What kind of photographer are you? - Part 2

Just over a week ago, I posed the question What kind of photographer are you?

In this instalment, I will cover the options I mentioned - Rent a guide, rent a hide or DIY.

Rent a guide is easy enough - Google is your friend here as are the many photography magazines. Outdoor Photographer is full of small ads at the back with individuals offering their services.

Typically her,e you can hire their services to take you to sites that they know of, which may well be publicly available sites, so you are paying for their knowledge, or they may have access to private sites, in which case you are paying for that privilege. Either way, they will basically do your fieldcraft for you, and probably advise you on set up as well.

This type of service may be of use if you are passing through an area and have very limited time, or haven't been able to get your own research completed ahead of your trip.

Rent a hide is a term I plagiarised from Mike Lane, our last Guest Photographer , who wrote a very good article for the Spring 2008 edition of The Iris, the in house magazine of The Royal Photographic Society Nature Group.

Again here Google is your friend, with a few key words around the subject you are interested in.

Scandinavia seems to be a great place to go, if your pockets are deep enough, where you can get access to hides for Golden Eagle, Osprey, boats for White Tailed Sea Eagles, Common Cranes, Brown Bear and many other species, such as Capercaillie and Goshawk - all the rare protected species essentially.

There is a sort of combination of the two, I suppose, where you end up going on holiday with your guide and getting the hide and the guide in one.

He will probably even take the pictures for you to save you getting up I suppose too (that was a joke by the way)

Finally, there is DIY. Do it yourself.

It is all down to you - the planning, the logistics, the travel, the research, finding the subjects, and getting access.

It takes longer, you may well not end up with anything, but then you can blame yourself for that.

But you can guarantee that the results will be all yours.

I am not going to air my judgements on what is best or appropriate - that is for the reader to make up their own mind.

I could have made this a much longer article, setting out all sorts of links to hides, guides, photo tourist sites and done it all for you - but maybe you should do that yourself.

Martin

Views - What kind of photographer - Part 1?

Just a short philosophical blog post today.

So are you a photographer that likes to shoot wildlife (photographically speaking), or are you interested in wildlife that likes to photograph it?

Why does it matter?

Well it doesn't really, at least not to me.

However, where things can come unstuck for the former category is when one goes blindly trying to capture some images without consideration for the welfare of the subject.

We have said many times through this blog that the welfare of the subject always comes first, and will continue with that mantra.

The other area of course for the former is that identification and understanding of behaviour can be difficult, but of course it can be learned. There are so many books and web resources, far too many to name here that lack of ID for the overwhelming majority of stuff can be done by a bit of self research.

I guess I was probably a bit of both. I loved my wildlife, and I liked photograph, but until I could afford some half decent kit, I tended to watch wildlife and photograph other things.

OK - as I said just a short one today. But would be good to hear a bit of feedback with your views, and we know that there are lots of you these days, looking at the analytics.

In part 2 that I will do next week, I will delve a bit more into types of wildlife photographer. I will look at rent a hide, rent a guide and DIY.

Martin