Two bull northern elephant seals clashing in the surf

Photo by Jaymi Heimbuch

Your Photo Could Be Here

We want one of your nature photos to be the next Photo of the Day! Share your images with our Flickr group and tag them with PhotoOfTheDay-NWF12.

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Today’s spotlight is on the “Landscapes and Plant Life” category, which focuses on scenic views and native plants in wild settings.

Last year’s first place winning photograph in this category comes from Spain, where photographer Francisco Mingorance used a long exposure to capture the unusual “star” of sea foam on the shore at night.

The Star of the Silent. Photo by Francisco Mingorance. 2012 National Wildlife Photo Contest winner.

Spectacled Cayman. Photo by Michael Tweddle. 2012 National Wildlife Photo Contest winner.

A Meadow-sweet in the setting sun. Photo by Zoltán Ritzel. 2012 National Wildlife Photo Contest honorable mention.

The Milky Way over Devil’s Tower in the Moonlight. Photo by Durand Johnson. 2012 National Wildlife Photo Contest honorable mention.

Check out this year’s entrants in the Photo Contest here. You can vote for and share your favorites or even enter your own photos.  We’d love to see them!

All photos were entries in the Landscapes and Plant Life category of the National Wildlife Photo Contest. See more photos or sign up for the 43rd Annual National Wildlife Photo Contest >>

Photo by Mark Preston

See more of Mark Preston’s photos on Flickr >>

Your Photo Could Be Here

We want one of your nature photos to be the next Photo of the Day! Share your images with our Flickr group and tag them with PhotoOfTheDay-NWF12.

Don’t have a Flickr account? It’s free and easy to create one.
 

The natural world offers unlimited opportunities and subjects for photographers of all levels to make compelling images. But nature photography, particularly when wildlife is involved, can be challenging under the best of circumstances. It requires proper preparation. Just as the great masters of painting wouldn’t want to get stuck trying to paint a scene with the wrong brush, people should avoid heading into the field with the wrong lenses to capture their subjects.

One thing photographers who use digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras can do to increase the odds that they’ll walk away with high-impact photos is to use the right tools for the job. Different lenses have different optical qualities that will give each image a characteristic look. Below you’ll find lens family overviews paired with example images to give you an idea of how they can help you highlight the beauty of your subject(s) and boost their impact to viewers of your photography.

Fisheye (8-15mm)

Star trails above Mobius Arch in the Alabama Hills of California. Lens: Canon 15mm Fisheye

1. They take in a very wide angle of view, often 180º.
2. They have a very short focal distance, allowing you to get within inches of your subject

The most distinctive visual quality provided by these types of lenses that viewers notice is the distorted perspective, namely barrel distortion. Distortion is something photographers either love or hate. I love distortion and the effect it brings to my photography. For those who don’t like the distortion, you can use a fisheye to get the wide field of view and then run 3rd party software applications like Optics Pro Elite v8 Software to remove the distortion.

A fisheye view of the Wave sandstone formations.

Ultra-wide (16-24mm)

Zabriskie Point – Death Valley National Park, California. Lens info: Canon 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM at 18mm

The lens I use is a Canon 16-35mm f/2.8L II lensand it is one of my most frequently used lenses. The longer focal lengths lack distortion while the wider focal lengths provide the distortion that I like.

Racetrack Star Trails.

Standard Focal Lengths (24-90mm)

Sun shining through a grove of Monterey Pines (Pinus radiata) – San Francisco, California.

The downside to using standard focal length lenses is that they don’t cover subjects requiring more extreme focal lengths, such as wide angle environmental images or telephoto wildlife images.

Telephoto (70-200mm)

A coyote runs through the hillside blending into his environment.

Fog fills San Francisco Bay with a silhouette of Mount Diablo in the distance – San Francisco, California.

Longer focal lengths narrow the depth of field, which is another impact telephoto lenses have on images. This requires a more precise placement of focus on the subject that you feel is most important.

Super Telephoto (200-1200mm)

Last light falls on Half Dome as the sun sets.

Perigee Moon & California Oak near the Monterey coast, California.

Macro (60-180mm)

Fall leaves.

The downside of macro photography is the need for a good amount of light, patience and sensitivity to vibration. Each of these can be overcome with external lighting, a focusing rail, good technique and the use of a shutter release or timed shutter.

Tilt-Shift (17mm, 24mm, 45mm & 90mm)

Badwater Sunset – Death Valley National Park, California.

Fog forms over Swiftcurrent Lake and Mount Grinnell at sunrise in Glacier National Park, Montana.

Second Body — Don’t Get Caught off Guard

While much of the discussion so far has centered on lenses, it is incredibly important to highlight that having a second DSLR body on-hand can make a huge difference. Case in point: on my last trip to Glacier National Park, I was shooting a time-lapse with my camera and a mountain goat came up so close to me that I couldn’t focus my camera on him. In fact, he came so close that, for safety’s sake, I had to step away. I would have never documented this if I hadn’t had a second camera on-hand. For more serious work, a second body helps as a backup in case anything catastrophic happens to your primary camera and it allows you to work at the same time with multiple lenses of differing focal lengths.

Outfit Your Excursions on a Budget

With all these recommendations you might think that money is no object but, like you, I operate on a budget. My secret to finding and using the right tool can be heavily attributed to the fact that I can rent the right gear for the right trip or assignment. To convert your camera bag into an endless home for new and great gear like I have, I recommend renting  the gear you want, when you want it from BorrowLenses.com.

And, after you’ve rented your gear, planned your trip, and taken your wonderful nature photos, remember to enter the National Wildlife Photo Contest. There are wildlife- and landscape-specific categories as well as $6,000 in prizes, with a Grand Prize trip for two to Churchill, Canada where you can see and photograph polar bears.

About Jim Goldstein

Jim Goldstein is a San Francisco based professional photographer and author who has been in numerous publications, including Outdoor Photographer, Digital Photo Pro, Popular Photography and has self-published a PDF eBook Photographing the 4th Dimension – Time covering numerous slow shutter techniques. Follow Jim Goldstein on Google+ | Twitter | Facebook | 500px

To help celebrate this special birthday, I decided to take a series of photos of 40 garden objects. This photo series was inspired by the blog Things Organized Neatly. My arrangements are not arranged as neatly as many photos on that blog, but you get the idea.

Here’s photo #4 – 40 flowers from plants in my neighborhood:

40 flowers from my neighborhood

I did not find 40 different flower species, though my son and I looked far and wide, but we have at least 40 flowers in this photo. Thank you to my co-worker Debbie Anderson for the lovely green fabric.

You can see past 40 garden object photos:

• 40 Garden Tools
• 40 nuts nibbled by squirrels
• 40 green leaves

Share Your 40 Garden Objects Photos!

During Garden for Wildlife month, I’m going to keep taking photos of 40 garden objects. Would you like to join me? What will you photograph? Share your photos at our Garden for Wildlife Facebook page for everyone to see.

And if you haven’t already certified your yard as wildlife-friendly, certify your yard with National Wildlife Federation this month!

Or you could call this blog, How to Garden for Wildlife in Zero Easy Steps.
 

A Hands-off Policy

In a poem that captivated my imagination when I was about 11 years old, Walt Whitman wrote, “I think I could turn and live with the animals, they are so placid and self contained.” At that time I wanted to live with the animals too, preferably with a pack of wolves (I had yet to recover from reading Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli stories, about a boy raised by wolves in India, a few years before). Now, thanks in large part to the wildish nature of my backyard, an NWF Certified Backyard Wildlife Habitat®, I find that I more or less do live with the animals, or rather, they have turned to live with me.

When my wife and I first moved into our suburban house in northern Virginia, I decided to leave our backyard alone. Heavily wooded, it lay in deep shade and backed to a larger woodland. I neither water nor fertilize my yards anyway, and this backyard was too shadowed for grass. In fact, it was covered by a massive moss bed that would turn emerald green in spring, before the trees grew their leaves. I wanted to leave it alone so I could see what nature had in store for it. I didn’t want to mow it, feed it, water it, plant it or anything else. I wanted to see what seeds the wind would plant, and which plants the sun and the clouds would let grow.

The result was the animals.
 

I Didn’t Build It, But They Came Anyway

Soon after I put up a bird feeder, American crows started coming in groups, giving me a sense of connecting with wildlife. Usually

Red foxes play in my backyard–the photo was shot through a window screen, hence the softness.

But it was a family of pileated woodpeckers that made me feel that my approach to gardening was working out. One day a pair of these woodpeckers—big as crows, heads topped with large red crests, shy and with a marked preference for woodlands—showed up at my feeder with two fledged offspring. They clamored over the feeder, the adults hammering into the suet blocks, and the young ones sliding awkwardly on the wooden roof of the feeder, still mastering the art of fighting gravity. Their presence gave my backyard an important seal of approval. If pileated woodpeckers were coming in, something was okay back there. But my gardening partner was deeply experienced: Nature has been gardening for wildlife since forever.

Squirrels and Deer

The tree squirrels are the main attraction, or at least the most ubiquitous, as might be expected—eastern grays. They are constantly in sight, but a few individuals stand out. One of these was a kamikaze that broke though my bird-feeder defense mechanism, a wobbly plastic sleeve mounted on the pole holding the feeder, depriving squirrels of any hope of climbing up to the food. It worked for about five or six years before one especially reckless squirrel took an aerial approach. He climbed to the roof of the house and flung himself out at least a dozen feet, as well as about 10 feet down, to the feeder. But the approach wasn’t foolproof. Once he miscalculated and rocketed straight past the feeder, overshooting by about 8 feet or so and crashing to the ground. Ah well, perhaps flying squirrels got their start that way. I moved the feeder a few feet farther from the house, putting an end to his escapades.

White-tailed deer in my backyard. Pardon the softness–this photo was shot through a window screen.

Squirrels get devoured once in awhile. One morning a red-shouldered hawk captured a gray squirrel and landed on the rail fence surrounding the yard to tear at the rodent for a few minutes before flying off. There’s nothing like a little predatory action to make a wildlife habitat seem truly certified. On another occasion, a red fox that denned in the woods gave frantic chase to a dodging squirrel beneath a rhododendron shrub and emerged with the squirrel limp in its vulpine jaws. Once a fox carrying a dead squirrel jumped up on the top rail of the fence and sat down. A second red fox joined it, looking on expectantly, but the first one kept the squirrel for itself.

Falling Trees

Two years ago, a developer—may Aldo Leopold curse him—cut down about two-thirds of the woods that lay beyond my backyard to build what he optimistically called luxury homes. The woods directly behind my yard were spared, but the spot where the red fox had its den beneath a fallen tree was not. I feared I’d seen the last of the fox.

But one spring day, not long after the cutting of the woods, the red fox emerged from under my deck. Far from disappearing, it had moved in with me. And it was in the company of three pups, which played on the patio.

Meanwhile, the fattest woodchuck I’ve ever seen had been roaming my backyard the previous summer and had spent the winter under my deck, burrowed in beneath the safe harbor of the deck’s wooden floor. I wonder what the woodchuck and the foxes made of one another that spring. Apparently not a meal, as the woodchuck continued to trundle around the yard in its magnificent obesity the following autumn.

As if to underscore that the animals had turned and lived with the humans, one morning I glanced out a window to see a white-tailed deer, a large house cat—a white and tan feline that must way 15 pounds or more—and a red fox standing by the rail fence as if at three points of a triangle not 10 feet apart. They looked at one other for several minutes. What went through their minds? To their consciousnesses must be added a fourth, that of the clothed ape at the window. Together we had captured a moment of acknowledgement, one to another, there in my Certified Wildlife Habitat®, where all the gardening is done by wind, rain, and sun.

Sign Up for Certified Wildlife Habitat®

photo of Joanna Pinneo by Arita Baaijens

Her first stop was the Mississippi State Veterinary Camp, where kids who aspire to become veterinarians get hands-on experience in the field.

“Vet Camp” from the May 2012 issue of Ranger Rick

“The Coolest Show on Earth” from the December/January 2013 issue

Joanna doesn’t just shoot pictures on these trips. She gets to know the wildlife, the natural surroundings, and the people in each of her stories before she ever reaches for her camera. Add Joanna’s great photographic eye, and you get a fantastic story every time.

“Bayou Kid” from the August 2012 issue of Ranger Rick

Congratulations, Joanna!

A bumblebee visits a coneflower in a Dayton, Ohio, backyard. Photo by Josh Mayes.

The following week, some U.S. activists made headlines by demanding the government ban a class of insecticides, neonicotinoids, after learning the European Union placed a moratorium their use due to concerns the chemicals are harming honeybees. (Imported to North America during the 1600s, honeybees are native to Europe.) Such concerns are understandable. Beyond their honey-making prowess, domestic honeybees are worth tens of billions of dollars to U.S farmers and beekeepers, who truck colonies back and forth across the country to pollinate commercial crops such as almonds, soybeans and watermelon.

A wild bee pollinates a pumpkin flower in an Ephraim, Utah, garden. Photo by Paul Gardner.

Why We Need Natives

Yet with all the attention being paid to honeybees, I wonder if we’re overlooking an even more important story: the critical role wild, native bees play pollinating plants both in natural and agricultural systems. And unlike domestic honeybees, these natives do it for free.

Mace Vaughan, pollinator program director at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, made precisely this point when I interviewed him recently for an upcoming story in  National Wildlife magazine. Bees are by far the most important pollinators in natural ecosystems, Vaughan told me. The insects also are essential to producing more than a third of all foods and beverages humans consume. “In the United States alone, native bees contribute at least $3 billion a year to the farm economy,” Vaughan said. “We grossly overlook the critical role these animals play.”

A bumblebee feeds on buttonbush at NWF’s office in Reston, Virginia. Photo by Laura Tangley.

Wild Pollinator Champs

I learned about that role a few years ago working on another article, “The Buzz on Native Pollinators,” that described research conducted by ecologist Rachel Winfree of Rutgers University. Winfree had just published in Ecology Letters results of a study finding that on 21 out of 23 farms in the Delaware Valley of New Jersey, wild bees fully pollinated commercially grown watermelons with no help from honeybees. “If we lost all honeybees in this region to colony-collapse disorder tomorrow,” she said, “between 88 and 90 percent of the watermelon crop would be fine.”

This February, Winfree and dozens of colleagues published results of much larger study in Science that looked at a diversity of fruit, seed, nut and other crops growing in 600 fields on all continents except Antarctica (where no food is grown). They found that visits by wild bees increased production at all study sites, compared with just 14 percent for managed honeybees. The upshot: Wild bees were more effective crop pollinators than were domestic honeybees.

If honeybees continue to decline—and many experts suspect they will—wild bees will become even more important in the future. Worrisome as colony-collapse disorder is, it may have had “a silver lining,” Scott Hoffman Black, the Xerces Society’s executive director, told me. “Now many more people know that their food is pollinated, and that we need native bees and other wild animals to do that.”

Help wild bees by growing native plants they need to thrive, then turn your yard into a Certified Wildlife Habitat® site. This month only, Garden For Wildlife Month, NWF will plant a native tree for every property certified.

Growing up in Baltimore city

That is why I was thrilled to be part of today’s announcement to make Baltimore a Community Wildlife Habitat® — the largest along the Chesapeake Bay. We don’t usually think of wildlife in cities but cities and surrounding areas are home to two-thirds of all North American wildlife species. National Wildlife Federation’s investment in Baltimore is not only about wildlife, though, it is about creating gardens that will make neighborhoods more beautiful, improve water quality of local streams and provide opportunities to get kids outside.

Like many people, my summer days were long and usually resulted in grass stains and being called in for dinner. Unfortunately, childhood has moved indoors during the last two decades. This is not only a lost connection to the outdoors but something that has contributed to the childhood obesity rate as well as declining creativity and concentration.

To address this issue we will focus on sustainable foods and healthy living at six Baltimore City public schools.  We plan to install edible food gardens on schoolyards and create opportunities for families to spend more time outdoors.

Baltimore has always been a city of for the birds, now we can make it official.  I can’t wait to add it to my list of special things about my hometown.

Tree swallows fighting over a perch. Photo by Bob Feldman. 2012 National Wildlife Photo Contest.

This Photo of the Day was donated by a participant in the annual National Wildlife Photo Contest. See more photos or sign up for the 43rd Annual National Wildlife Photo Contest.