Pierre Steenberg

Animal expressions

October 08, 2023 • Leave a Comment

Yes, animals have expressions too. Their expressions change from when they are relaxed to when they are on high alert. Or a predator has a different look on its face when it finds and hunts its pray from that of just resting in the shade. A Heron or an Eagle has a focused look as it targets its pray. If we can capture the image when they wear their...

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Patience with birds

October 01, 2023 • Leave a Comment

My brother and I went to photograph a beach. The sky was cloudless and the beach did not seem to hold promise for great photos during sunset. As we were walking to the beach we saw these black birds being very active in an area between where we parked and the beach. So we decided to stay where the action was, with the birds. We often think that bi...

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Get unique and different perspectives, even of animals

September 24, 2023 • Leave a Comment

As photographers we analyze a scene. We don't want to photograph an iconic scene, that has been photographed a million times before, in the same way as everybody else did. We seek a different angle, a different perspective, different conditions. We want our image to stand out, to be impactful. Often, we achieve this by shooting the scene from a dif...

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Animal behavior and interaction

September 17, 2023 • Leave a Comment

There are some great images of animals posing. But often, the best images display their behavior and the interaction between animals. Which image do you prefer, an Eagle sitting on a stick or of the Eagle catching a fish? Which would be better, a photograph of a bird on a stick or of that bird in flight? The images that show their behavior and inte...

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Get eye level with animals and birds

September 10, 2023 • Leave a Comment

You have heard me say this over and over again. This is literally the best advise I can give you with regards to photographing birds and animals. Being at eye level with them creates opportunities to actually make eye contact with them. It connects the viewer with the animal. Somehow it places you there with the animal. It helps you to experience w...

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Searching for Birds

September 03, 2023 • Leave a Comment

The other day I visited the Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center near Lincoln, Nebraska. I picked the day because it was going to be overcast. There was no particular plan in place. No prior research was done. No specific target bird was chosen. I just basically walked around trying to find some birds to photograph. It was not easy. For some reason...

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Frogs

August 27, 2023 • Leave a Comment

Tree frogs are exotic, cute and colorful. Of course no one would turn their attention to common frogs. No one in their right mind would lie in the mud, photographing such boring creatures. Well, I do! I will let you decide if I am in my right mind or not. I picked an overcast day deliberately. Soft light was needed for the frogs. I wanted to photog...

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Show nature

August 20, 2023 • Leave a Comment

We often seek nice and clean backgrounds for our subjects. I advocate this too. It makes your subject stand out and "pop." It looks so professional, it really does. From time to time, however, I am tempted to not take the "perfect image" and rather to show my subject in nature, where and as they live. Perhaps it tells more of a story. Perhaps it gi...

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Sun-stars for balance

August 13, 2023 • Leave a Comment

I was having a hard time creating a composition on the beach which was balanced. It seems no matter how I composed the scene, the one side was always heavier than the other. Object have visual weight. If all the objects are on one side of the image that side will weigh more and the image will not be balanced. There are a few things we can do to cre...

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Waterfalls in harsh light

August 06, 2023 • Leave a Comment

McArthur-Burney Falls excited me. From the images that I saw of the falls, I could not wait to photography them. By the way, why do we refer to "falls," plural, when there is just one of them, singular? Either way, we got there and I discovered that the falls were as impressive as I had hoped they would be. You can even walk down to where the water...

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