My Favorite Me; A Guest Blog Post by Tim Grey

Yours truly at Fort Desoto. Image courtesy of and copyright 2013: Tony Golic. You can see more of Tony’s excellent people images on his website here. Thanks a stack Tony!

My Favorite Me; A Guest Blog Post by Tim Grey

On November 18, Tim Grey interviewed me by phone for the December issue of his Pixology magazine. It was a chilling experience as I did the interview while taking my 40-minute ice bath–in 59 degree water. (Want more info? See Cold Thermogenesis here and here.)

After reading the interview I sent the following e-mail to Tim:

Yo Momma, I just read the interview. I’ve done a ton of them, and I gotta say that yours is the best-ever by far. What I liked most about it was that you did not clean up my New York speech. When you transcribed the interview, you did not attempt to calm me down or slow me down. My frenetic pace showed in every segment. As I was reading it I wanted to read faster and faster to catch up with myself and my thoughts. Though I have mellowed considerably over the last decade (see The Work of Byron Katie here), it was good to realize that I am still driven and passionate about my life and about photography. Later and love, artie

Tim Grey’s Pixology Magazine

Pixology magazine, an e-Magazine written and produced by Photoshop guru Tim Grey, debuted this past August. The interview article below was first published in the December issue that also included detailed informational pieces on Windows 8, Sampling Colors in Photoshop, Keeping Level, and Photoshop CS6 Preferences among others. All of the articles are of course written in Tim’s pleasant, easy-to-read, easy-to understand style with a examples of his wry sense of humor sprinkled throughout. You can learn more about back issues by clicking here and scrolling down to item 6.

You can subscribe today by clicking here.

Best-ever Interview

For the Love of Birds
A Conversation with Arthur Morris
By Tim Grey

I first met Arthur Morris when we were both speaking at an event in Portland, Oregon, and I’ve been happy to call him a friend ever since. I’ve always been impressed by his photography, found him incredibly willing to share his knowledge, and enjoyed his great stories and fun personality. In my mind he is quite likely the best bird photographer in the world.

I give Artie credit for helping me capture all of my favorite bird photos. Each of those favorites was captured during one of his Instructional Photo Tours (IPTs). He had been kind enough to invite me along as a co-leader, and in the process I also became a co-learner along with the other attendees.

Artie has many accolades, being a Canon Explorer of Light, a world-renowned photographer, a much sought-after educator, and more. He has many fans, and he makes himself very accessible to those photographers. Just before Thanksgiving, the day before Artie was getting ready to head to Bosque del Apache to lead another great field photography workshop, we were able to spend some time on the phone. I’m very pleased to share that interview here, so you too can get to know Arthur Morris a little bit better.

What got you into photography in the first place?

Well, I was a bird-watcher for six or seven years, starting in about ‘76 or ‘77—I don’t even remember. And then I had seen some photographs and programs by these two guys, Thomas H. Davis, Jr., and this old Eastern European guy, older man at the time for me, Tony Manzoni. Before then I just had an AE-1 and a 50mm lens and I had taken a few pictures of my kids, you know a couple of rolls of print film. But not much interest in photography.

And then after seven years of birding I was like, “What am I doing?”. I had seen most of the birds of New York state, it’s getting boring. So, I asked around and ended up buying the Canon 400 f/4.5 FD manual focus lens. Went out, took some pictures, got the film back and said, “Oh, that’s nice, what are those spots on the film?. Oh, those are the birds.”

Then I started crawling in the mud, and the rest is pretty much history, and it’s been an amazing history.

Obviously you’re known first and foremost as a bird photographer, but I’ve seen plenty of amazing landscapes and bears and other photographic images from you. What is it that brought you to birds in the first place? Obviously bird watching, but why birds?

Well, I guess it goes back to my main interest when I first started birding, I mean really when I first started birding, I had gone out once or twice, I had gotten a field guide by Richard Pough, because I had seen a skimmer skimming in a little pond when I came back from fishing, and I thought that was pretty cool. And then I went to Jamaica Bay once or twice. Went in the spring with my family once. That was pretty good but it didn’t stick. Then in August I went back and in the log I saw that there was an American Kestrel sighted and I looked in the book and I said, “Oh, that’s BS. A blue and orange falcon in New York City? What are they, on drugs?”

Then of course I went out for a walk and I saw the bird, and I wanted to get closer. So I blindly followed it and the next thing I know some horn is honking. “Hey, you’re not allowed over there. That part of the refuge is closed. If you want to get close to the birds and have freedom then go across the street to the East Pond.”

So the next morning I went out to the south flats of the East Pond, which became one of my soul places. And there was this beautiful sort of cinnamon buff colored bird with a long bill that was curved up and had a pink base to the bill, and in the meantime behind me there’s like a hundred thousand cars and trucks going by on Cross Bay Boulevard, right in front of me probably fifty yards past the end of the pond is the A train and the C train, taking like a million people a day into the city, and overhead of course are jets going in and out of Kennedy. I’m going, “This is crazy, nobody knows this bird is here”.

And it’s so beautiful. So my first interest was in shorebirds, and they pretty much epitomize the reasons I like the birds. They’re beautifully handsome, they have interesting plumage sequences that you can study and learn, and learn to identify. It’s actually easier to identify them as to age – to tell if they’re juveniles or adults or in winter plumage, than it is to identify them as to species. And then they fly ridiculous distances. And I mean ridiculous.
The pectoral sandpiper breeds for the most part in central Siberia, flies across North America on an angle, hits the east coast and goes down to Argentina for our winters, and then repeats it in the spring, comes back up. And there are others. The American golden plover—they rival the flights of the Arctic tern, which goes to Africa and South America.

So, you know, the interesting plumages and the ability to fly a zillion miles. When I first started going out on the East Pond, I saw two Sanderlings, and they had a bunch of little colored bands on them. And each one had an orange band that had a tab on it, and the band with the tab, which is called a leg flag, is from Argentina. So number one, these birds were banded in Argentina, and now they’re in New York City, in Queens. Number two, what the hell are they doing flying together? It’s obvious that they were banded together, and then they made their way to this little patch of the East Pond together. So totally insane.

Well that ties in with one of the great mantras in photography, which has always been to know your subject. But with birds it seems like this is a huge undertaking. There are so many species, with varying behaviors, migration patterns, and more. How important is it to really understand the birds you’re photographing beyond just being able to identify the species?

Well, for me being a birder—at that time it was called bird-watching—but being a bird-watcher or a birder, was a huge advantage. Within a couple of years I said, “Hey, you give me somebody who’s a pretty good birder and I can teach them photography in five minutes.” If you have a great photographer who wants to become a bird photographer, that transition is far more difficult. So knowing your subject, as with anything that you photograph, is a huge advantage. Just being able to anticipate behaviors, and knowing where the birds are, are huge advantages.

I mean, when I go to Trinidad or someplace new—right now I’m planning an exploratory trip to Nepal in the spring—I’m not going to know the birds. And I’ll make it a point to learn the birds I photograph, and then I’ll know that species, but just knowing the birds in general, it’s a huge help.

I often tell other photographers that you are probably the most knowledgeable on photographic exposure of any photographer I know. Does that come from intuition, years of experience, careful study, or something else? In other words, is there hope that all photographers can learn to master exposure?

Well, let’s go back to the beginning. One of the things I’m most proud of is that I’ve taken only one course on nature photography. It was eight Tuesday nights given by my friend Milton Heiberg from New York City Audubon. It was in February of 1984, eight Tuesday nights for two hours. And I didn’t know anything about exposure.

Of course we were using film and Milton is still a good friend to this day. He lives down here in Orlando and I see him every once in a while. And I remember getting on my knees on the floor and begging him to teach me exposure. He was a professional commercial photographer. Nature was for fun. And when he photographed a Campbell’s soup can or a Doubleday book, he got the right exposure.

But he could not at the time teach me how to get the right exposure. So I read a lot, and I struggled, and, you know, John Shaw’s book, Nature Photographer’s Complete Guide to Professional Field Techniques (http://amzn.to/TFw2vB). That gave a decent basis, but it was much too simplified, assuming that the whole picture was always one tonality. But it got me started a little bit, and of course trial and error helped.

And then the big turnaround for me: I’d been studying for probably eight years or so, and two pretty well known nature photographers, John and Barbara Gerlach, did some writing for I think Nature Photography magazine, and I saw an ad for their exposure document. So I sent them whatever, twenty or thirty bucks, and I got this rexographed paper document—how much have things changed today with digital and PDFs and MP4 videos and the like?

Anyway, I got the thing and I started studying it, and I quickly realized two things. Number one, at the time they weren’t very good writers. I had a handle on what they were talking about, but it wasn’t explained clearly. And number two, they had this diagram, which I reproduced with credit in the original The Art of Bird Photography. And once I saw that, and I realized that, hey, if you spot meter a white and you open up one-and-a-third stops, or you spot meter a middle tone and close down one stop, you wind up with the correct level of exposure for brilliant whites. Once that hit me it was just one of those “ah ha” moments.

So my best advice for folks is… Well, today with digital it’s not so necessary. Take a picture, if you have ten seconds with the bird or subject you’ve got to get the exposure right every time. Expose so the histogram has data in the fifth box going all the way almost to clipping. So with digital it’s far more simplified.

But what I tell folks is, hey, there are those once in a lifetime moments, those BBC moments, that backlight for ten seconds, you have to have a good idea if you need to be plus two or minus one, or else you risk blowing the picture. So take the time to study exposure theory. And a zillion folks have said it, that the best treatment of exposure theory is in the original The Art of Bird Photography. So I’m proud of that. And then we simplified things in the CD book, but the principles are the same.

So I generally have a pretty good idea, and film and digital the exposures are the same thing. So if you have a dark subject that dominates the frame and then some whites you need to underexpose, and if you have whiteout conditions and no sun you need to go at least two stops over. Those principles don’t change. But it’s almost criminal how easy it is today for people who are starting with digital.

But sometimes it’s not so easy, and you don’t have multiple opportunities, or at least for any specific photo at any given time, and I think one of the most challenging examples of that would be birds in flight. What sort of tips can you offer for achieving greater success when photographing birds in flight?

Well, we start with the tip that I give for all kinds of bird photography, which is in general point your shadow at the bird. You want the bird within fifteen degrees of your shadow. In other words you want the sun behind you, and you don’t want to be photographing a bird that’s way to your left or right. Secondly, you want to make sure to have your limit range switch set on the far focus setting so the lens doesn’t waste time hunting, and generally, with most lenses, its a great idea to pre-focus manually.

We were on the ship, for example, in South Georgia and when we did the crossings back and forth to the Falklands, if most of the birds were sixty feet out from the ship, I’d tell people to just pre-focus on the water under the birds. Then when you lift the camera and get the bird in the frame, the system doesn’t have far to search.

And as far as exposure, you generally for flight want to, if you have one predominant subject… Say we’re at Bosque where I’m heading tomorrow, Bosque del Apache in New Mexico. Your primary subject is snow geese, the white ones. So it might be a sunny morning and if its really clear and its 8:30, we’re going to wind up at something very close to a two-thousandth at f/8 in manual mode. And as long as the bird is roughly in that 15-degree arc, 30 degrees all together, fifteen degrees on either side of the sun angle, where you’re shadow’s pointing, you’re going to get a pretty good exposure without any blown highlights.

The other thing that folks don’t realize is that you always want to photograph—not always but 99-percent of the best flight photographs are having the birds flying parallel to your position, slightly toward you, or right at you. So, you don’t want to be working with a west wind in the morning or an east wind in the evening when the birds are flying away from you.

Once in a while—I just posted one on the blog yesterday of an Inca tern—we had wind against sun. We were stuck on a rock, the light was behind us, so there wasn’t much light, but all the birds were flying and landing away from us into a west wind. So those conditions can be really tough, and if we had an east wind that morning we would have all been famous.

You talk about bird photographers out in the field, and it’s funny to me sometimes how readily they stand out with their extreme telephoto lenses, big tripods, Better Beamers attached to flashes… All that gear costs money, of course, and so one of the things I hear a lot from photographers who are interested in bird photography is whether it is even possible to do good bird photography on a budget.

Oh, without a doubt. In today’s blog post we talked about the Sigma 50-500. One of my students, Clemens van der Werf, used that a lot in South Georgia, especially in bad conditions, and he made amazing photographs. I mean, you’re going to need to spend at least a grand getting a used 400mm, even a used 70-200mm, depending on where you live.

And we’re doing a B&H Photo Event Space presentation in December, and one of the segments I’m doing is about choosing and using lenses for bird and nature photography. And one of the big lessons is, hey the 800 with a teleconverter is often the worst lens to have in your hand. It works great for my style of “clean, tight, and graphic”, but when the bird flaps its wings or two birds start fighting, I’m often too tight. So I try to always have an intermediate telephoto on my shoulder, a 70-200, or the 300 f/2.8, which is killer.

It is on the blog, but on the third day of this huge ship to the southern oceans, I tripped on the rock on perfectly clear ground and I fell and smashed a brand new 500mm II, $10,500, and I smashed my brand new 1DX, about $7,000. So for the rest of the trip I was using the 300mm. And a lot of days it was just great. I even went without a tripod, even though we had some fairly low light. And it can be really enjoyable going out with just a single shorter lens, even, say, when I’m going down to Fort DeSoto. Hey, I think that you were there with me?

Yes, I was there.

Sometimes I just take a short zoom and go out and say, “Let’s see what I can do”. And I’ll often create new and different pictures. So there are tons of opportunities no matter where you live or using shorter focal length lenses and making great pictures—I call them birdscapes.

Do you ever feel like you’ve photographed a particular bird species so much that you already have enough photos of that species and you just don’t need to photograph it anymore?

That actually makes me chuckle…

I’ve been to San Diego a zillion times. I know you were there guest co-leading also. But when I get to San Diego—my mom used to live there. She lived there from ’70 till about 2004, and I would go out every year. And every year I would get to her house, and as soon as I get in the house she would say:
“What are you doing tomorrow?”
Ma, you know what I’m doing tomorrow.
“No, what are you doing tomorrow?”
Ma, I’m going to La Jolla.
“And what are you gonna do when you get to La Jolla?”
Ma, you know what I’m gonna do when I get to La Jolla. I’m gonna photograph pelicans, just like I’ve been doing for the last fifteen years.
She’d say, “Don’t you have enough pictures of pelicans already?”

So, the answer to that is, no. I mean, if its Snow Goose, or Great Blue Heron, or Brown Pelican, probably the three most photographed species in my files, the next time I go out, you know, on Tuesday morning when I get up to photograph snow geese, I’ll be as excited as I was the first day.

You know, I’m not a storyteller with the camera, I’m more of a one shot person, looking for some beautiful pose or some amazing light or some new perspective, something that nobody’s done before. So that hope is always there, even if you photograph the same bird a hundred thousand times, the next frame might be the BBC prize.

Speaking of that unique photo as it were, over the years you’ve incorporated a pretty wide variety of creative approaches, including a variety of in-camera blur effects, for example. How do you dream up these techniques, and how important do you think it is that photographers explore these sorts of possibilities?

It’s one of the things I love most about digital. I jokingly say, “Hey, at the end of film it cost me 38 cents to push the button.” Do you really think you ought to be shooting 500 blurs at 38 cents a pop? I mean we made some good blurs with film, but it was really difficult and really expensive.

Now with digital you’re free to do anything. So, slow shutter speeds they were first… That was my digital epiphany, when I wound up switching for good from film to digital. It actually happened at Bosque. I made some pictures and I didn’t realize when I took them that I was at a sixth of a second. And for years I had been telling people, “Oh, don’t take a blur slower than a 15th of a second.” So this whole thing with digital where you, the learning aspects, you see the shutter speed you see the aperture you see the ISO you see the picture, it’s just incredible.

So once that happened you can start pushing the envelope, and now, it’s funny you mention it, with the new—most folks will know that I’ve been a Canon Explorer of Light for 15, 17, 18 years now—but the new 5D Mark III, oh my God. I had a 1DX and I just ordered a second one to bring to Bosque since I smashed the first one I bought, but the 5D Mark III has two features that are just too much fun.

In-camera HDR, you know I love HDR but, man, having to bring the three or the five or the seven images into either Photomatix or HDR Efex Pro, that’s a pain. Here you go, bang, bang, bang, and you get a 61 megapixel JPEG, and my favorite setting is Art Vivid.

They give you a bunch of presets, most of them are terrible. Natural is nice, Art Standard’s OK, but I love Art Vivid. Then I just desaturate it a little, lighten it a little. We had one on the ship, in South Georgia, and just from seeing the image on the laptop, they had a fundraiser to raise money for the rat eradication problem in South Georgia, and this three-frame HDR Art Vivid image of a bunch of King Penguins by a stream with snow-covered mountains and snow in the background went for $750. So that was exciting.

Then the other feature I love is the multiple exposure. And of course my good friend Denise Ippolito turned me on to that. She uses it with flowers, I use it a lot with big groups of birds where you move the camera, and there’s so much more experimentation to do with those features and with everything else digital. Heck, after you spend your ten or twenty grand on lenses and another ten or fifteen grand on cameras and get a four thousand dollar laptop and a couple of thousand dollars worth of software, and $500 worth of CompactFlash cards, digital’s free.

So once you’re out there you might as well push the damn button.

Denise and I did an eBook, A Guide to Pleasing Blurs, and one of the things we emphasized is that once you’re in a blur situation take a lot of pictures. It doesn’t cost you anything more once you’re there and you’re setup. And the funniest part is that often times the first one is the best. It’s funny, that’s pretty much a rule in photography. You see a macro subject, you setup, you take one, maybe there’s something you can move, or move this around, and then you get the pictures back, you can take a hundred and the first one’s the best.

Well, speaking of going through those exposures, I’ve had the opportunity on more than one occasion to watch you sort through images, and I have to admit it scares me. I’ve seen you delete images that are better than the best bird photos I’ve ever taken in my life. Can you share a little bit of your philosophy when it comes to deciding which images to keep and why you throw away what I would consider perfectly good images?

What I do, well, I just got back from this amazing trip to South Georgia and the Falkland Islands. More than three weeks, probably 18 to 20 photographic sessions, and some of them we were out in the field photographing for twelve hours. I captured—I don’t know—probably four or five thousand images. And I try to edit every picture every day.

And my rules for editing are… And when I say editing I mean not image optimization I mean sorting the images. On the first edit, the first time I go through the pictures, I may get down from 800 pictures from one day down to about 200 images. At the same time I’ll go through a second edit, and in the second edit my guideline is if you’re not thrilled delete it. And then on the way home I generally take another look, and my general rule is if you don’t love it or if it doesn’t fulfill some educational purpose, delete it.

So I wound up from the entire trip with about 950 images that I kept. And I only optimized about 70 images, which is quite low. Usually when I get home from a trip like that I have around 250 optimized.

You have a blog at birdsasart-blog.com, and there’s a huge amount of content there, with more just about every day. I swear it seems that you must spend more time writing for the blog than you do taking photos. How much time are you spending on the blog and what will readers find there?

Well, as I like to say, “the blog is the bomb.” Today is Sunday, I’ve just been home less than a week and I’m getting ready to fly away again tomorrow, and of course I didn’t have Internet access on the ship, so I prepared a post for every other day while I was away. We have a tremendous readership and we don’t want to lose them.

Then I did a bunch of blog posts, pretty much every day, every day and a half. And just to give you an idea we also have the Birds as Art bulletins, which are quite a great marketing and exposure tool, they’re free. And everything, the blog and the bulletins, all contain what I call the images with our legendary Birds as Art educational captions.

You always read in a magazine, you know, this picture f/16 at an 8th of a second. And for years I’ve said that doesn’t tell anybody anything. So from the first picture that I ever published online I made it a point to tell people how I metered and how I compensated. So just in looking at the blog or the bulletin, looking at the pictures, and seeing the exposure compensations, folks can get a huge idea of how to get better with exposure.

But just for an example, I’ve been getting up early, I generally am an early riser, I get to bed early, sometimes as early as 8:30 or 9. And I’m up at four, sometimes 3:30, it’s always by 5. So on Saturday, which was yesterday, I started working on a bulletin and ten hours later I finished the bulletin.

And today I did not the longest blog post but not the shortest—it featured images that other folks took on an incredible snowy day at a place called Cooper Bay when I punked out. I was tired and I didn’t go, and that blog post took me about five and a half hours.

You look at John Shaw, who’s a famous nature photographer, and he’s quiet and unassuming, and you look at me and I’ve got somewhat of a big mouth, I’m from New York. I’ve mellowed a ton and I’m much more at peace than I used to be five, ten years ago, but I like being the center of attention. My dad never had much nice to say about me so I’m still trying to make up for that.

But the thing is that I enjoy the sharing. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy being the center of attention. And I enjoy what notoriety I have in the field. But in the long run it pays off. I mean, fifteen years ago, twenty, when I first got online, I started answering emails from everybody. Now if you send an email to most top pros you get a form response from their staff. So and so is in the field, he can’t, blah, blah, blah.

I’ve answered everyone individually for twenty years. And people go, “What’s wrong with you? That’s insane!”

It all goes back to answering the email questions, you know, doing the stuff on the blog, doing the stuff on the bulletin. It is marketing for things like Digital Basics. But the information there is huge, and we update it for free. And now we’ve just started a new gig, I’m emulating my friend Tim Grey a little bit. Denise and I have always talked about apps, and then learned that each one costs a couple thousand to do, even if it’s not too complex. I don’t know how to do it, so that hasn’t worked. And then when I got involved in this “24 Hour Photoshop” thing, I got Camtasia, and started doing screen capture Photoshop tutorials.

So we just released our first one the other day, King Penguin Image Clean-up, and I pretty much paid for Camtasia in just a couple days, so that’s like a brand new market and it’s going to be pretty much limitless. And the strategy will be to post a before and after picture on the blog, basically give people an idea of what we did, it’s all in Digital Basics, but as you very well know people just love actually seeing what you’re doing at the computer, seeing the step-by-step. So the screen capture videos are something new and exciting for us.

And speaking of watching what you’re doing, I’ve had the personal privilege of joining you on a few of your Instructional Photo Tours, your IPTs, and in fact, all of my best bird photographs were captured on one of your trips. Can you give readers a sense of what they can expect if they decide to join you on one of your IPTs?

Well, I fly to Bosque tomorrow, and then Tuesday morning Denise and I will wake up early and head out and do a scouting run just to see where the birds are in the morning. We’ll meet the group Tuesday evening where we’ll each do an introductory slide program, give them an idea of what they’ll be photographing. Then we get up the next day at about 4:30, leave the hotel at 5:30, photograph for a couple of hours, come back for lunch at about 11am. Then by about 12pm we’ll be starting Photoshop sessions. We’ll do that for an hour or an hour and a half, we have a bunch of great co-leaders including Denise Ippolito, Mike Hannisian, and my friend Jim Heupel, who’s a really good landscape photographer, and he’ll do a session on Lightroom during the day.

Then just multiply that by seven with the exception of Thursday when we’ll photograph and then go up to Albuquerque for a wonderful buffet at the Crown Plaza.

Usually at the end of the first full day of the tour we do a critiquing session where folks are invited to bring five or six of their best natural history images, and we give them an honest critique. And one of the things that we try to do each trip is to have me edit the day folder. So if I take 400 pictures just I go through them in BreezeBrowser and show them how to use the checkmarks for keepers and that’s a tremendous activity that folks just love.

What I’d like to do one day is an eBook with series of from two to ten images, and ask folks which ones do you keep and why. And then have them click through to the answer page and talk about head angle and all the little factors. You might take twenty or thirty pictures, and almost invariably if you take thirty images of the same bird in the same position, one image is going to stand out as being clearly best.

I just did this one day… A lot of times I’ll do it at lunch and the people would be gathered around behind me. So then we started doing it on a projector, and people just groove on it. So I don’t know when I’ll have time to get to that eBook, but probably not this week…

Well, it sounds like you’re very busy but having lots of fun.

Yeah, the whole trip has been… If anybody would have told me where I’d be in 2012, and how well I’d be doing, I wouldn’t have believed it at all. I would have said “You’re on drugs.”

Questions Welcome

Please leave a comment if you have a question; I will answer it at my earliest opportunity.

Traveling

Please know that artie will be traveling to and from the Galapagos until July 19th. He will not have any internet access while aboard the Samba from July 3-16th. He will be home briefly July 19-20 before flying to Long Island for the sold out Nickerson Beach Baby Birds IPT. Jim will be in the office every weekday to help you with your mail order purchases and Jen will be here handling IPT registrations. The blog will continue to be active as he has prepared more than a few posts for you in advance for you to enjoy during his absence.

If you have a gear or an image processing question please e-mail me after July 19th.

Typos

On all blog posts, feel free to e-mail or leave a comment regarding any typos, wrong words, misspellings, omissions, or grammatical errors. Just be right. 🙂

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