Jigokudani Monkey Park Timelapse from Josh Anon on Vimeo.

One of the neat moments from here was when a monkey decided to reach out and touch my lens. I had actually picked up a cold before coming to Japan, and between the sulfurous hot springs and the fishy food, not being able to smell anything turned out to be a good thing.

Next, we headed up north to Hokkaido, stopping first in Tsurui. Here, we were shooting hooded cranes at the Otawa-bashi bridge, the Akan international crane center, and the crane sanctuary. But boy was it cold (-27°C one morning)! One of the highlights for me was getting this shot of eagles fighting in mid-air. I also took this timelapse of the stars over the Otawa (or Otowa) bridge.

Otowa Bridge Timelapse from Josh Anon on Vimeo.

From there, we headed to Lake Kussharo to photograph whooper swans, and it was pretty amazing listening to the ice on the lake creek and re-freeze as the sun set.

Next up, we went up north to Rausu to photograph a Blakiston’s fish owl and stellar sea eagles. Unfortunately, the seas were too rough and the ice was too far out in the channel to shoot eagles, but we got some great shots of the Blakiston’s fish own. There was an incredible wind/snow storm one morning as well, and even the swans had trouble in it.

On our last day, we woke up early, shot sunrise, and raced back to Kushiro to catch our flight to Tokyo. We went out shooting Tokyo that evening, and ended the trip on a great note with some Nepalese food.

Obviously, still images won’t cut it anymore. Photographers need to start thinking like cinematographers and visual storytellers, and fortunately new DSLRs with video capabilities are giving us the tools. When shooting, we need to think what it’ll take to put or image into motion to convey something. If our exposure’s faster than 1/60s (typically the closest we can get to 1/48s, which is the right exposure for a film-ish look at 24fps with a 180 degree shutter), consider shooting overcranked at 60fps or beyond to really slow down and capture the action. Or use a ND filter to slow the shutter speed down so that we can keep a shallow depth of field. If we need a slow exposure, think about timelapse. I think this timelapse video I did of the northern lights with my 1Ds is more dynamic than a still shot. Needing multiple frames for HDR won’t be as much of an issue as sensors become capable of capturing more and more dynamic range, and face it, we don’t leave our images in 32bit mode anyway–we tone map them down to a range that can be displayed or printed.

I suspect a new type of market will emerge for these moving images. You typically can’t tell a full story with just one clip. I suspect clip packages, with lots of coverage (different shots from different angles) designed to cut well together, will become the new common item we sell so that ad designers/editors can cut together the perfect sequence to accompany each article or advertisement.

Here’s why this is all good for photographers–it’s still hard to do video well! There are far more elements to video than just getting your exposure right. While I personally think that lighting with continuous hot lights is easier than flash, I also think it’s far harder to setup a good-looking moving camera, especially in the field, than it is to blast away at 10fps and pick the one image that works. High-quality video content is still out of reach of most people, and I think that people still value it.

Lastly, let’s think about software. I don’t think that Final Cut will become the new Photoshop, as I don’t think photographers will be responsible for cutting their own sequences. However, I suspect that photographers will become well-versed in Motion to take their clips to the next level. I very much hope that future versions of Aperture (yes, I’m biased, I don’t care about Lightroom) will let us treat a Quicktime file the same way we do a RAW file, making albums and stacks with them, and even applying adjustments to each clip. I also hope that PhotoShelter will let me treat a mov file just like a still photo, generating small previews, adding watermarks, and doing all the other wonderful management things I’ve gotten used to.

That’s my prediction. Your thoughts?

Two Gentoo penguins check out the Gura Gear bar

The point of the split design is that you can store two fully-assembled cameras, one on each side, and get them out quickly on the safari jeep. In practice, I found that I didn’t want to readjust the multiple dividers I had setup for my lens/filter side of the bag, but I still had one side that I could quickly stash and retrieve a camera from, which is similar to what I did with my old LowePro (I had space in the center for a camera and lens).

One side of my Kiboko

Both while trying to fit the 500mm lens in and while working in the field with gloves on, I quickly came to realize that my absolute favorite feature of the bag is its high-quality zippers. They’re easy to open and close and quite solidly built. The strap system is also well-designed (although still a tad too large if you have a shorter torso), especially given how light the bag is. And let me tell you, it’s nice to have a light bag!

Of course the lightness also means it’s not very padded, and I found it useful to place an extra divider at the bottom of the bag on each side so that when it’s upright (which is how it’s usually sitting), there’s extra protection.

If you’re hiking, there’s also an included rain shield, which works quite well, although I wish it had a snap of some sort instead of just tight elastic, so that I felt more sure it wasn’t going to accidentally come off.

In reality, these gripes are small, and for its lightness and functional design, as well as its looks, I definitely recommend giving this bag a try!

On this trip, I spent over 45 hours on airplanes and another 15 or so in airports. Plus, a number of our shark excursions were cancelled due to big storms, and there wasn’t much to do in the distant areas we were staying. So, I ended up reading 5 different books on the trip (side note: I highly recommend Pillars of Earth and The Devil in the White City), and they weighed less than what one thick paperback weighs. Since I keep my Kindle’s wireless connection off, the battery lasted just fine for all this reading over two weeks, and the e-ink screen made it so that I didn’t feel any eye strain.

When you first use a Kindle, the brief flash of the screen as you turn a page is weird (it’s much faster than on the Kindle 1) , but you quickly get used to it. Plus features like the built-in dictionary make me perfectly willing to accept the tradeoff of the screen flash.

While most Kindle books on Amazon are a couple of bucks cheaper than their new paper counterparts, I think it’ll take a while for those savings to make up for the cost of buying the Kindle (especially if you normally get your books from a library or buy them used). However, the ability to have so many books with me with no weight penalty has made the Kindle completely worth the cost.

Over the years, I’ve shot whales a number of times. It’s always great to see a whale breach, but let me tell you, in hindsight, a whale breach seems slow. You have time to see it in the distance, get your camera up, focus, and shoot. On the other hand, sharks are insanely fast. By the time you register that you saw a breach, the shark’s gone. That challenge made shooting them infinitely exciting! We joked that we were trying to photograph seals, but the pesky sharks kept jumping up and eating them.

Being in the shark cage is also exciting (oh boy was that water cold, especially on the day that we had record low temperatures). As crazy as it sounds, you find yourself sitting there going “hello shark, please come closer and swim at me with your mouth open.” One shark did pass so closely that I decided it was smarter to pull my hands back into the cage. Our boat’s crew was really skilled at grabbing the shark’s attention!

We were also fortunate because for a few days, there was a very large school of dolphins (thousands) in the water, and it was rather amazing to see them swimming along with the boat, porpoising from right next to the boat out to the horizon.

Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t terribly cooperative, and about half of our shark excursions were cancelled due to swell and storms. But such is nature photography, and it’s probably better to not go than to have a boat of heaving passengers.

The next part of the adventure were a few nights in the Shamwari Game Reserve (about an hour drive from Port Elizabeth). Honestly we were fortunate enough with all the wildlife that we saw with our ranger, Ben, that it didn’t completely feel real.

The first day, we encountered a herd of elephant (with a 2-week old baby no less), and one of them decided to check me out. He stuck his trunk about a foot from me and was looking me right in the eye as I sat in the back of the safari truck. While I’m rolling camera (I was shooting a lot of footage using a 5D MkII on this trip), the ranger’s saying “don’t move.” I seem to be popular with elephants (must be my deodorant) because a couple days later, another elephant decided to check me out, too, and he got so close to the truck that he inadvertently punctured the cloth side with his tusk!

Each time we went out, we found something great. The absolute highlight was a morning that started with an hour with a leopard and its cub out in the open. The leopard even passed so close that we could reach out and touch it (of course we didn’t) twice! That morning continued on, ending with watching a lion and its cubs eat a fresh kill. Ironically, and completely by chance, every time we saw a kill, the animal that the predator killed was on the menu for dinner.

As a side note, if you go to Shamwari, let me recommend that you ask for Ben to be your ranger. He’s a very smart, easy-going guy who will explain to you both how waterholes start with an elephant’s footprint and what differs between black and white rhino dung.

The last stop in our journey was an abandoned German diamond mining town in Namibia at Luderitz called Kolmanskuppe. This town was built in the early 1900s and then abruptly abandoned, and the desert is gradually reclaiming the land. It’s worth seeing and provides some very interesting still life photos, especially now with HDR photography, but boy is getting there an adventure!

Windhoek is one of the big airports in Namibia. Unfortunately it’s an 8-9 hour drive to Luderitz from there. Luderitz, however, has its own airport, and Air Namibia flies there once a day. Well, the plane that took us to Luderitz held 19 passengers, had no overhead bins, had a window that was falling off on the inside, and had some metal shearing off the outside of the engine. It also listed 3 major “features” of the plane right by the door on the outside, including “air conditioning” and this new-fangled contraption called “radar.”

Despite the physical condition of the plane, the flight was perfectly fine. But I should mention here for other travelers that Namibia’s time is 1-hour behind South African time. We found that out when we arrived at the airport to return home. And here we all thought we were lucky, getting to sleep in until 7. Mealtimes were actually a bit odd, though not because of the time difference. Each restaurant we went to served enough food to feed at least 2 people as a standard portion. It’s weird to realize that there are people starving in the country, and you feel very guilty when you don’t eat your whole meal.

However, despite that dose of reality, everything worked out well, and we got some great images! The trip was everything we hoped it would be, and boy are we itching to go shoot sharks again!

Near our hotel, in Santiago.

Santiago was quite hot, easily 80-90 degrees, but it was my first time in South America and a neat experience. Appropriately enough, right outside our hotel, there was an apartment building with a large Canon ad on top. The group of us traveling on to Stanley met up here (for the most part), and we had a great dinner at Como Agua Para Chocolate.

The next morning, we got up early and headed to the airport. After running back and forth and dealing with ticket agents who really didn’t speak English, we made it into the airport. There was a mad dash onto the plane, and it was quite full. The plane makes a couple stops, one of which would be in a popular cruise ship port (hence why the plane was full). On the way out, we passed over amazing mountains by Santiago as well as Patagonia.

Mountains and fog by Santiago

Finally, we landed in Stanley. And boy did we land in style, at the Royal Air Force base, Mount Pleasant. There were enlisted men basically telling us not to glance in certain places, and I’ve never seen a more intimidating customs stand. Once we all made it through, nearly everyone from the plane was loaded onto a bus and driven to Stanley to our different hotels. Along the way, we passed different areas that had been roped off due to land mines still left over from the ‘82 war.

Roughly 3,000 people live in the Falklands, and 2,000 or so of them are in Stanley. This small capitol city has a plethora of colored roofs, and two satellite dishes that handle all communications to and from the islands. It’s quite amazing. The Union Jack is pretty much everywhere, and we had rather British food at our hotel.

During the summer, the temperature is roughly 50-60°, but it’s frequently windy (I was wishing I’d been able to bring my kiteboarding gear!). What’s amazing is how windswept and treeless the islands are. The only trees we saw were ones people imported and took careful care of. The natural vegetation is all low-lying shrubbery.

FIGAS weighs everything that goes onto the plane.

Saunders is a really amazing island. It’s one of the largest islands in the Falklands yet completely privately owned by Tony and David Pole-Evans, and it’s mainly a sheep farm. After we landed, we had a quick stop at the Settlement, and then we took a 10-mile, hour long trip in Land Rovers to an area called The Neck. The Neck is an incredibly beautiful area with a white, sandy beach and colonies of gentoo, magellanic, rockhopper, and king penguins, to say nothing of the albatross and other wildlife. There’s a port-a-cabin that the islanders have improved over the years. It slept all 8 of us (plus a few bugs, much to the horror of one of our group members), had hot water (there’s 1 bathroom, and you do shower out of a bucket), and even has electricity via a generator now! The 5 nights we were here were completely worth it (thankfully we all got along quite well!), and we had some of the best shooting of the trip here, despite some bad weather.

The beach at The Neck

The last day, despite wind gusts around 60mph, FIGAS flew in the next group, and the island crew brought them to the cabin to trade places with us. But going back to The Settlement meant that we’d get to stay in a really nice converted farm house with a shower! Plus we had great home-cooked food from Biffo and Suzan. Probably the most amusing part, though, was when Suzan mentioned how she gets up early every day to milk a cow, and my dad asked if he could try his hand at milking. Apparently he didn’t realize how…organic the experience would be.

A baby gentoo penguin and me

Before we knew it, our time on Saunders had come to an end, and we jumped on a plane to take a short hop to Carcass Island. Carcass’ owner, Rob McGill, greeted us enthusiastically at the runway and took us to their guest house for smoko.

One of the great highlights on Carcass was visiting an incredibly large King Cormorant colony. What was very weird to me is that off to the side, there was a huge field of abandoned clay pots, which the cormorants build to make their nests in. It was very odd, wondering where all those birds went.

The other great highlight was taking a boat trip to West Point Island. There was an amazing albatross colony on West Point where the birds were flying so close I ended up doing flight photography with a 16mm lens!

The albatross were buzzing our heads!

Seemingly in the blink of an eye, our time on Carcass came to an end, and we headed back to Stanley in preparation for our flight back to Santiago. Yet we had one last adventure planned, a trip to Volunteer Point, where there’s the largest colony of King penguins outside of South Georgia.

After a two-hour Land Rover ride from Stanley, we arrived at this rather amazing rookery (you always smell penguins before you see them). We were very fortunate because there was a group of roughly 3-week old chicks resting on their parents feet, and we were about ten feet away from them. They really look like little dinosaurs! There was also an elephant seal dining on penguins. Although we saw the seal come onto land, we didn’t see him catch a penguin at all, and the penguins were definitely quite wary of the water!

The King Penguin colony at Volunteer Point. The sign says 'Penguins Only'