The use of camera traps has grown increasingly popular lately, especially at our house. My wife, Karen, gave me a simple camera trap as a Christmas gift last year, and we’d had pretty good luck capturing images of mule deer, gray foxes, ground squirrels, and birds and deer mice eating the seed we put out. This fall, we even got a bear feeding on apples in our neighbor’s orchard. Swall Meadows apples are very popular among the local bruins.

These so-called camera traps, also known as trail cameras or game cameras, are placed in remote areas to catch wildlife in the act of living wild. These cameras have shutters that are activated with an infrared or motion sensor, and they’re generally placed in areas where animals are likely to roam, such as obvious animal trails, at water holes, in caves or in large tree stumps. Hunters and wildlife biologists use them to document species presence in certain habitats. We were mostly just curious.

(There is a great blog with fantastic photos from a camera trapper here http://natureofaman.blogspot.com/  )

Then we set our sights higher and placed the camera in a remote area, leaving it out for 10 days in late November/early December. We selected a site among some young Jeffrey pines along an animal trail, strapped the camera around the lower trunk of a pine, and hoped we might capture migrating mule deer, bears, or perhaps something more elusive such as a bobcat. What we clearly did not expect to see was a family of mountain lions lounging about in the middle of the image frame!

As I watched the series of over 50 thumbnails flash by after I first connected the camera to my computer, I stared in disbelief. Holy cats! After the images downloaded, I could see from the time stamp that the cougars came by December 3 at 10:10 am, stayed for 10 minutes, then returned at 4:02 pm that afternoon.  The cubs came in close to inspect the camera, and one lied down momentarily before wandering off at 4:08 pm. They returned to within view of the camera again 30 minutes later, and the final image of a cub was made at 5:26 pm.

The cubs shown here are probably about 8 months old, and they may stay with their mother for as long as 2 years. These beautiful cats are noted to be common in the Eastern Sierra, but they are very rarely seen as they furtively follow migrating mule deer through their high mountain summer range and valley winter range. These photos aren’t up to my usual standards for sharpness, but the camera has a small f2.8 fixed aperture lens, so the depth of field is very shallow. Even if they’re not tack sharp, these images are some of the most exciting and fulfilling photos I’ve ever “captured” with a camera.

Willows above the south shore of Mono Lake

Hundreds of thousands of eared grebes spend the fall floating on Mono Lake gorging themselves on brine shrimp, and getting primed to migrate south into Mexico and Guatemala for the winter.  Mono Lake, which has been estimated to have as many as 2 million eared grebes in mid-October, is the most important fall staging location in North America, supporting nearly 1/3 of the entire North American population of these gregarious birds!

We know this because of aerial photographic surveys over Mono Lake, which I was lucky to be a part of last weekend.  Local Bishop pilot and owner of Black Mountain Air Service, Geoff Pope, also volunteers his time for LightHawk, an organization that coordinates flights that help support conservation work around the world.  LightHawk partners with the Mono Lake Committee (MLC) every fall to conduct the eared grebe survey.

We landed briefly in Lee Vining to pick up MLC Communications Director and photographer, Arya Degenhart, who enjoyed the views and photo ops as much as I did.  A recent storm, which had delayed our flight by one day, had brought a welcome whiteness to the mountain slopes above 9,000 feet, and had made the Eastern Sierra even more photogenic than usual.

The pilot’s job was to fly 16 pre-determined transects in an east-west direction over the entire 70 square-mile lake while maintaining the same altitude.  My job, while leaning out the open window 1200 feet above the drink, was to get photos of the green lake with its tiny flecks of gray that represent eared grebes.  With my intervalometer set to trip the shutter every 10 seconds, and bundled up with wool hat and gloves, I held my camera out the window and aimed straight down.  Although this was clearly photography for science, some of it came through looking artful.  Without a true sense of scale or depth, aerial photos amplify the color and patterns we see on earth’s surface below, and give a new perspective to our sense of place.  Long Live Mono Grebes!

Green algae in shallow waters

Drainage patterns on old lakebed/alkaline playa

Bands of vegetation, E shore of Mono Lake

Old lakebed/alkaline flat with tufa remnants

I’m glad to be able to say that four of my images were chosen by the G2 Gallery as part of a show benefiting the Eastern Sierra Land Trust.  The G2 generously donates 40% of all photo sales to different environmental organizations and causes, and for this show they teamed up with Eastern Sierra Land Trust and seven eastside photographers.  All of the images are of landscapes and wildlife from the Eastern Sierra region.  The show runs from June 26-August 5, 2012.  Click on the image link below for more information.  Support ESLT and come check it out!

Alabama Hills Dawn

Mule Deer Buck on an ESLT Conservation Easement

Due to overwhelming demand, I’ve finally added a new Gallery of nothing but time-lapse videos.  Some of these are also posted on You Tube, but you can click on the thumbnails and watch them without leaving my website (so convenient!).  And they’re short, mostly less than 30 sec, so you won’t be wasting your time, even by viewing them all.  So far I’ve focused mostly on clouds and their interactions with the mountains here in the Eastern Sierra, but I plan to move farther afield with my efforts at compressing time, and will post more in the coming months.  Hopefully this summer will be a good one for monsoonal thunderstorm activity.

In the meantime, here is a new one (from last year) of stratus clouds ebbing and flowing west against the mountain wall of Wheeler Crest, just above our house.  I love watching (and riding) surf at the beach, and these clouds move like waves washing up the shore and back out.

Stay tuned and thanks for watching!

Check out more time-lapse videos by Stephen Ingram.

High stratus and lenticular clouds at dawn

Clouds are – both literally and figuratively – one of nature’s highest forms of abstract art.  Alfred Stieglitz, who had a passion for photography as Art, was the first photographer to photograph clouds “solely for their artistic merits.”  He called his series of cloud photographs Equivalents, and his cloud images are widely recognized as the first intentional abstract photographs.  Stieglitz’s Equivalents were also a source of inspiration to Ansel Adams, who claimed his first “intense experience in photography” was when he saw some of Stieglitz’s cloud images.

Altocumulus lenticulularis

Spring is generally a great time for cloudspotting in the Eastern Sierra, and this year is no exception, so I thought I’d post a few of my favorites.  I enjoy watching and photographing clouds because of their perpetually changing light and form.  Even if a Sierra Wave cloud stays in one place all day, it changes form, and it changes with the light and in contrast to other clouds that float by during the day.

Cirrus with Iridescence

Color is also an important aspect of clouds.  From bright white to dark gray, and every color of the rainbow, clouds reflect the sunlight.  And as Stieglitz observed, they can reflect your mood as well.

Clouds Above the Mountains

As I wrote in an earlier posting about time-lapse photography, cloud forms lend themselves perfectly to time-lapse videos where hours can be compressed into seconds.  This has been especially true this winter and spring with several storm systems forming stationary wave clouds above Coyote Ridge and Round Valley.  Like a standing wave that forms downstream of a large river boulder, wave clouds form as cooling air is forced up to where it condenses at the front edge and then dissipates on the lee side as it sinks down the wave’s backside.  Click on the link below to see a recent time-lapse video of clouds forming and dissipating eastward, and notice the towering lenticular cloud up above.  For scale, the highest peaks in the frame are close to 14,000 feet high.

Clouds Moving and Building above Coyote Ridge, Eastern Sierra, CA

Winter Light on Mono Craters

The Mono Craters are among the youngest chains of volcanoes in the country, having initially erupted less than 40,000 years ago.  In contrast, Mono Lake is one of the oldest lakes in North America, dating back over 760,000 years.  From the southern edges of Mono Lake, the Mono Craters rise to 9169 feet.  Viewed here from the north, the warm afternoon light catches their western flanks, which is partially reflected in the cold blue waters of Mono Lake, seen through barren, winter cottonwood branches.

I first saw the potential for this photogenic scene as I descended from Conway Summit on my way home from Carson City.  This image was captured with my trusty Nikon F4 on Velvia film, in the days before digital, but has been scanned with a high-resolution drum scanner, and has been printed with great results.

Mt. Tom and Eastern Sierra peaks from Aeolian Ridge, Volcanic Tableland

My wife Karen and I stumbled upon this “cave” along a ridge while hiking around in the Volcanic Tableland north of Bishop. I call this area “Aeolian Ridge” for the wind-scoured pits and holes eroded into the volcanic tuff rock. When we climbed up into this large hollow, I noticed how part of the roof matched the horizon line of Mt. Tom, the most prominent mountain west of Bishop. I returned several months later when photographic conditions seemed more favorable, and placed my tripod-mounted camera up to the roof at the back of the hole. Fill-flash was used to light the roof of the cave because it would have gone black when exposing for the rest of the view out the “window.” The rough texture on the rocks is well-suited for canvas prints of this image.

If you don’t have hours to spend lying on your back watching the clouds float by, you can compress a few hours of photos into a minute or less, and enjoy the clouds in a time-lapse video. Since I’m a big fan of clouds, and because I’m lucky enough to live in one of the best cloudspotting locations on Earth, I’ve been making time-lapses of clouds for the past few months, but I sure wish I had started sooner! Here are two of my favorites from this past year.

This cloud eddy on the lee side of Mt. Tom can best be appreciated through time-lapse. This top video is a sequence of 248 images taken 7 sec. apart, and played back at 15 frames per second (fps).

One of the amazing aspects of digital photography is the ability to shoot time-lapse intervals. Time-lapse videos offer a new perspective of the vibrant natural world. As you watch a sequence of photos played back at a much higher rate than their original frequency, you can really appreciate the dynamism of our natural world. Opening flower buds, hot air balloon rallies, the night sky, and busy city scenes are other common subjects for time-lapse videos.

There are a few good websites that go into more detail than I have space for here, such as

http://content.photojojo.com/tutorials/ultimate-guide-to-time-lapse-photography/   and

http://www.lightstalking.com/timelapse

For subjects such as clouds or sunrise on the mountains, I usually shoot at intervals of 6 to 15 seconds. When this sequence is played back as a video at 24 fps, a 1 to 2-hour sequence of moving clouds and changing light can be seen in less than 30 seconds.You’ll need an SLR that lets you program an interval setting, or get the perfect tool – an intervalometer. The main things to remember are to set your light meter and white balance on manual, and plan ahead for the interval length and total time of your sequence. Although I shoot in RAW format for most of my photography, I usually shoot in JPEG for time-lapses because the file sizes are more manageable.

This video of restless cumulus clouds dropping virga (rain that evaporates in air) is from 728 images taken 9 sec. apart, and played back at 24 fps.

Experiment with time-lapse - you won’t regret it! Check out more time-lapse videos by Stephen Ingram.

Old-growth Redwood forest

One of my favorite places on earth is Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park on California’s north coast. After renting a Fuji 617 panorama film camera (before purchasing a used one), I made a fall road trip up to the redwood forests to try it out. After a day or two of searching for the right spot to try and capture the essence of old-growth redwoods, I found this stand along a trail. It seemed to have it all-huge redwoods, snags and fallen trees, epiphytic mosses, a lush understory of sword fern, and the powerful feeling of a healthy, functioning ecosystem. And fortunately, it was overcast and calm for this 8-second exposure.