it happen if I have to make images to suit others taste ? I think this can become an interesting challenge in making nature photography as a profession. To pay school fee of his daughter I would not be surprised if a professional nature photographer resort to extensive digital editing to suit needs of his clients. I am not at all saying every professional nature photographer will do this but I won’t be surprised if some of them do especially when there are floods of “low” cost images of nature available for potential buyers !

Of late I have been very busy with my office work and have not had enough time to spare for photography.
It is monsoon time here in India and of late we are receiving good rains in Western Ghats region. It is the time of the year when life forms in Western Ghats are rejoicing thanks to heavy rains. Last year I spent a few days in jungles of Western Ghats during monsoon months. Not sure whether I will be able to spare time this year. However, I spent some time revisiting my previous images and converting some of them into black and white. Some of the newly processed images of Western Ghats in monsoon season here -

Western Ghats in Black and White

When photographing “almost” flat surfaces quality and direction of light plays a major role in getting textures within our subjects right – more so in macro photography. See the above image and the same one below. The only different is direction of light used. For the above I used light falling on the subject in a oblique angle and for the one below it is front light.

See the difference !!

Why oblique angle of light made so much of difference ? It is because “texture” is characterized by fine play of light and shadows as shown in below two small crops (100%) of the above images.

Next time when you are photographing almost a flat surface give it a consideration for angle of light falling on your subject !!