All of this week’s Weekly Wow! images can be seen in the slideshow on the NANPA homepage at nanpa.org.
Showcase 2018 Top 100 winner: “Leap For Life, Baffin Bay, Nunavut” © Greg Cook.
The following Showcase images have been selected to appear on the NANPA home page for the week beginning Monday, October 15, 2018.
Least Bittern with Fish, Lakeland, Florida (Category: Birds) © Peter Brannon
© Angie Chappell
During a 1999 trip to Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, Nate Chappell became serious about nature photography, and in 2007 he and his wife Angie decided to start a wildlife photography tour and workshop company, Trogon Photo Tours, http://www.trogontours.net/. The first tour they led was to Angie’s homeland of Ecuador. Since then, Nate has led many more bird and nature photography tours to South America as well as tours to South Africa, Namibia and Thailand and dozens of photo workshops in the United States. He has been on the staff of Nature Photographer‘s online magazine since 2007. During the course of his travels, which have included trips to all continents except Antarctica, Nate has photographed more than 1,700 species of birds. Nate’s images have regularly placed in the NANPA Showcase, Audubon’s top 100, Share the View Denver Audubon Society contest and other nature photography competitions. His images have been published in books and regularly in online publications. His stock agencies include Minden Pictures, Birdimagency and Vireo. Nate has given many photography presentations at photo clubs and Audubon Society chapters and enjoys speaking to groups of photography and nature lovers. Continue reading
African elephants drinking , Chobe River, Botswana © Carol Grenier
Each week www.nanpa.org highlights 7 images from the top 100 submissions of the 2017 NANPA Showcase competition. This week’s images are by:
A Sword-billed Hummingbird (left) and a Chestnut-breasted Coronet battle over a hummingbird feeder. © Nate Chappell
Images and Text by Nate Chappell
Photographing hummingbirds in flight in countries like Ecuador and Costa Rica with natural light or with just one flash can be very difficult. The reason – most of these birds live in the cloud forest where there isn’t much light due to both shade from trees and cloud cover. One solution for this, which creates beautiful flight shots, is a multi-flash hummingbird setup. By setting up several slave flashes set to 1/32 or 1/16 power around a hummingbird feeder or flower you can produce stunning images of hummingbirds in flight. The reason is that the flashes are actually synching at speeds of 1/8000 to 1/12,000 of a second changing the effective shutter speed from what is on your camera – let’s say 1/200 sec to the lightning fast speed of the flashes synching. The key to this is having the flashes produce all of the light, otherwise you will be mixing ambient light and flash lighting. In that case the 1/200 sec shutter speed will affect the image by causing blurring in parts of it. So you need to have your camera’s exposure set to at least -3 or -4 stops below the ambient lighting.Another helpful component is to have an artificial background – often a large printed photograph held a few yards behind the mutli-flash setup. Continue reading