Tag Archives: Mick Jagger

Breakin’ The Rules

Posted on by

BreakingTheRules7545Click to Enlarge

Breaking the rules. Breaking all of them. Photographically that is. That’s what I do anyway. Break ’em, worry about them later. This image breaks almost every rule of photography there is, yet it is one of my most favorite images that I have ever taken. I say almost every rule only because I know there’s a rule somewhere I’ve forgotten but I know I broke it anyway. This was not a premeditated decision on my part. I didn’t decide to fly in the face of convention just to be a rebel it was more along the lines of, I want this picture and I’m going to get it even if it means breaking the rules.

If you Google ‘Photography Rules’ you will come up with about 105,000,000 hits for rules. That’s a lot of damn rules. Granted not all 105,000,000 hits are different but even so, Geezum Plutz that’s a lot of rules. That’s one thing we do pretty good as a species, making rules. Here are just a few examples of collections of rules.

10 Top Photography Composition Rules

5 Easy Composition Guidelines

18 Composition Rules For Photos

The 10 Rules of Photo Composition (and why they work)

9 Top Photography Composition Rules You Need To Know

And there are folks out there that will tell you “Don’t you go breaking any of those rules.” if you want to be a photographer. You can’t be in our photo show if you don’t follow these rules. “Hey Bozo, I saw your work. You need to follow the rules, man.” Seems like everyone is an expert when it comes to rules, especially the guys that make them.

There are real photographers out there looking at this image right now that are gnashing their teeth and raining curses down on my head for deliberately showing this bollixed up, rule breaking image as if I had a right to. Which I do by the way. I’m one of those artist types that believe once an image is completed it exists. It doesn’t matter how it was made, or what was done to it afterwards, or whether it was Photoshopped or not, an image is an image and it stands on its own for better or worse. You can shoot it holding the camera behind your back and jumping up and down, or put little red hearts all over it, or draw, paint or step on it with muddy boots then sign your name. It doesn’t matter, an image once it’s finalized and put on display is there and it’s up to the viewer to figure out whether they like it or not. Or even consider whether it is art or not.

Look in the back of any photography magazine on the newsstand and you will find dozens of highly trained, apparently successful photographers willing to take you on workshops and teach you how to make beautiful pictures by sticking to all the many rules in force that will make you a successful photographer too. Unfortunately I’ve always had a certain degree of difficulty in following rules. Some of them anyway, but especially those that say you need to create in a certain way. I guess it’s because that I, like Mick Jagger, don’t keep regular hours, so my outlook is different from most.

So getting back to the picture, “What’s wrong with it?” you ask. It’s an image of a wolf swimming across the Yellowstone river late in the evening in mid-may back in 2006. The sky was overcast, it had been raining just moments ago and this wolf was one of the dominant members of a pack in the Hayden valley. They had killed an elk on a small tributary called Alum creek which feeds into the Yellowstone and were gorging themselves until they could barely move. She, this was a female, was the first to leave because being the alpha she had fed first and was ready to return to the den which was located on the other side of the river. The problem and the first of many rules that were broken to get this image, was that she was way too far away for this to be any kind of decent shot. The rule says you have to be close and fill the frame with as much wolf as will fit in it to make this any kind of acceptable picture. The wolf of course didn’t know she was breaking the rule and I couldn’t get any closer before she jumped in the river and began her swim across it. I said the hell with it and took the picture anyway.

My equipment then was somewhat limited. The camera was a 6mp Nikon D70, a woefully under-powered camera by todays standards, and my lens was an inexpensive telephoto which was all I could afford at that time. There’s another rule shot to hell so to speak. Good photographers always use the best most expensive equipment available.  NO exceptions. The limits of the equipment I had, because of its measly megapixel count, meant that when it was time to print this image it wouldn’t be adequate to be enlarged so that you could see the wolf in all it’s perfectly focused clarity. They are absolutely right, those rule makers. It is kind of blurry and out of focus looking because I did stretch the limits of the image and now it has a kind of painterly pastel looking feel to it, not at all what a good photo should be, but I like it. Maybe you do too, or not.

 I remember exactly how things were the day I took this image. How cold it was, how the air smelled like damp grass, the sounds of the river flowing by and the huffing of the wolf as she swam across the widest part of the river she could have chosen to take. However there is a characteristic that rule makers leave out and that is that intangible feeling one gets when you see an image that you like regardless of whether or not it fits into the Follow the rules category. There have been an awful lot of pretty good painters that didn’t follow the rules, and people tend  to think very highly of them, myself being one of them.That’s what makes breaking the rules work for me. Had I followed them I wouldn’t have taken this picture and I wouldn’t have this image to remember the experience or to share with you, my friends. If you ask me I’m going to tell you to break the rules, break ’em all. It’s worth it.

So as far as rules go I’ll probably continue to break them, as the image is more important to me than various opinions. In case you’re wondering I do take technically good images where many of the rules are followed but I am never one to shy away from gathering what I see and putting it into a viewfinder regardless of what the rules say, after all art and the image are what I most care about.

Just for grins I’m posting the original image below, as it was taken straight out of the camera, to show you how and where the image above came from.

 BreakingRulesOrig7545

Bear Facts

Posted on by

BearFacts2512

Periodically we here at The Institute go out on the World Wide Web to check facts that are available to our readers regarding some of the wildlife they may be interested in. We are fact checkers. As you might imagine there is a lot of information out there, some of it good and some of it downright wrong. Or at least misinterpreted. We set our official fact gleaners to work gleaning and they visited some bear websites to check out those bear statements. This was done because we get so many cards and letters asking for fun-filled facts about bears.

Here are just a few of those facts that we found out there that need further explanation or correction to make them complete and more accurate or even believable.

First bears, and in this case grizzly bears, have been around for a long time. At least since 2005 when this picture was taken by our Director with one of the first legitimate digital cameras available. They may have been around longer than that but if so not many people knew about them because there weren’t any digital photos taken of them. This was back in the dawn of the digital age when 6 megapixels was considered to be the height of photographic technology. Many new species were being discovered then and documented using this new photographic tool, so we feel confident in correcting or adding information to the wealth of information about grizzly bears out there on the web.

Fact: A male bear is called a boar or a he-bear. A female bear is called a sow or a she-bear. A group of bears is called a sleuth or sloth. We can find no reason to dispute this fact although we have found that actually calling these bears he-bear, or she-bear to their faces makes them anxious and somewhat touchy, so we don’t recommend it. We have also called a group of them a sleuth and found that it made them all look at us appraisingly so we don’t recommend doing that either. Your results may vary.

Fact: Bears have been known to eat almost anything, including snowmobile seats, engine oil, and rubber boots. We can find no corroborating evidence to support this fact so we cannot endorse it. We can state however that a determined bear will eat the entire door off a motorhome if there are ding-dongs inside.

Fact: In a similar vein we heard that in 2008, a Canadian man was attacked by a grizzly bear. He survived the attack by playing dead, even when the bear began to gnaw on his scalp. The bear eventually lost interest and went away. The bear did take his watch, an undetermined amount of travelers checks and a can of bear spray however, plus his iPod but inexplicably not the ear buds. We believe this fact to be true as we have personally seen bears with iPods on several occasions.

Fact: During hibernation, a bear does not defecate. Its body can somehow recycle body waste into protein—a process scientists still do not understand. This is just so wrong that we can’t even address it. What kind of sick mind makes this stuff up.

Fact: The lips of bears are not attached to their gums, which make their lips look rubbery. This is true. It is also why they sound like Mick Jagger when they talk.

Fact: The most accurate way to determine the age of a bear is to count the rings in a cross-section of its tooth root under a microscope. We have found that this might be true but have been unable to substantiate it due to no one ever surviving the attempt to complete the procedure.

Fact: Bears are very smart and have been known to roll rocks into bear traps to set off the trap and eat the bait in safety. Yes this is true. What should be added however is that bears will often force tourists or other interested parties to carry the rocks for them under threat of doing them bodily harm if they don’t and then extorting them into bringing them more bait on a regular basis. Many unsuspecting people enter into bear territory completely unaware of the Bearsa Nostra and pay a huge price for their ignorance.

Fact: Bears are bowlegged. This gives them better grip and balance. Ummmm, on what? We believe this is bogus.

Fact: Grizzly bears use growls, roars and snorts to communicate with each other. They also text, send short but well written notes to each other, and wave excitedly when encountering old friends.

Fact: You can recognize grizzly bears by the hump on their back. The hump is made up of muscles. This is only partially true. It is accurate to say the hump is made up of muscles but it is just as accurate to say that the hump is due to the bear being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Often large heavy branches will fall off the trees as the bear is walking through the forest, striking the bear one hell of a whack. This results in a big knot or swelling on its back that takes a long time to go down.

Fact: Unlike many mammals, bears can see in color. True. They also see things that aren’t there. They get emotional upon seeing a rainbow. And they take offense at people who dress unfashionably. This why so many bear attack victims are found to be wearing plaid pants or Bermuda shorts with black socks and wife beater t-shirts. Or women in solid color pant suits like the ones Hillary Clinton used to wear.

Fact: Bears rarely discipline their children. This is patently untrue. Look at the cubs eye in the picture above. He was mouthy and just one quick smack later he was perfectly behaved.

These are just a few of the facts floating around on the web that needed clarification. We hope that this has been helpful and has made your understanding of our wild brethren, the bear, more complete. This has been an unsolicited service of The Institute.  Remember our motto, We’re from The Institute and we’re here to help. And we hope we do.