Wisent Adventure with Rollei Rock Solid STORY Rollei GmbH & Co. KG Tarpen 40, Gebäude 7b D-22419 Hamburg CEO: Thomas Güttler Author and Photos: Alexander Ahrenhold Tel. +49 (0)40 / 7 97 55 71-0 Fax +49 (0)40 / 7 97 55 71-60 welcome@rollei.com www.rollei.com
Wisent photo safari in Poland s white wilderness The hope of finding wisent living in the wild in their natural environment in Poland drove me and my colleague Florian on photo safari into Europe s last virgin forest, in the Bialowieza National Park where both large tracts of forest and sizeable numbers of wisents were awaiting us... But let s tell the story from the very beginning: The two of us left Germany for our photo safari in an old car in a violent snow-storm, which gave us reason to hope that in Poland too there would be lots of snow on the ground (making for good photo scenes, we thought), but the further east we drove, the less snow there was. The Bialowieza National Park, which is located in eastern Poland on the border with Belarus, is home to around 1200 wisent, which can be found here in the wild. After a 14-hour drive over hill and dale, through a police check-point and taking occasional wrong turns on poorly negotiable forest roads, we reached our destination. A meagre little cabin that we were now to call home but that contained all that we needed to survive. First encounter with the wisent The first day began with an exploration of our surroundings. We got up early in order to see as much as possible and set off hiking through nature. Thanks to good preparation and prior research (important for any photo safari) into the habitual haunts of the wisent, the first impressive encounter was not long in coming. We could already see them from afar, because their physical size is staggering. After a careful approach, we stood face to face for the first time with these prehistoric giants (up to 3 m in length, 2 m tall at the shoulder and weighing up to more than one ton). 2
The Rollei tripods with telephoto lenses were rapidly set up so that the cameras shutter releases were soon rattling and very quickly we had taken the first pictures of the wisent. However, their reputation for being able to become highly aggressive very suddenly, kept us at a distance at first, and the animals too seemed to prefer it that way. They became nervous even when we approached slowly and crouching down. Fortunately, with our 800 mm telephoto lenses we didn t need to get very close up to the giants to shoot the first full-frame images. Unfortunately, the day was not blessed with fine weather conditions, and so I decided to take full-body shots of the wisent from close to the ground using the Rollei Rock Solid Alpha Carbon. Despite the heavy weight, ground-level photography without camera shake is no problem when using the Alpha. The ability to set up the Alpha in a very low position also enabled me to create a few images with misting in the foreground. I obtained this misting effect by consciously including in the picture, between subject and lens, elements that intruded between them into the picture. By setting the focus range on just the subject, the grass and snow then became a fuzzy blur and shrouded the edges of the subject (especially the legs) in a beautiful mist. In our case, the small amount of snow also helped to maintain this misting effect. Thus our first day went by in a flash, because by the early afternoon the light was also too weak to allow shooting to continue. We spent the evening and a large portion of that night getting the cabin nicely warm, eating pasta with pesto sauce and talking about what our first impressions were and the pictures we had taken. 3
Up closer to the wisent The next few days we spent looking for the wisent and approaching them ever more closely. Granted, the animals flight distance was quite small in comparison to what would be considered normal in the wild, but nevertheless, the distance was often still really too great to take decent pictures, even for the big telephoto lenses. At first, a healthy respect stopped us from approaching to a distance that was dan gerous. After a while, we learned that the males were markedly more tolerant than the females, which were travelling in large groups with their young. Most of these groups of females that we encountered consisted of around 30 animals, but it is said that they can be considerably bigger. By contrast, the males ran around in small groups or singly, and in the course of time they sometimes allowed us to approach to within a few yards. After a few days, what had been at first a very uneasy feeling changed in part into a somewhat reckless routine. There are some field reports that say that once a bull wisent is heading for a certain individual it rarely deviates from its path. For us, it would probably have been time to quickly call it a day because there were neither trees nor any other objects within reach to offer protection. Thankfully, however, the bulls stayed calm and we were able to take our pictures 4
Experience and tips for a photo safari in the snow Over the 14 days that we spent there, we managed to shoot almost all the subjects that we had planned, including allowing for the season of the year, for the photo safari. Thus, in the second week, after initially grey weather and bad light, we were finally able to photograph the wisent in a snowstorm. However, this placed certain demands on us. The fact that our camera buttons froze over and our gloves were stuck frozen to the lenses was the least of the problem. No, it was rather that, photographically speaking, it was not very easy to find the correct lighting or brightness for the image. It so happens that when there is snow, everything is white who would have thought it! Yet that brings with it one big difficulty. In the automatic mode, the camera normally tries to create a balanced image. This means that it tries to maintain the bright and the dark areas of an image in equal proportions, thus creating a neutral photo that is neither too bright nor too dark. In a normal lighting situation this produces well-balanced pictures that can be remedied, if need be, by making slight corrections. With snow, however, what happens is that the majority of the image emits a great deal of light. The camera, which now however wants to create a balanced image, ensures that the shutter speed is reduced and the picture becomes darker overall. This makes the wisent, which possibly takes up only a small portion of the picture, almost black and the effect is expressionless, almost without any detail. At the same time, the snow becomes dark and looks dirty. In other words, you may as well throw the picture in the dustbin. Now, if you are taking photos using A mode on a Nikon or AV mode on a Canon the shutter speed is selected automatically in this mode then you should go well over the exposure compensation into the + in order to make the overall picture brighter and have a more natural finish. With the wisent, I was often in an aperture stop range of +1 as regards exposure compensation so as to get a well-lit image. My personal tip, however, is to shoot directly in manual mode and to select the shutter speed so that the image is brightly enough lit that you get the animal properly illuminated, and the snow doesn t outshine it. Here it is worthwhile to take a look at the histogram that you can have displayed on modern cameras. If the curve borders the edge on the right it is too brightly lit; if it borders on the left, it is too dark. Depending on the subject, it may make sense to work with grey filters or graduated grey filters in order to balance out the disparities. 5
Autofocus, eyes, balance the white and never give up! Now if heavy snowflakes are falling you are confronted with the next problem. The autofocus, which as a rule takes its job very seriously, tries to focus on each individual flake, and this can make a mess of quite a few situations. In principle, then, it is recommended to just turn off the tracking autofocus, because then the focus remains on the desired subject as long as the shutter release remains half-way depressed. Should this still lead to failures, it is advisable to take matters into your own hands and focus manually. Sometimes this takes a bit of practice but it is better than just giving up when the snowfall becomes too extreme. The falling flakes also sometimes cover up parts of the animal that are crucial to the image, such as the eyes, for example. In my opinion, the eyes are very important in a photograph and should, on the one hand be given the greatest definition while of course being as completely visible as possible. It was often the case that the eyes or at least one of the wisent s eyes was covered by a flake in the snow flurry, and so it is recommended in this case to take a few more shots so as to avoid this problem. If the picture then still doesn t look as you would like in terms of colour, it is wise to correct the white balance. Those of you who photo graph in raw image format may now perhaps think that things may go much better subsequently on the PC, but I prefer to have reasonable colours already in the field. In this way I get an image that is as realistic as possible and I don t have to evoke it from memory when I m sitting at home in front of the computer. In our case, it mostly turned out that the white balance was set at 5200K because this made the blue colours of the drab, overcast days clearly visible. And if in addition the shutter speed is set so that it is just fast enough to get images that are still sharp and the ISO and aperture fit, then there is nothing left to prevent you from getting good pictures, even in snow. I can recommend the trick with the misting using the deep-focus camera angle (see above). With the help of this practical knowledge, during our photo safari, the snow and the photogenic wisent rewarded us with some fine photos that are really quite impressive. To make the long evenings more entertaining, we used the few clear nights that we had on our photo safari for shooting landscapes. But more of that in the next report! 6