Selected Nature Photography Resources

from William Chan's Photo Page. Last modified July 29, 1999.

Resources for nature photography in North America

Techniques

The photo.net nature photography pages contains a host of useful information. There, you can find a discussion forum with image critiques, photography guides, equipment selection, travel guides, etc.
Discussion on nature photography is also being carried out at the rec.photo.technique.nature newsgroup.
Many nature-related articles have appeared in the online Apogee Photo Magazine.
Photographer Kevin O'Neil has written a number of articles on scenic and landscape photography. dnlcan be found on
A beginner's guide to nature photography is offered by Texas Parks and Wildlife.
Renowned nature photographers like Frans Lanting, George Lepp, William Neill, Freeman Patterson, Moose Peterson, Galen Rowell, and Art Wolfe have their own home pages. You may find their articles or photos inspiring.

Buying photo equipment from mail-order companies can lose you a lot of money, unless you read Douglas Blodin's photographic mail order survey or photo.net Neighbor-to-Neighbor. Or you can check with the Better Business Bureau. Think twice before you order from AAA Camera Exchange, Cambridge Camera Exchange, Camera City Inc, Marine Park Camera & Video, and the like.

New equipment

B&H Photo and Camera World of Oregon are my favorite camera stores for new equipment.
I also like Freestyle Sales Co. Not everything there is cheap, but occasionally they have some very good deals.
Really Right Stuff sells premium-quality Arca-Swiss style quick-release plates and other accessories. Tel: 805-528-6321 (residential), 8am-5pm PST only. (Bob Atkins points out some mistakes in their publication.)
Kirk Enterprises carries various quick release plates, flash brackets, tripods, etc.
Singh-Ray sells well-regarded filters, such as the graduated neutral density filters.

Used equipment

The rec.photo.marketplace newsgroup is in my opinion the best source for used gear.
Jeffrey Albro provides lots of other pointers in his used equipment guide.
You can browse the ads or place yours free of charge in the photo.net classifieds and Photo Shopper Swap Meet.

Trip Planning

Robert Hitchman's Photograph America Newsletters are invaluable for planning photo trips. They are not free but in my opinion well worth the money.
The guides or back issues of Photo Traveler are also informative. They even have a few guides available online for free.
If you're planning to trip to a national park, forest, or wildlife refugee, then National Park Service and GORP are definitely worth checking out.
The photo.net nature photography pages contain a few trip reports and tips.
You can also find a few travel guides in photo.net.
You may also want to check out my list of regional attractions, but the page is not well maintained.

For driving directions, visit MapQuest or MapsOnUs. And remember to check the weather before you go.

In the Field

Always respect the nature and leave no trace in the wilderness.
NANPA alerts us to some nature photography issues.

Web Publishing

General advice about web publishing can be found in Web Tools Review, and the tips from the Stock Solution.

I prefer to have slides or negatives scanned on Photo CDs. If you would rather do scanning by yourself, you might want to read Michael Sullivan's scanning tips. Of course you want your pictures to look good on a variety of machines worldwide, so you should understand gamma correction. Charles Poynton explains the technical aspects of color. You should also compose good HTML. A good reference is the Guide to Web style by Sun Microsystems. To locate potential problems of your web pages, use one of the numerous HTML checkers like Doctor HTML. The Web is successful because it is independent of platforms and operating systems. To ensure continued survival of the Web, it is important not to include any Microsoft-only features in your site, or design your web page specifically for Internet Explorer.

Everybody knows that Adobe Photoshop is great. On Unix, a wonderful image package is ImageMagick. Its convert tool is especially good for batch image processing. WWWis is a handy Perl script that inserts HEIGHT and WIDTH tags in HTML files. I also like to use the atchange script when I edit web pages.

William Chan's Photo Page (wchan@cs.washington.edu)