I have consistently been part of the Nature’s Best Photography Awards the last 7 years, but each year the photography is more amazing and the competition more difficult. I am honored to have even one image accepted and especially pleased that this year it was one of my underwater images. I love photographing dramatic landscapes, but I am equally excited by underwater and wildlife photography.

My underwater portrait of a Steller sea lion had an excellent 2010. Last summer, it received 2nd Place in the 2010 International Conservation Photography Awards in the Underwater Category and was featured on the promotional poster for the event. The poster was highly visible around Seattle all summer and even made a cameo appearance in an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. This image is currently Highly Honored in the Underwater Category in the 2010 Nature’s Best Windland Smith Rice International Awards and is one of 6 images featured on the cover of the current issue. I’ve also been told that it will be displayed in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum.

I created this image with my Canon 5D and Canon 17-40mm f4 lens with a +2 diopter inside an Ikelite 5D underwater housing with dual Ikelite DS 160 strobes attached with ULCS arms. The image initially required minimal processing, but I spent a lot of time cloning out backscatter in Photoshop.

I spent last Thursday and Friday photographing the sockeye salmon migration on the Adams River in central British Columbia. It was a miraculous sight to behold! Every 4 years the salmon return in huge numbers. However, they had not returned in as great a numbers as this year since 1910. The relatively short life cycle of the salmon is amazing when you consider that when they are born they swim in Shuswap Lake for a year before descending the Fraser River, migrating to the North Pacific Ocean, and finally returning to the river of their birth by swimming past orcas, fisherman, and the city of Vancouver to lay their eggs before dying. Though the young salmon never meet their parents, the accumulated biomass of their decaying parents nourishes the lake and thus the young salmon in their first year of life. The epic journey of the salmon is a story about determination and rebirth.

During my previous visit to the Adams River in 2002, I was just beginning my photography career. I had no idea what I was doing with an underwater housing. Plus, I was limited to only 36 exposures on a roll of film, which made it a real pain getting out of the water to change film. Using my Canon 5DmkII and 17-40mm f4 lens in my Ikelite 5DmkII housing with an 8″ dome port and dual DS 160 strobes, I am now able to create over 600 exposures on my 16GB Sandisk Extreme cards. My recent shoot was no longer limited by technology, but more by my patience and willingness to sit on my knees in the middle of the river while wearing my drysuit for hours at a time. I perfected my technique of shooting “blindly” by positioning myself in the river so that an eddy formed downstream of my body where the salmon could congregate and then I lowered my housing into the water to fire away at 4fps without looking through the viewfinder. Clearly, there was a lot of room for error in my positioning of my camera in this manner, because I had to delete a lot of images. I was inspired to create this image as the sun was just starting to rise over the tops of the trees in the late morning. The salmon were backlit, so I used my strobes for a bit of fill-flash. I did not have all my correct strobe arm parts with me, so I attached one strobe to my housing in the vertical position on the left side and hand-held my other strobe against my knee with my right hand. I was able to push the shutter release button with my left hand while balancing my housing against the river bottom. My strobes were set to -3 and the rest of this image was just pure luck that I guessed correctly of how to angle my camera. I do not like to do very much post-processing, but I had to digitally remove a significant amount of backscatter that was caused by my strobes illuminating the particulates in the water. My overall point in this long description is that there was a lot of technical challenges as well as blind luck required to create this beautiful image.

Update on 10/23/10-For anyone who might be concerned about my photography interfering with the salmon, I had a permit from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) that allowed me to be in the water.

Click here to purchase a print of this image.

Tonight is the awards ceremony for the 2010 International Conservation Photography Awards at the UW’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.  The exhibit opens to the general public tomorrow.  My image of a Steller sea lion underwater won 2nd Place in the Underwater category.  It is featured on most of the promotional materials, including this poster that is currently displayed all around Seattle.  I also received an Honorable Mention in the Landscape category for my Badwater Salt Crust Sunrise image from Death Valley National  Park.  I am really looking forward to seeing some of my friends, like Stuart Westmorland & Sean Bagshaw, and meeting a number of photographers that I only know online, including Todd Mintz, Jim Patterson, & David M Cobb.

This post is from guest blogger, freelance editor, & my lovely wife, Jennifer “Daisy” Cornforth. Please contact her with questions or for help editing your blog posts, Web content, articles, newsletters, or book projects.

As the wife of a photographer, I read a lot of photographers’ blogs.  Y’all have amazing stories to tell!  However, too often the meat of your story gets lost in a sea of weak verbs, redundant modifiers, passive constructions, and self-focused storytelling.  So after listening to me enumerate the faults of his and his colleagues’ writing, Jon suggested that I write a post to share my suggestions.

1. Read through your piece from the beginning and find the sentence that cuts to the quick. Delete all the gobbledygook that precedes that sentence.

2. Take out unnecessary words. Phrases like the fact that, it seemed that, I thought that, it felt like can almost always be dropped and result in clearer, stronger writing.  Likewise, most intensifiers can, and should, be dropped.  Very, so, really, extremely, completely and the like add very little to your story.

Not so hot: It is with great appreciation that I would like to announce…
Warmer: It is with great appreciation that I announce…

3. Excise the verb To Be. Is, was, were, and are bore the reader. There is usually a better way to construct a sentence than by using is.

So-so: There are two black eyes staring back.
Better: Two black eyes stare back.

4. Replace wussy verbs like to have and to be with action verbs.

Uncool: I was running through the woods, and I had my pack in my hands.
Better: I ran through the woods, clutching my pack.

5. Replace passive constructions with active ones. Passive constructions include phrases like “The suitcase was packed by me.” as opposed to “I packed the suitcase.”

Annoying: The truck was driven up the winding road and was parked by the ledge.
Far better: I drove the truck up the winding road and parked it by the ledge.

6. Weed out unnecessary, flimsy, and distracting adverbs. Take a discerning look at every –ly word on your piece.  Most adverbs either (1) prop up weak, overused, or vague adjectives or verbs, or (2) attempt (failingly) to provide additional information.  Better word choices and adequate factual information remove the need to beef up writing with adverbs.

Worse: The air was extremely hot.
Better: The air was scorching.  (Better word choice.)

Worse: We ran quickly up the trail.
Better: We scurried (dashed, bolted, flew, rocketed, planed) up the trail. (More precise word choice.)

Worse: The trail was completely impassable.
Better: Torrential rain had flooded the trail the day before day, knocking out all three footbridges, and leaving the trail impassable. (More information.)

7. Don’t tell the reader how to feel! The most consistent and irritating problem I see with photographers is that they tell the readers what to see, think, or feel, rather than showing the reader the scene and allowing the reader to generate their own feelings.  Phrases like you feel a surge of awe as you, it is breathtaking to see, and one is shocked to find weaken, rather than strengthen, the reader’s emotions.  Use words to paint the picture, and allow the reader to decide if it’s breathtaking!

Cloying: No one can deny the surge of sympathy you feel when you see these tiny chicks cheeping alone on the outcropping.
Better:  The tiny chicks cheep-cheep-cheep, abandoned on the outcropping.

8. Flesh out the story with details. Don’t say, “The road was long.” say “The road stretched 20 miles.” Don’t tell me “the sunset was very, very, extremely gorgeous,” describe how the light reflected off the surroundings, what the air smelled like, what the colors resembled, or how long it lasted.  Fight the temptation to cop-out with adjectives.  If you say something was short, the reader wants to know “How short was it?”

9. Use tropes to describe the indescribable. The images and environments in your stories are outside the realm of most people’s experience.  So help the reader “see” more clearly by using metaphors, similes, and other tropes they can relate to.

Run-of-the-mill: unbelievably pink sunset, beautiful fluffy clouds
Punchy: a flamenco pink sunset, clouds like cotton candy

10. End sentences with a bang. The natural emphasis of a sentence falls at the end, so make sure your last word is worth emphasizing.

I saw, leaping out if the river, hundreds of sockeye salmon. (Emphasizes salmon)
I saw hundreds of sockeye salmon leaping out of the river. (Emphasizes river)

Use the last word to set up your next sentence, to underline your point, or to crystallize the perfect image.

I just spent 4 days earning this spectacular sunrise image of Mount Robson.  I drove all day last Thursday from Seattle to Valemont, BC so that I could catch a helicopter ride on Friday morning to Berg Lake.  The weather started out OK, but quickly turned lousy.  I spent all day Saturday & Sunday in the campers shelter next to the wood stove, reading my book, and trying to stay warm while it was miserable outside.  Both nights I experienced some terrifying thunderstorms that deposited fresh snow on the mountains down to an elevation not too far above the lake.  I was getting grumpy and frustrated to say the least.  I called my dad using my Iridium satellite phone for reassurance about the weather.  The forecast said that it was going to be nice by Monday.  I kept my fingers crossed.  Sure enough, when my alarm went off yesterday morning, it was almost totally clear!  I probably should have set my alarm for 15 minutes earlier than I did because the first light was already hitting the top of the mountain.  I threw on my clothes and took off running to my “secret spot”.  I arrived just in time to set up my camera to capture this perfect reflection of Mount Robson with a lenticular cloud on it’s summit.

In case you do not keep up with me already on Facebook & Twitter, I posted a bunch of iPhone photos & videos yesterday from my trip.  I’m having a lot of fun and hope that you enjoy following my adventures.

Like I mentioned in my last post, I’ve got a lot going on personally right now that is requiring my attention, so I have not been able to keep up with my blog posts as much as I had hoped to. Since it seems harder and harder these days to get by on just my publishing income and art sales are slim due to the economy, I need to take better advantage of the tangential things related to my work to bring in some new business. I have been getting a fair bit of traffic to my website without really trying for my photo-workshop/tours. I need to refine and add more pages to that portion of my website. With my new found SEO skills, I am confidant that I can bring in some new clients. For example, take a look at my Google search results for Patagonia Nature Photography Workshops. I need to make my site come up high in every manner of searches for whatever type of photo workshops I want to offer. I also need to better define the tour products that I am currently offering.

I am also actively soliciting website SEO work from other photographers and small businesses. I’ve got a few clients that I have already sold on my SEO skills, now I just need to work on their sites. I also intend to build a web page for that aspect of my business, because I believe it is so important for every website to take advantage of the free advertising that comes from the search engines.

Here is another great image from my recent Steller sea lion shoot. This sea lion is biting the front of my dome port. Even with the dome and a +2 diopter, you can still see that it is a little soft around the mouth, but is that close or what? This images was created with my Canon 5D digital SLR in an Ikelite underwater housing with 2 Ikelite DS160 strobes set on Manual to -4, at f4 and 1/125 second.

For any of my regular visitors, I have to apologize for not keeping up with my promise to try and post more the past few weeks. The economic uncertainty that we are all facing has started to demand my attention, as well as some personal family issues. I canceled my trip to return to Argentina this week, and am trying to work on some other projects for the time being as I try and sort everything out that is going on. It might be awhile, so I am just trying to regroup and focus on what I can do for my business and family at this time. Some of the bigger concessions that I am trying to make include selling my boat up in Alaska and eliminating my film expense by going all digital. I’m looking into trading in my Pentax 67 and Canon 5D so I can upgrade to the new Canon 5D mkII. I’ve got some new projects in the works to lead more photography workshops next year, so it only makes sense that I should shoot digital so that I have something to show to my clients, rather than waiting for my film to get processed after the trip. I think that I will keep my Fotoman 612 panoramic camera to still shot some film once in awhile, because I really like the detail I get in my larger prints.

I’ve got some more editing to do from my recent dive trip with the Steller sea lions, but this is one of my favorite images. I shot about 2600 images over 3 days during 8 hours of diving. I deleted at least 1800 in my first cut. Now I need to process the top 40 or so images from the shoot. This images was created with my Canon 5D digital SLR in an Ikelite underwater housing with 2 Ikelite DS160 strobes set on Manual to -4, at f4 and 1/125 second.

I have had a great week scuba diving with the Steller sea lions. This is my 4th visit to Hornby Island, but the first time that I have chartered the resort with only 3 other photographers. I have been mobbed by 20-40 sea lions on 5 out of my 6 dives. I routinely disappear into a ball of sea lions as they gently bite on my drysuit covered legs and pull on the back of my wetsuit hood! When it gets too much, I just sink to the bottom and hold my camera over my head until they lose interest and go bother someone else. It is impossible to take pictures in the middle of that much chaos. They are constantly chasing each other and dive bombing me from the surface. I think they are having as much fun as I am. This is one of my favorite images of a juvenile blowing bubbles at me underwater. It was shot with my Canon 5D digital SLR, 17-40mm f4 lens, B+W +2 diopter, Ikelite underwater housing with an 8″ dome port and two DS160 strobes set to -4 at f5.6 and 1/200 second.

My buddy Paul and I went up to Nanaimo last week for a few days. I have been wanting to do some cold water diving for awhile. I also just bought a new 8″ dome port for my Ikelite housing that I wanted to try out. Paul has the same boat that I do, a 22′ C-Dory, so we took it on the ferry with his big truck and wasted a lot of gas. After all of the expense and effort to get up there, the underwater visibility was less than 5′. It sucked. I managed to get this one image (which is not that great in my opinion) of a harbor seal staring at its reflection in my dome. Even when the images are not that great, it is always amazing to swim with marine animals. I will have to try again when the visibility is better next winter.

Please visit more of my Harbor Seal Photography.

Stumble It!