A Raft of Sea Otters


A Newsletter by Chuq Von Rospach
V1#12 - Jun-2019

Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS. As I write this, it's the first of June, and my main reaction to typing that is where the heck has this year gone? Time seems to be flying. I seem to be accomplishing a lot of stuff but I still feel terribly behind schedule for some reason.

Last night was the Santa Clara Valley Audubon Spring Birdathon award dinner, where we all got together to have a bit of food, a bit of fun, and to recognize the people who helped make this annual fundraiser succeed. Our goal every year is $40,000 and this year we just missed at $39,700. It's my second year running the organizing committee and I'm thrilled that we raised more money, had more people involved and in general it ran a lot more smoothly. I'm already starting 2020 planning with a list of things to research for possible improvements. It think we can do even more next year.

A new look for 6FPS

I've done the new look for 6FPS, bringing it in line with the new site designs. I'd love to hear your thoughts. I think it's cleaner and more readable, and should work fine on tablets and phones. If you run into problems, please drop me an email and let me know.

Upcoming travel

I have some travel coming up I wanted to pass along, in case I head into your area where we can try to grab a coffee and chat or maybe go out with the cameras together for a shoot:

  • Week of July 15: I'll be headed to Boulder, Colorado for business meetings. The schedule is quite full but perhaps I can sneak out for a quick coffee.

  • August: Laurie and I are finally planning a trip back to Victoria B.C. to visit a favorite city -- for the first time in about a decade. The location is set, the itinerary isn't, although I know we'll cross via the Coho, as always...

  • September: I've finally pulled the trigger and I've booked myself into a photography workshop -- with Art Wolfe. It'll be in the Olympic National Park area, and I must say I'm really looking forward to diving in and pushing myself in new directions here.

You'll hear more about Victoria and the Wolfe workshop later, and I expect to go into some detail about how that workshop turns out after.

On with the Show!

And with that, on with the show! And thank you for being part of this.

What's New?

Here is what I've written since the last issue:

  • Focus Stacking with the Fuji X-T3

  • Focus Stacking: Helicon Focus vs. Photoshop

  • What's going to Happen After You're Gone?

Email This

Photos: A Raft of Sea Otters

I'm taking an online photography class from David duChemin, and through that, involved in a community of alumni in his classes. Part of this involves sharing images for critique by my peers, and part of this has David issuing challenges nudging people into trying different things photographically.

I got involved in large part for that second piece, because I felt like my work had stagnated into endless repetitions of the same kind of things, none of which I was happy with.

One thing David talks about a lot is the idea of the body of work, where you bring together a set of images around a topic or an idea. I tend to think of them as portfolios, but perhaps that word adds a bit too much seriousness to them.

It's something I've tried to do in the past and generally hated the results, but David has me trying again, and I'm much happier with the results now. Mostly, I think, he's helped me see that I was simply thinking too hard and psyching myself out trying to build these things. Relaxing and letting them build themselves around something has been working a lot better for me.

This was the core of the idea around my redesign of my Smugmug site: it's a place for a set of bodies of work. An issue or two ago I showed off the one I did about the Elephant Seals of Piedras Blancas, for instance.

I've just finished a new set about another species I love photographing, the Sea Otter. I call that A Raft of Sea Otters where I try to show off some of the personality and behaviors of this water-going mammal -- believe it or not, it's a sea-going weasel.

They are fascinating, social creatures that spend most of their time in the water in social groups called rafts. If you sit and watch them, you'll see them doing lots of fun and interesting behaviors, whether's it's hunting for mollusks on the seabed and bringing them back to the surface to be opened by pounding them on a rock they balance on their chest, or the mom otters hauling pups around, or a pair deciding to play fight and swimming around roughhousing with each other.

The sea otter, unlike seals and sea lions, is not insulated by a layer of blubber, but by their fur coat, which is incredibly dense and which they fluff air into to act as an insulator. This is a reason why they spend so much time preening -- they need to maintain this insulation layer.

My favorite shooting locations are Morro Bay and Moss Landing Harbor, which is at the mouth of Elkhorn Slough. Both are home to good-sized and growing populations of otters, and both are places where they are often easily viewable from the shore.

My new collection contains some of my favorite otter images over the years and I hope you enjoy it (and them).

Get out of your comfort zone

One of the things I'm doing right now -- and the Focus Stacking articles I wrote are tied into this -- is spending time with a desktop photography mini studio here in the home office and learning how to set up and shoot in a studio situation.

For someone who normally shoots outside, in natural light, with a 500 mm lens with subjects who are normally trying to fly away from me every time I move, shifting into an environment where I'm playing with a 60mm macro lens, extension tubes, background screens, lighting setups and really close, detailed looks at small objects, this is frankly way out of my comfort zone.

And that's the point. If you let yourself get comfortable with what you're doing, you stagnate. You have to keep pushing yourself to experiment, to try new things, to find new ways to innovate and learn. That was a reason behind my Yosemite trip where I went after more intimate landscape rather than the epic works, and that's why I'm doing this macro work. Because it's new, and scary, and a bit stressful and forcing me to try stuff I'm not sure I can do well yet.

And what's coming out the far side of this pipeline is sometimes crap, but sometimes really interesting, and I'm figuring out how I want it to look. When I did the focus stack tests, it was with really basic lighting that got the job done. I'm now starting to experiment with how to light a subject well and make it interesting in the image.

The photo below is a current experiment, and of course, I chose something with shiny surfaces and specular spots, because why make my life easy?

Because that's the point. When I figure out how to light this bear well (hint: diffusion fabric) I will know how to light pretty much everything.

And I'm having fun, which I think hasn't always been the case with the camera in recent years.

This is also why I am taking the duChemin class online, and the Wolfe workshop this fall. It's partly to push me in new directions and break out of the old habits I wasn't particularly enjoying -- much less producing good work with -- but also, because I have started pushing in new directions, I'm enjoying the experimenting while liking the results.

I've actually had doing a photography workshop on my to-do list for about three years now and I've held off, because I didn't think my mindset or my photography would really benefit. Coming back from that Yosemite trip I realized I'd broken the block that was making me think all my landscape work was crap (because it was) and I was back in a happier, more productive mindset with the camera. And then I noticed Wolfe had set up that fall workshop, which was one I'd considered last year and held off because I knew my attitude was in the wrong place -- and I jumped at it.

We will see how it goes, but I'm feeling much better about what I'm doing with my camera in years, and I think it's just the start of what I hope is an innovative and fun new cycle of generating really good images.

For Your Consideration

About 6FPS and Chuq

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (chuqvr@gmail.com).

Coming out about every two weeks, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

See you soon!


And with that, I'll see you in a couple of weeks with the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along.

Until then, take care, and have fun.

Chuq

Copyright © 2019 Chuq Von Rospach, All rights reserved.