Jonny Armstrong Photography » Specializing in camera trapping, underwater, and conservation science photography

My friends’ and I had a recent paper featured in The Nature Conservancy’s Cool Green Science Blog. We found that Dolly Varden migrations from the ocean to freshwater track the highly variable timing of salmon runs, even in the face of climate change. You can read about it here.

For the blog post I provided images of char following schools of sockeye salmon up a small spawning tributary in Bristol Bay, Alaska. These trout-like fish can be seen darting around streams, dodging territorial salmon as they target their energy-rich eggs. The eggs that char eat tend to be those that have escaped the redd (nest) and would not have survived. My friend Morgan and I found that char can actually ramp up their gut size to help them eat as many eggs as possible before salmon finish spawning. A good bout of egg-gorging is important because char need a lot of stored energy to spawn in the fall and then survive the lean times of winter. I’ve argued that the decline of wild salmon runs has likely been an under-appreciated factor in the decline of bull trout, a char native to the Pacific Northwest.

 

Getting a good picture of char and salmon is surprisingly difficult. In this watersheds where I work, salmon populations only spawn for about three weeks. In small streams, that leaves 49 weeks with no opportunities to shoot fish larger than a sculpin. While a salmon population may spawn for 20-30 days, the scene pictured above is quite fleeting, and occurs only as the first wave of fish push into the stream and hold in pools. Within a week fish are typically spread out on redds and many are starting to look beat up. Soon after that, the stream is scattered with carcasses and the swimming dead-the zombie-like fish that have burned through all their energy stores and are nearing the end.

Not only is the salmon run ephemeral, but its timing (phenology) varies year to year. To find fresh salmon to photograph, you’ll need to track this moving target just like the Dollies in our paper. The small Dolly pictured below, under the sockeye, likely followed a wave of salmon as it passed through Lake Nerka, located downstream.

If you are lucky enough to time your arrival with the first waves of fresh salmon you’ll have some more challenges to deal with. First, you’ll need to bring a buddy along to shout “hey bear” now and then. The clear streams that facilitate underwater photography also tend to be cold, so they incubate embryos at slower rates and require salmon to spawn earlier. This means the handful of streams where you can effectively photograph salmon are the same handful of streams where bears go to find their first high quality meal after hibernating all winter and going vegan all spring (except those that get lucky and catch a moose calf). The salmon pictured below, in the bear’s mouth, was the first fish to enter any spawning tributary in 2011. It had been injured by a gill net and entered the stream a week ahead of its peers, dying shortly afterward. I set a camera on its carcass and this bear arrived 30 minutes later; two more bears came during the night to sniff the gravel bar. When the salmon show up, the bears are there within minutes.

That means you’ll want at least one person to stay above water and make sure that you don’t surprise any bears as they walk the stream. Several times I’ve had freshly killed salmon drift in front of my snorkel mask. These are often males with a single bite mark in the back of their head, from a bear plucking out their energy-dense brain, leaving the rest of their carcass for the gulls and caddis flies.

 

The grizzly bears are easy to deal with. It’s actually the other end of the food chain where you’ll find the biggest threat to underwater photography. Before salmon spawn, rocks are covered with a slimy cocktail of algae, microbes, and detritus known as periphyton. As salmon swim upstream and dig in the gravel, they scrub these rocks clean and the periphyton, along with sediments and benthic invertebrates, mix into the water column.

This is great if you’re a young-of-the-year fish looking to snack on mayfly nymphs, but it’s bad news if you’re a photographer hoping for sharp images. The best way to deal with murky water is to get rid of it, by getting closer to the subject and reducing the volume of water that you have to shoot through. How close? Probably about one foot. That means you need an ultra-wide lens if you want photograph fishes, rather than parts of a fish. My favorite lens for this application is a Tokina 10-17 mm fisheye, usually zoomed all the way out.

The smartest way to get within a foot of a school of fish is to set up an underwater tripod and shoot remotely. However, that also takes 90% of the fun out of it and requires some specialty gear. I’d much rather swim with fish than sit in a lawn chair with a wired shutter release. Luckily in smaller streams with distinct pools, the fish are fairly tolerant of a 6 ft. long monster in a camo dry suit. I think once they see how clumsy you are, they realize you are not a jumbo river otter, plus they don’t want to risk darting across a shallow riffle to find the next pool.

So you nailed the run timing and got close to the fish; you’re good-to-go right? Not quite, it’s coastal Alaska in July, so there’s a good chance it’s dark and cloudy. The good news is that you’ll have soft light that won’t illuminate the fine sediments in the water. The bad news is you won’t have much light to work with, the fish are moving, and you’ll be shooting them with your arm extended into moving water. That’s not a good recipe for sharp images, as you’ll be using slower shutter speeds with shaky hands and erratic subjects. Freezing action will require a mix of luck and ISO. You can try adding flash, as in the photo below, but its often impossible to avoid substantial backscatter and you’ll hate that extra weight and drag as you try whip your camera around at the surface. On my 7D I’ll shoot in manual mode at ISO 1600, f/5.6, and a shutter speed around 1/60 to 1/250. I’ll often use the “all points” or zone autofocus mode. When shooting without looking through the viewfinder, using a single autofocus point is risky. I also shoot in rapid-fire mode to increase the odds of a keeper and frequently check the LCD screen to calibrate my aim.

 

If you can deal with the challenges and inevitable frustrations, shooting salmon in small streams can be extremely rewarding. Even if you don’t get the image you’re after, it’s hard not to have a blast when hanging out underwater with fish. If you don’t have a housing for your SLR, you’ll probably do nearly as well with a GoPro on a pole. If the salmon don’t cooperate, you can always throw on a macro lens and look for sculpin in the rocks.

Thanks to Will Bustard and Richard Peters for allowing me to share my thoughts on camera trapping in the Camtraptions Blog. The interview can be found here.

 

 

 

Just got back from a brief but wonderful trip to Yellowstone National Park. I first visited the park in 2001 during a road trip with my twin brother and a friend. We drove through the Old Faithful area in the summer and witnessed the worst aspects of Yellowstone. There were hoards of people, huge RV’s everywhere, and traffic jams from people jumping out of their cars and literally chasing bears into the woods to get photos. We drove straight out of the park and left with little interest in returning.

In 2008, I met my fiancee and began visiting her family in Bozeman, which is just 90-minutes from Yellowstone. Jessi and her folks gave me a proper introduction to the park, bringing me to the less visited areas during the off-peak seasons. Since then I have been mesmerized by the animals and landscapes of Yellowstone and try to get there at least a couple times a year. Winter is my favorite season to visit. There are great opportunities to explore the backcountry on skis or snowshoes, and wildlife are easy to spot against the white backdrop of snow.

Last week I had a typically magical day in the park. Jessi and I got a casual start, skipping the dawn-patrol critter cruise in favor of coffee and snacks from Tumbleweeds in Gardner. We headed into the North Entrance at 9:30am and pulled over to watch some bighorn sheep grazing high on the hillside while we finished our coffee. A ewe and her yearling came in close and let me snap a close-up out the window.

 

A ram came down as well, but attracted the attention of another car, which seemed to think they were in a zoo, as they pulled up 10 ft. from the ram and got outside to take pictures with their phones. The leader of the group stood about 8 ft. from the ram and began mansplaining about YNP ecology… we left.

We hit the next pullout along the Gardner River to watch the steam rise and let the air temps to get closer to zero before we got our day started. After a minute or so we noticed there were a pair of mule deer bucks browsing in the riparian. It didn’t take long before the bigger of the males was just below us putting on a pretty good show and giving me a chance to take another snapshot out the window.

Next stop was Mammoth for some more hot beverages. The clerk told us an amazing story about an American marten that had been sneaking in and raiding chocolates out of the store. It almost sounded too crazy to be true, but sure enough I read about it later in a local magazine, they named the little guy Dean. We drove slow to Blacktail Ponds hoping to luck into an ermine or coyote, but didn’t see much besides a few buffalo and cow elk. It was barely above 0 F outside, but we were getting stir-crazy in the car and needed to get out and do some exploring. We try to pick a new place to wander around on every visit, and this time we chose to ski the plateau above Blacktail Creek. We were pretty miserable for the first half hour, unable to keep our noses and fingers from going numb, but finally the exercise got us warmed up. Besides some zig-zagging ermine tracks, there weren’t many signs of life, but we kept skiing and were content with the views of the plateau’s rolling white hills.

After skiing to the top of a knoll, we spotted a couple bull elk in the distance. Looking with binoculars, more and more bulls starting popping out until we counted 13 in all. I’ve seen small groups of bull elk before, but nothing like this. With their huge antlers, it was quite a site. To avoid disturbing the elk we followed a terrace along a stream headed a different direction. A little while later, another group of bull elk came trotting out of the stream and paused to check us out before heading over towards the other group.

We saw a cow moose on the way out and enjoyed the 3pm “evening” light, when the sunlight gets warm in color and casts long blue shadows off everything it hits. We never did find any of the ermine that had tracked up the willow bottoms, but we did see a couple coyote on the drive back to Gardner.

 

If you get a chance, go to YNP in the winter-you won’t regret it. For me, the trick to really enjoying the park is to be a casual photographer. I see a lot of serious photographers working the road system for wildlife, leaving the car only to stand in pullouts behind their big white lenses. While this is an extremely effective way to photograph wildlife, particularly wolves, it’s also a great way to miss out on the wonder of the park-do you really want your wildlife experience to include the sound of retired dudes comparing the merits of the new 200-400 zoom vs. the 600 mm prime? I don’t, though I do enjoy roadside action in limited quantities. On a recent October I visited the park without any camera gear and bumped into a badger as a thunderstorm rolled over the Lamar Valley; while I regretted not taking my first good shot of a badger, getting to enjoy an animal encounter without having to select AF points and f-stops was pretty nice.

Happy New Year!

 

 

 

My friend Jason Ching and I camera trapped the Washington cascades for an entire winter and the results were humbling: we got a domestic cat (we named her Dolores), one bobcat, and this mysterious furry beast, slightly out of focus.

I’m a fish guy, so it took me a little while to figure out that we’d gotten an American marten. Minus the ears, it reminded me of another mustelid that photobombed a grizzly bear set back in 2011: that one was a mink.

 

Fast forward to 2014; now I am nuts about small carnivores, particularly the weasel family. I’ve gotten a wide variety of them on my research trail cameras, even the apex weasel-beast herself:

 

 

While I’ve had luck with mustelids on trial cams, I’ve mostly gotten skunked (cheesy mustelid pun intended) when going for high quality portraits with my SLR rigs. The one exception has been my lucky encounters with one of the rarest of the weasels, the Pacific fisher.

This winter, I decided to revisit the weasel species that so thoroughly eluded Jason and I in Washington. I went about it a little more wisely this time. First, I picked the brains of fur trappers that I know in Alaska and read up on how folks target marten when they’re after their pelts rather than their portraits. Next, I talked to some local experts in Wyoming, Jake Goheen and Merav Ben-David, who study small carnivores. They tipped me off to the forest features that marten prefer (closed canopies with coarse woody debris), and even some specific locations where they were known to occur. I wandered into one of these locations and was a bit skeptical. It was hard to find thick forest because of all the beetle-kill, but there was a lot of downed wood. However, the forest felt lifeless; beyond the chickadees and gray jays that buzzed around, I just couldn’t picture there being much in the way of wildlife. With larger critters, I can use topography and game trials to guide my set location, but I was at a loss trying to figure out how an arboreal weasel would move across the seemingly homogenous forest landscape. Since I couldn’t bring my camera to the marten, I decided to bring the marten to my camera; I used a skunk-based scent lure that’s popular with fur trappers. I have become habituated to the sharp odor of this lure, I might even say I enjoy its floral aroma and notes of mink and beaver. However, I would not recommend forgetting it in the trunk of your fiancee’s car when you go to pick her up at the Denver airport-it will not go unnoticed.

I went to check the cam a couple weeks later and was blown away. I had video of elk, fox, and the marten I was after. I figured I had it made, so I returned with my SLR rig and setup a full on studio portrait for the marten. That didn’t work: for the next 3 weeks or so nothing hit the set. My friend Maureen Ryan came to visit and I was sure I could show her a shot of a marten… nothing. I gave up and left with a humbling reminder of the trade-off between being a trapper and a photographer: every step you take to improve the photographic quality of a set decreases its chance of getting a visitor. It’s always tricky to gauge your subject and figure out how to optimally balance the trade-off. I’d clearly done a poor job in this instance.

Last week I got a sudden impulse to give the marten another shot. I buzzed out to my old set location just before dark and hiked in through an awful snowpack of breakable crust. I was discouraged to find several sets of human tracks; which made me worry about leaving my camera. Further, because there’s not much potential for winter recreation in this patch of forest, I figured the tracks were from fur trappers, which wouldn’t bode well for my chances of photographing a marten. As I followed the tracks I stumbled upon a huge pile of barrel-shaped turds. To my relief (and embarrassment as a tracker) I realized I was following a moose rather than a person. I made a quick set as it got dark; this time I placed my camera next to a small tree and strapped branches to it. Though I prefer the sharp fall-off of lights placed close to the subject, I pulled my flashes back and hid them behind trees or under a dusting of snow.

I came back a while later and followed fresh marten tracks to my set. Full of hope, I opened my camera box, hit the replay button, and checked out the last picture taken:

” That’s not a #$%(*$#*# marten!” were the next words that came out of my mouth.

Somehow my motion sensor was picking up my arm in test shots, but missing the marten. I moved the camera closer to the log, hoping that would fix the problem. I waited a bit and then returned on skis with my friend Bailey Russel and his adorable mutt Saga. It had snowed 8″ or so and my motion sensor and two of three flashes were buried. I opened the camera and saw another arm shot. I cursed, but Bailey pointed out that I was simply looking at photos from our arrival seconds before. I scrolled back a bit and found that we’d had a visitor come through just before the snow storm. I was thrilled to be looking at my first good portraits of a marten.

 

 

Just like the fisher I photographed in Oregon a couple weeks back; this marten couldn’t resist pouncing onto my camera. I missed the pounce encounter because my motion sensor was buried. It would have made a beautiful shot with the ambient light and falling snow.

He pops back out 30s into the clip.

I have big plans for this guy’s cousins. Headed to Montana today and I think I’ll set a trap for ermine. With a little luck I should have some shots of weasels from another continent within a few months… more to come.

 

High Country News covers environmental and social issues in the American West. I’ve always enjoyed their articles, and a couple summers back I worked with them on a cover feature about Bristol Bay salmon. To my surprise, they recently asked me to photograph a story on a timber mill reopening in Saratoga, Wyoming. Photojournalism isn’t my specialty, but the assignment sounded fun so I said yes. After scheduling the shoot with the mill owner, I learned that it’d have to take place the next morning, and I’d have about one hour on the premises. I’m used to taking weeks or months to get camera trap shots, so I was a little intimidated.

I tried to get as many shots as I could outside of my short window at the mill. I buzzed over the Snowy Range before dawn to get some photos of beetle-killed trees at sunrise and bumped into a pair of foxes right away. I was tempted to spend the whole morning capitalizing on my lucky critter encounter, but I had a 9am meeting at the mill so I had to split.

I got to the mill 20 minutes early and scouted for places to shoot one of my deliverables, a portrait of the mill owner. I found a nice stack of stained beetle-kill wood as a backdrop and dialed in some lighting by shooting myself with a remote shutter and my camera on the tripod. I had great conditions for outdoor lighting; the sun was low enough that it wouldn’t overpower my strobes, but it would provide a free fill light. I used a PCB Einstein in a PLM umbrella as my key light, ambient as fill, and a Lumopro LP-160 as a kicker, zoomed to light the wood in the background and fall off towards the edges of the frame. I love using ambient as fill because it’s often nicer light than what I can make with flashes and I can easily adjust it by changing shutter speeds. Once I had the shot dialed in, I quickly grabbed some ambient light shots of wood products in the area and then headed over to meet the mill owner, Clint George.

 

 

Clint gave me a nice tour of the mill and we talked about forest ecology. I told him I needed a shot of mill activity, so he took me to a large building where the logs are processed. I got a pang of stress when we walked inside: the room was extremely dark with harsh fluorescent lights, terrible conditions for freezing the fast-paced activity of the workers. I didn’t want pop flashes at people operating dangerous equipment, so I bumped my ISO way up and worked at around 1/60s, the fastest shutter speed I could get with the lens open to f/2.8. I knew I was getting blurry shots so I had a new thought; embrace the blur and take a long exposure on a tripod. I was feeling pretty slick until I realized the entire mill was vibrating from all the heavy equipment. I tried turning on image stabilization and hoped for the best. Luckily a few shots turned out sharp enough for print.

I wasn’t able to nail every shot like I had hoped, but I was happy with the collection of images I was able to create in such a short window of time. Plus I got to scout some new camera trap spots on the West side of the Snowies during the drive. The images here are outtakes, the full article is on the HCN website.