Adobe Creative Cloud and greedy sports teams

Adobe and I go way back. I don't remember the first copy of Photoshop I bought, but it was in the early `90s. I want to say it was version 4.0. And I've been buying its design program, InDesign, since way back when it was known as Aldus Pagemaker. For the past three upgrade cycles, I've bought licenses to Adobe's Master Collection, essentially licenses to every design application it makes. Before that, I often upgraded to its Design Collection.

So, like most everyone else on the Internet it seems, I was furious when Adobe announced this week that it will no longer let you buy its products. Now, with the Adobe Creative Cloud, you can only rent them.

Adobe says this change is needed to allow it to deliver improvements continuously. It's a principle I support. A couple of years ago, ebooks, for example, were just electronic versions of regular books that you had to read on a dedicated black-and-white device. Now, thanks to the iPad and other tablets, they can be interactive, beautifully-designed works that incorporate HD video.

As a nature photographer who's coping with a collapsing market for prints – led by the building bust – and ever shrinking image licensing fees, I believe self-published ebooks, providing they're well done, can help offset some of that lost income and introduce nature to a whole new audience. I would gladly support rapid development of tools that made producing those books easier.

The problem is, I don't believe Adobe. And its new pricing scheme holds individual hostage, not unlike the way sports teams hold cities hostage for ever more luxurious stadiums. Let me explain.
Ever since Adobe began selling packages of applications as a suite, its business has become much more cyclical. If you're wowed by the features in a new release, you're likely to upgrade sooner rather than later. For Adobe, that results in a lot of cash when a new suite is released and a trickle in the months leading up to the next expected release.

If you work full-time at a job, imagine that only a couple of your paychecks each year provided the bulk of your annual salary. The rest of the checks are virtually worthless. Some weeks, you don't even get a check. (It is a bit of an exaggeration, I know, but I think it helps to illustrate the true problem Adobe is trying to solve.)

As an individual, this is fine if you're great at managing money. But businesses do better at maximizing profits with a steadier cash flow. That is, cash comes in at a more constant rate and the amount flowing in at any time is always more than what flows out to pay expenses.

With steady cash flow as the goal, you can see why it's so important that Adobe move everyone to a system where they pay a monthly fee. If you don't believe me, ask anyone in accounting. Or review Adobe's quarterly earning statements for the past few years.

Making financial matters even more difficult for Adobe, the industry is maturing and it's harder to come up with new "wow" features. Some of the graphic design companies I work with are happy to use old versions of the software, so Adobe doesn't get annual revenue from them even under the old system. Meantime, it has to continually update applications, like Photoshop, to support new digital camera, file formats, and modern expectations.

So I understand Adobe's situation. I understand how it feels the current licensing system isn't working.

But the new licensing system doesn't work for me. It gives Adobe all the power in this business relationship. It gives Adobe what I think of as "greedy sports team power."

I live near Seattle and I've seen this dynamic play out many, many times. Our baseball team decided it needed a new stadium, so we had to build it one so it wouldn't leave town. Our football team actually did leave town briefly for a few days. We agreed to implode a stadium we were still paying for and build it a new one. We lost our basketball team several years ago when we couldn't find a way to build a new arena fast enough. Our city is now trying to snag a basketball team from another city that's been dragging its feet in ponying up for a new arena.

In each of those cases, the team had all the power. Give us what you want, or we'll leave you with nothing. After the Sonics left town, its arena, declared "state of the art" by the NBA barely more than a decade ago, now sits vacant most of the time.

And that's what I fear with Adobe's new licensing scheme. At first, $50 a month – even less for the first year! – sounds reasonable. It's actually a bit less than what I have been paying.

But what when Adobe decides it wants more. What if it wants $75 a month? Or $100 a month? Or $200 a month? With the new Adobe Creative Cloud you lock in the price for a year and you're free to cancel on your anniversary date. But are you really?

If you decide to stop paying the monthly fee, you lose all access to the Adobe applications. Want to make a tiny edit to one of the layers in a Photoshop file you've spent hours on? You're out of luck. What to make a quick adjustment to a video you spent weeks editing? Out of luck again. You will either have to give Adobe whatever crazy amount of money it demands or start over from scratch in a totally new software package that may or may not offer similar features.

And what about those constant upgrades? For the past year, Adobe has offered two versions of its software: a constantly upgraded Creative Cloud for people willing to pay the monthly fee and a perpetual license to Creative Suite for the rest of us. Take a look at the exclusive upgrades Creative Cloud users got. There was a new version of Adobe Acrobat that gives Creative Cloud members the ability to covert PDFs into PowerPoint slides, among other minor features. There was also an Illustrator update that makes it easier to package design files for printing. Those were the highlights in a year when Adobe had a tremendous incentive to deliver meaningful improvements for its monthly customers. What kind of improvements will there be when you have to pay a monthly fee just to use the software, meaningful improvements or not?

Adobe is reportedly considering a compromise that would allow you to convert your files to a different format even if you decided to cancel your monthly subscription. Even that wouldn't address the real problem, which is that the time you spent in Adobe's products developing the underlying design of your underlying works is still held hostage. Your ability to make even a simple change to any part of the underlying recipe would be lost.

With Adobe Creative Cloud, you have no power to compel the company to do anything. As long as enough design firms or other customers are willing to pay the monthly fee, it doesn't need you and there's no reason to at all for it to give you features you need or access to work you've created with its products.

Your work becomes Seattle's KeyArena. It was once considered a fine basketball arena. It now sits useless most of the year.

(Follow Kevin Ebi's photography on Facebook, Twitter, or Google +.)

Lions, tigers and manual exposure

There is something that strikes fear straight into the heart of most photographers and it's not a close encounter with a wild bear or a dangerous cliff. It's the manual exposure mode of their cameras.

The manual mode can be overwhelming at first. It typically activates a pair of dials that control a series of settings that move a graph in the viewfinder. Why go through that much bother when the fully automatic mode generally works so well?

The reason is that the camera doesn't know what you're photographing. It can't tell a wildebeest from a waterfall. It uses generic settings that are adequate for the average situation. If you want to freeze dramatic action or capture the motion of water, for example, you'll need to take control of your camera yourself. Besides, who wants an average picture of an incredible scene?

I think people are confused by manual mode because the camera works so much differently from our eyes. When we look at something, we are looking at the light that reaches our eyes in that instant of time. A camera, however, works more like a rain barrel. It collects light over varying amounts of time to produce one image.

To make a photograph of something that is white, the camera needs to collect a certain amount of light. It needs to collect that amount of light whether it's high noon or the middle of the night. Only that specific amount of light will produce white in your photograph. To continue the rain barrel analogy, the idea is to perfectly fill the rain barrel: don't spill a drop and don't leave any room.

When I photograph with people after sunset, some are surprised I can make a picture when "it's so dark." As long as there is any light, you can make a photograph. You just may have to wait a long time for enough light to accumulate on the sensor (or film).

There are two primary settings in manual mode that affect the collection of light: shutter speed and aperture.

Shutter speed affects the amount of time that the shutter remains open to collect light. All things equal, if you're photographing at dusk, you'll need a longer shutter speed than you will if it's high noon on a bright, sunny day. Shutter speeds can be ridiculously fast, like 1/8000th of a second, or several hours long.

The aperture is like the iris of your eye. It expands and shrinks to affect the amount of light that passes through the lens. The most open apertures have the smallest f-stop numbers, like f/2.8. A setting like f/22 lets very little light pass through the lens.

So why don't you always want to use the most open aperture possible? The aperture affects the focus of your image. When the aperture is wide open, the only thing that will be in focus is plane where you focused the camera. Anything in front of or behind that point will generally be out-of-focus. It's known as a very narrow depth of field. You've likely seen this in pictures of birds or flower buds where the background seems to be a solid splash of color.

On the other hand, very small apertures can greatly extend that depth of field, allowing you to capture a field of wildflowers and a mountain and have them both appear to be in focus.

There is also a third consideration. Lenses are typically designed to deliver the most sharpness in the middle of their range, generally f/7, although at that setting you won't get a blurred background or tremendous depth of field.

Perhaps you can now see that these settings all have tradeoffs. When your camera is in automatic mode, it's making decisions about those tradeoffs without any regard for what you're photographing. By using manual mode, you can decide the settings that are right for your particular situation.

Setting the exposure yourself is a two-step process. The first step involves determining whether you want to use a specific aperture or shutter speed. Do you want a nice blurred background? Use the most open aperture available to you, such as f/2.8. Do you want maximum focus depth? Try an aperture of f/11 or f/22. Do you want to blur the motion of the water in a waterfall? Try a shutter speed of ½ second.

The next step is to adjust your other variable so that the camera collects the correct amount of light. If you set the aperture, you will now be adjusting the shutter speed. If you set the shutter speed, you will now be adjusting the aperture.

In the viewfinder you'll see a small graph. When the indicator is at the midpoint of the graph it indicates you are collecting enough light for the average scene. If the indicator is closer to the positive end, it shows your image will be brighter than average. If it's closer to the negative end, it indicates the exposure will be darker than average.

Most of time, you will want the indicator to be in the center. That's typically the correct level of light to make a blue sky blue, or a lawn a nice medium green. Whenever your scene is predominantly full of medium tones, like grass or blue sky, try to adjust the exposure settings so that the indicator is in the middle.

You will need to adjust the exposure if your subject is brighter or darker than those medium tones. If you photographed snow with the exposure indicator in the middle, your image would turn out gray. Again, the camera doesn't know what you're trying to photograph. It's programmed to assume that whatever you're photographing is about as bright as green grass and it calculates an exposure that will produce a medium tone.

Depending on how much brighter or darker than average your scene is, adjust your exposure accordingly. To continue the example of a scene of mostly pure snow, you would likely want the exposure indicator at nearly the positive end. If you're photographing a black sand beach in Hawaii, you would likely want the indicator a couple notches above the negative end.

Selecting faster shutter speeds will reduce the amount of light the camera has time to collect, causing the exposure indicator to move toward the darker end. This is also true of using smaller apertures, such as f/22. The more closed the aperture is (and therefore the larger the f/ number is), the less light passes through the lens at any given moment.

Conversely, using slower shutter speeds increases the amount of light the camera has time to collect and therefore brightens your overall exposure. An open aperture, such as f/2.8, also lets light pass through the lens more quickly, also resulting in a brighter exposure.

Digital cameras have made using manual exposure easier than ever. Once you think you have set the exposure correctly, take a picture and check it out on your screen. If it's too dark, extend the shutter speed or open the aperture a bit more. If it's too light, shorten the shutter speed or close the aperture.

Don't worry if at first it takes several attempts to get a correct exposure. It will get easier and easier. And mastering manual exposure will allow you to create images you can't otherwise.

The image at the top of this post is of a secondary waterfall that forms alongside Snoqualmie Falls in Washington state. When the waterfall is at maximum flow in the spring, some of the mist from the main falls blows into the neighboring wall, forming a secondary falls as it collects and falls into the river below.

If I used a fast shutter speed as the camera would normally suggest, I wouldn't have been able to capture the graceful strands of water. A fast shutter speed would have caught individual drops. If I would have greatly extended the shutter speed, the texture of the cloud of mist would have been blurred so much that all detail would have been lost. I manually set a shutter speed of 1/15 of a second with an aperture of f/7.

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One scene, infinite possibilities

I've always been a little envious of painters. If you're trying to capture a scene and the clouds aren't quite right, a painter can just make them right. Photographers have to make do with what nature provides — at least at that moment. As one grows as a nature photographer, however, the act of creating an image becomes more like creating a painting. And I'm not talking about the use of Photoshop.

Photography does involve being in the right place at the right time, but that doesn't mean it's always entirely left up to chance.

One of the biggest differences between beginning and experienced nature photographers is how they approach a scene for the first time. Beginners immediately start snapping away frantically, believing they are capturing the best the area has to offer. The advanced photographers immediately start considering possibilities, wondering if the scene would be even more striking at a different time of day or different time of the year.

All of the photographers I know have developed through three stages of seeing:

In the first stage, they have trouble seeing the whole scene. If they were to set up their tripod where Ansel Adams took one of his famous pictures, they would have trouble seeing how their photograph was different. If it's a view they discovered themselves, they may be surprised to find power lines running through the image when they look at it on their monitors back home. They tend to concentrate on one element of the view, letting their minds fill in the rest. And they don't realize that their minds and their cameras are seeing different things.

In stage two, they learn to see what the camera is seeing. They realize sometimes the light is better than it is at other times. They may realize the scene will be much more beautiful if they wait an hour for the sun to set. When setting up the camera, they scan the entire viewfinder to look for any possible flaws. They have the technical skills to use filters and other means to bring out the best in the scene that is in front of their eyes.

At the final stage, the photographers have grown to the point where they can imagine what a particular scene could be. They can imagine what the scene would be with light coming from a different direction, different weather, more or less snow, more or less water in waterfalls and rivers, different colored or no vegetation, and so on. And they have the experience and research skills to determine when the ideal time would be to capture that image then. They will take a picture today, but they will also be back at the time when they visualize the scene will be even better.

The stages of artistic development are not a new discovery. Galen Rowell, one of the highest regarded landscape photographers of the 20th century, once wrote about growing as a nature photographer to the point where you can see things that haven't happened yet.

There are not many short cuts in this process. To grow as a nature photographer, you need to grow in your awareness of the world around you, realizing that there are an infinite number of variables that affect the scene before your eyes. If any of those variables change, the scene is different. Maybe the changes result in a better image. Maybe they don't.

Education can help you with this process. I took a weather class in college and it's has proven to be one of the more useful subjects I studied.

Personal observation can be even more helpful. Pick a view near your home and photograph it at different times of day, different times of the year, and in different years. Study the images for differences. Treat this exercise like one of those puzzles where you're presented with two nearly identical-looking drawings and you have to spot all the changes.

All of the images in this post are of Mount Si and Borst Lake. My tripod was set up in nearly the same place for each image. But each image is dramatically different. In the image at the top of the post, notice how the fresh snow and clearing storm changes the appearance of the mountain. Notice how in winter there are no lily pads or algae on the lake.

In the images below, see how the amount of vegetation on the lake changes through summer and into fall. Notice how a different type of storm can completely change your perception of the mountain. Or how the moon impacts the feel of the image.

For every scene, there are infinite possibilities. To grow as a photographer, it's important to understand all the possibilities so that you can select the one that best matches your vision.

(Follow Kevin Ebi's photography on Facebook, Twitter, or Google +.)

Desensitized to nature

I was standing at Tunnel View in Yosemite National Park recently, sharing the popular overlook with a couple dozen photographers. It's one of the most popular viewpoints in any national park. From this one point you can see several iconic granite peaks as well as Bridalveil Fall. If there's any one scene that says, "Yosemite," this is it.

But the sky was clear. The lighting was not dramatic.

"Let's go," a photo tour leader barked to his students, wanting to retreat to the lodge for hot coffee. "I have many pictures from this spot that are much better. You could get this picture any day." He ambled to his car and honked the horn at his students who were still snapping pictures.

He was right. But he's also wrong.

His statement was literally true. (I, too, had "better" shots from Tunnel View already; one is at the bottom of this post.) But I think it's tremendously sad that someone could ever find a sweeping vista that stretches from El Capitan to Half Dome boring. Even more troubling, I am guessing that someone who hired a guide to take them to such a well-known viewpoint had probably never seen that view before with their own eyes. I would also guess a fair number of those students will never get to experience that view again.

I did not get a great photo there, nor did I expect to. Yosemite is one of my favorite places, but I live 1,000 miles away. I am lucky if I get to visit once a year.

While I was at the viewpoint, I spent nearly all my time just taking in the scene. I watched golden sunlight trickle down the face of El Capitan. I watched three ravens circle together, catching thermals to effortlessly soar higher and higher. I listened as car-sized chunks of ice that formed on the granite walls overnight broke free and crashed to the ground.

I left the viewpoint not disappointed, but recharged. Everything suddenly seemed interesting. I noticed tiny details as I went for a walk on the valley floor after leaving the viewpoint. I noticed the golden granite walls reflecting in tiny streams. I noticed gorgeous patterns in fallen trees. I immediately took my camera out of its bag and began making art. I can't imagine that would have happened without the seemingly unproductive stop at Tunnel View.

In a way, I understand where the cranky photo tour leader was coming from. Beginning nature photographers typically flock to popular vantage points where they attempt to recreate images from artists they admire. Frankly, it can be an almost paint-by-number approach to nature photography.

As these beginners grow as artists, however, they learn to work beyond that. "I stood where Ansel Adams stood, why doesn't my shot look like his?" They learn about quality of light. They learn how the view from one particular point can change dramatically from one minute to the next, one season to the next, one year to the next. They eventually learn that creating truly special images involves more than just standing where someone else stood. Rushing his students off deprived them of that important lesson.

Professionals often call images from well-worn viewpoints like Tunnel View "cliché shots." I believe that attitude shows that we professionals can still learn something from them, too.

A photographer who thinks that one of the most iconic scenes in one of the most iconic parks in the world is just a cliché is a photographer who has been desensitized to the wonder of nature.

So-called cliché shots, like that from Tunnel View, are popular because they are iconic and represent some of the best scenery we have. True artists need to work beyond the cliché, of course, but they also need to acknowledge that just because a viewpoint is popular doesn't make it bad.

If you can't appreciate something that nearly everyone else finds wondrous — even if only for the sake of your students who are seeing it for the first time — maybe you need to leave your camera in its bag for a morning or two and get reacquainted with the wonder of nature. If you ever let the feeling of wonder die, or snuff it out in new photographers, I believe art is lost in the process.

The image at the top of this post came from my walk on the valley floor after my time at Tunnel View. It may look like a simple fallen tree across a creek, but to me, it's more than that. I was drawn to this scene because the water captures some of the amazing golden color that I watched develop on the granite cliffs earlier. It's not a picture of Tunnel View, but it's certainly inspired by it.

Paying respect to these icons, even if you've seen them hundreds of times before, is good not only for the next generation of photographers, but it can also help fuel your own creative spirit.

(Follow Kevin Ebi's photography on Facebook, Twitter, or Google +.)

You get what you get

The image at the top of this post was supposed to be of a large flock of snow geese and Mount Baker. Instead, it's of a large flock of western sandpipers and Mount Rainier. And that's perfectly fine with me.

For the most part, I believe in planning images in advance. I like to sit down with topographical maps, sun and moon charts, wildlife books, etc., creating images in my mind and then seeking to capture them in real life. Some images were in my mind for years before the conditions were right to capture them with my camera.

My style is typically to create images that tell stories, whether it's about the changes of the seasons, the behavior of the wildlife, or some other natural phenomenon. Planning helps be focus my message and to tell the story the best way possible.

Despite all the planning I do, however, I would guess that a majority of my best images involve some serendipity. Planning can also be a creative trap.

On this particular day, I headed up to the Skagit Valley of Washington state with the purpose of trying to capture snow geese with a giant snow-capped volcano in the background. Snow geese visit the state only for a few months each winter. I figured the snowy mountain would effectively communicate the season. The forecast called for clear skies, so I figured it was my day.

When I arrived, however, clouds were already building around Mount Baker. And the snow geese, which frequently travel in one giant flock, were dispersed because of hunters. There were groups of the birds here and there, but the size of the flocks was nothing compared to what I've seen in the valley on previous trips.

Over the years, I've learned that while having a plan is important, it's even more important that you know when to try something else. So that's what I did.

I went for a short hike along an open area along Skagit Bay and saw a large flock of sandpipers feeding on the mudflats. The flock grew larger and larger. A bald eagle flew by and stirred them up. Soon thousands of these shorebirds were zig-zagging across the water.

I spent a half hour photographing them as the flock grew ever larger while the sun set behind the Olympics. In several of the frames, I got a different volcano, Mount Rainier, in the background. If I had stuck with the plan, trying to force an image that nature wasn't willing to provide that day, I would have come home with nothing.

This experience wasn't unique. On my first trip to Iceland, for example, I traveled with a stack of research and ended up using very little of it because of unusual weather. I spent that trip making lots of close-up and patterns images instead of the sweeping landscapes I envisioned. And I'm proud of the images I created on that trip.

I think one of the biggest success factors for a nature photographer is understanding the roll of planning. Planning opens your eyes to the opportunities. Once you're on location, you need to open your eyes to what's actually there.

Planning helps you look for things you might not have otherwise noticed, but with nature, you get what you get.

(Follow Kevin Ebi's photography on Facebook, Twitter, or Google +.)

Best images of 2012

While it is a new year, I do want to take a moment to reflect back on 2012. Compiling a few of my favorite images from the past year has become an annual affair. This task isn’t easy. Artists generally aren’t all that good at editing their own work. Boiling an entire year down to 10 images can seem like an impossible task.

But it can also help you look at your work in new ways. The passage of time has helped me evaluate some of my images with new eyes, freeing me from some of the emotional attachment to the image at the time of capture. That, in turn, helps me figure out what I like — and don’t like — about the work I’ve been producing, helping me to grow and set a direction for the new year.

In no particular order, here are a few of my favorite images from 2012:

This image wasn’t planned; I visited North Creek in Bothell, Wash., this day in search of flooded out beavers. The flood waters, however, were rapidly receding, and the beavers were safely in their lodge. I decided to hike along the creek anyway, and spotted this pied-billed grebe. The colors, the perfect circles, and the intimate moment combined to give me one of my favorite images of all time.

A Jack Horkheimer astronomy segment introduced me to the Zodiacal Light, millions of miles of comet dust that glow in the night sky around the spring and fall solstices. I traveled to Crater Lake, to the rim of the former Mount Mazama, figuring it would make a unique backdrop. And I imagine in its day, the volcano produced massive amounts of dust of its own.

A bald eagle and moon image made my list last year, but how could I pass up an image where it appears the bird is crying at the moon? (In reality, it's crying at annoying flies.)

There have been better years for wildflowers at Paradise, Mount Rainier, but add a backlit lenticular cloud ... instant favorite!

The fall color this year in the North Cascades, however, was the best I had ever seen.

I have probably spent hours gazing at this image of leaves floating off Foster Island in Seattle, Wash. It looks simple, but between the reflections, the surface tension of the still water, and sparkles of sunlight, my eye always finds something interesting to study.

This is a color image, even though it looks black and white. I spent hours photographing this tiny sea tunnel, part of the much bigger and much more well known Devils Punchbowl on the central Oregon coast.

Dry Falls, a remnant of ice age floods in eastern Washington, resulted in one of my favorite images from my first big photography tour 12 years ago. For the first time since, I went back in 2012 and was rewarded with a great sunset and, if you look really, really, really close on the right horizon, a flock of gulls that give this former waterfall a true sense of scale.

The Stanislaus “Rim of the World” viewpoint is a place people race past on their way to the Yosemite Valley. I was mesmerized by the sun trying to break through the thick fog and had to stop. Even six months later, I am drawn to the lighting and layers in this scene.

Capturing a bird in a great in-flight pose may be the holy grail of nature photography, but I always felt this beautiful snowy owl bathed in gorgeous golden light in a unique driftwood shelter was a special image.

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Get close by keeping your distance

For the second year in a row, there are fairly large numbers of snowy owls that are wintering nearby. Near Seattle, snow geese are a regular winter feature, but snowy owls are a rare treat. Reckless photographers, though, are in danger of driving our infrequent visitors well back north — or even worse.

I understand the need to get close. I’ve written about the standard approach to wildlife photography before. Looking at the work produced in some photo clubs or the winners of some contests, it’s easy to assume the crowning achievement of a wildlife photographer is to get so close to the subject that you can’t even squeeze the entire animal into the frame.

Not only would they be wrong, they could also be putting their wildlife model at risk. And as I’ve learned over the years, you can often get closer by staying farther away. I’ll explain more about that in a minute.

The influx of snowy owls this far south is known as an irruption. Scientists aren’t exactly sure why it happens, but it is related to their food supply. Either population of snowy owls grew dramatically this year or the number of voles, their favorite food, plunged. In either case, predators outnumber prey in the Arctic this year, forcing the owls to spread out over greater distances to feed.

Boundary Bay, an open area in southern British Columbia near the U.S./Canadian border, is where many of these owls end up during an irruption year. There are some voles, but there are also lots of short-eared owls, bald eagles, and coyotes. And those predators are there every winter. Snowy owls, likely starving even before they made their extra long journey south, have to compete with well-established, experienced hunters for the limited food there.

These are years when every calorie matters for the birds wintering there, which is why it’s particularly upsetting to see a handful of photographers march past the “do not enter” signs to scare the owls into flying. Every time this happens, the owls expend energy — energy that, especially in a year like this, they might not be able to replace at their next meal.

That’s bad enough, but I can’t imagine their behavior even results in good images. When you scare an animal, it flees from you. Capturing the backside of an animal isn’t much of an accomplishment and it’s not likely to win you any accolades.

The best images wildlife generally result from keeping a respectful distance and letting your subject approach you. Snowy owls typically aren’t afraid of people; they don’t see many of us high on the tundra. By being quiet and waiting patiently in one spot, I’ve had numerous owls decide on their own to fly toward me, often landing on a perch not far away. They knew I was there, but they decided to come closer to me anyway.

This approach to wildlife photography is time consuming and requires tremendous patience, but it provides incredible photographic opportunities, it doesn’t put the wildlife at risk, and it rewards me with an amazing nature experience. Words can’t describe the wondrous intimate feeling when a snowy owl sees you, approaches anyway, and decides to nap 50 feet away.

Often, the best way to get close is to stand back.

(See more of Kevin's snowy owl images here. Follow Kevin Ebi's photography on Facebook, Twitter, or Google +.)