Sunday, April 3, 2011

Photography Tips for Shooting in Jungle Lagoons

Jungle lagoon and mangrove photography has several risks.  Lagoons are often found in tropical zones with high humidity.  Tropical high humidity areas can be infested with Malaria and Dengue Fever mosquitos.  I use two varieties of mosquito repellant when I am photographing the lagoon photos you seen here on this page.  If the mosquito population is particularly high the photographer might consider wearing mosquito netting around the head.


Potentially fatal mosquitos in the air is not the only risk to obtaining these types of lagoon photographs.  Alligator and crocodile hazards can exist as well.  When I shoot lagoon photography I walk very slowly taking frequent pauses to listen, look, and smell the air around me.





While batting away the mosquitoes and watching for crocs consider that boa constrictors can often be found in rainforest infested lagoons and mangroves.  When I was teaching English in Thailand I read in the Bangkok Post newspaper that a worker as part of a deep jungle natural gas pipeline laying operation went from the construction zone into the nearby jungle to answer nature's call.  This occured during the worker's lunch break at noon.

The poor man walked into the jungle and where he stood a boa constrictor was in a tree just above him.  As he was answering nature's call, the boa droped from the tree and its body encircled the worker's neck.  A short time after the lunchbreak several workers noticed that their friend was missing from the work crew.  A search began.  The workcrew spread out as on a skirmish line and went into the jungle to search for their co-worker.  After a lengthy time they found him, found him inside of the boa constrictor.  When shooting photography in jungle or rainforest lagoon, don't forget to look up whether your framing a photography of a beautiful jungle bird, or, answering nature's call.

The main cautions here are keep your eyes moving around you, up above and down below when taking photos in a jungle or rainforest.  I very, very good rule of thumb is do not ever travel alone into these environments, go with a guide if one is available, and at the very least bring a cell phone with you.  Test the cell phone battery before going into the jungle.

 View additional lagoon plus topical beach photography here via this link. These I put into the public domain.

Romantic Sunset Beach Scenes

Enjoy and use these sunset beach scenes.  I used an Olypus X-920 digital camera to take these photographs.  I am not a photographer by profession.  The camera does it all.  There are a few things though that you can do to help take photographs like these.  Practice the rule of thirds.  Often there are three or more visual elements to a photograph.  The three most important elements can be incorporated into the visual scene of your photograph.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Free-Public-Domain-Royalty-Free-Photographs-and-Printable-Images-for-Web-Pages-and-Hard-Copy-Media
As an example, let's say you want to take a beautiful picture of a beach or sunset.  Consider framing into your photograph one third of the sky, one third of the horizon and one third of the space of the beach or sea into your photograph.  The nature photography photograph, when taken in this way will provide a harmonious balance of the three primary elements in view.

The photograph I took above does not follow the one third rule I mentioned above.  I wanted to catch the primary topic of the photo, which was the setting sun, just as it was being absorbed into the sea.  So the sun appears to be only a small part of the photograph, perhaps one tenth of the entire photo.  The sand and the sky take up approximately 40% each respectively in terms of photo framing space.

I took about twenty minutes lining up this shot.  I had to find a place that would be relatively free of obstructions when the instant to shoot the photo occured.  Every now and then there were passing horsemen, people wondering on the beach from a nearby village and dogs that could have led to distraction.  If I were out of sight there would be less opportunity for a distraction to occur when the time came to shoot occured.

View one of my 300 blogs and more photos here on my Hubpages at 
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