10-05-11 – Where the Wild Things Are

I’d love to know the info aspidites! Not sure I could handle a shoot in the snow nor do I know when I’ll finally win the lottery, but would be good info to have.

So they didn’t have any restrictions on using the images? When you sold the shot, was it to a magazine or something like that or do you mean a print sold to someone?

The main trainer is Troy Hyde he runs Animals of Montana with his wife Tracy.
Website http://www.animalsofmontana.com/
I have only worked with Troy on the tiger shoot, but his Red Rock shoot in Moab is on the ?to do list?. They were very safety conscious on the shoot. They made sure everyone knew the rules and how to act around the tiger.

Shooting in the snow can be tricky and some of the things I have learned;
1.Batteries: Lots of batteries and a way to keep them warm. I was duct taping dry chemical hand warmers to the bottom of the battery compartment. With a spare set in my pocket with a hand warmer. 20 below cold will zap your batteries very quickly.

2. Metering: Manual spot meter the snow. Snow in bright light, meter the snow and over expose by 1 and 2/3 stop. Snow in shade, meter the snow and over expose 1 and 1/3 stop. Check your histograms to make sure your whites are not clipping. If you get the snow right everything else should fall into place.

3. Camera: something with a frame rate of 5 FPS or above. Good focus capabilities. I was using an F5 with Provia 100 and a 1DX on this shoot. Now I use a 1D mark II N and a 5D.

4. Lenses: Preferably something that has a f2.8 they tend to focus faster. On a shoot with Troy you shouldn?t need anything over 200mm or 300mm I was using a 100 ? 400 on the F5 and a 70- 200 on the 1DX.

5. Clothing: The warmest, thinnest gloves you can find and heavy duty shells to put on when you aren?t shooting. Did I mention 20 below?

I used a cloth rebreather mask in Yellowstone cause some mornings it was 30- 40 below before we got on the snowmobiles, so add 50 mph wind chill to that. COLD!

The charging tiger was in the Ukrainian edition of Digital Photographer and was the picture that got me the calendar deal.
The one on my B list was the cover of an Italian scientific textbook and I have sold lots of prints of the tiger.
There were no restrictions on the pictures. Most of them don’t….You pay them for their services and the accessibility to the animals. The pictures are yours.

Being a native desert rat, those temps will zap my soul! Heck, it was like 75 in my room this morning and with the ceiling fan on low, I’m about ready to pull the comforter out!

Thanks so much for all that info! I’ve also wanted to do a winter wild horse shoot too. Maybe I’ll grow up someday & quit being such a sissy! But I do want to head to Northern AZ sometime this season to see some snow, so those tips are helpful and I’ll keep them in a note. I’ve played in small amounts of snow about 3 or 4 times in my long life. 😆

I’m thinking the Babies in June sounds more my speed. Love the pic of the cub in the spring flowers on their site.

There was a small/cheap workshop here to learn how to photog wolves, but they wouldn’t give you any kind of release, didn’t even want them posted online. So I skipped it since I doubt I’ll randomly run into any wolves any time soon.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve worked with SNA, but from what I recall, without explicitly encrypting the messages (which is possible using either protocol), I think most of SNA’s security came from obscurity. I remember reading raw data dumps of SNA conversations and if you knew what you were looking for, it was all there to be seen. Of course, this was back in the days before the internet had pipes big enough to support all the store-to-corp data transfer, so everyone had dedicated lines which are pretty much secure in and of themselves.

SNA was/is likely more robust/fault-tolerant than TCP, though. And I can’t imagine doing 24/7/365 support work for that long of a period. Glad to hear you got out of it alive.

That’s it. I’m buying a farking tiger this winter.

/maybe just renting one.
//good stuff this week.

😆 😆 😆

PERFECT!!

Yep.

Thanks for the info about the tiger photo-shoot. While I wasn’t really serious, it sure is interesting. And, I have to admit, tempting.

I’ve always been a PC guy for the most part, but over the years I’ve had to interface to the types of systems you reference. Fortunately, most of the retail world has moved/is moving away from the big iron and into server farms, so no more dealing with arcane communication protocols like SNA and worrying about tying into CICS transactions on the mainframe. Good luck with your fix tonight, hope it all goes smoothly.

Looks like we got it fixed. I really hate the way these problems affect my sleep schedule. It always takes me a few hours to wind down enough to sleep.

I’m not allowed to discuss how our systems communicate, but we don’t use SNA.

it means your comment was deleted because it was in reference to or quoted someone else’s deleted comment and therefore had no context. i think. at least that’s what I assume when I get it.

Thanks.
I was thinking I was going to go on a Fark vacation again.

I’ve only had one “Fark Vacation”. It’s a temporary ban, usually 24 hours for posting something that could maybe be considered NSFW, or off-topic chatter in a photoshop contest.

Also, congrats aspidites!