I´m Max Waugh, ask me anything

[Max_Waugh]

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Hi everyone. I’m a long-time NPN member, and have been working as a full-time professional photographer for fourteen years. This follows a stint as a designer for a small marketing company here in the Pacific Northwest. My years as a designer coincided with my formative time behind the lens. Though I took a photo course toward the end of college that helped inspire my love of the art form, I was mostly self-taught following school. During my early years as a part-time shooter, I spent equal time shooting sports (including a stint as the lead athletics photographer at the University of Washington) and wildlife, but eventually my love for nature won out. My travels in my spare time quickly evolved from vacation/backpacking style trips to wildlife- and photo-centric adventures around the globe.

By the time I found myself in a position to tackle photography full time, I had a variety of trips and experiences under my belt. An immediate goal for me as a working professional was to guide and lead tours, and those years of solo travel had established a familiarity not only with several wildlife destinations, but also allowed me to establish relationships with overseas outfitters and companies. This helped me dive into international wildlife guiding straight-away, and to this day I still work with a number of partners who helped me plan those early trips.

I am most often recognized for my work in Yellowstone, my first “favorite” destination which I first visited for photography nearly twenty-five(!) years ago. Annual trips to the park (sometimes several times per year), and an active role in the greater Yellowstone photography community made it one of my first go-to guiding destinations, and for the past fifteen years I’ve owned property near the park, which has allowed for greater adventures there. These days my focus is primarily on locations that offer a variety of wildlife experiences—Yellowstone, Africa, tropical rainforests—the types of places where you might see and experience something new every time you return. I relish sharing the wildlife moments found there with others, either virtually via platforms like NPN or my social media accounts, or even better, in person while leading trips. There’s great joy to be found in shared experiences in the field, and while many photographers use nature to get away from humanity, I often enjoy the opportunity to bring people face to face with rare, unusual, and exotic creatures and places, to help them learn, and be delighted by new discoveries.

Though I do teach and consult, I don’t consider myself a “technical” photographer. The more detailed aspects of photography often bore me, and I try to avoid getting stuck in long discussions about gear and processing (that said, you’re welcome to ask questions about such topics today… I’ll do my best to answer them). My focus remains on the more human experiences behind the lens, and helping people explore the wild world through my work.

I’m looking forward to tackling your questions today. Let’s get started!

Website: https://www.maxwaugh.com

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[patrick_nowotny (Patrick Raymond Nowotny)]

How do you think AI in photoshop and Lightroom will affect photo contests?

[Paul_Holdorf]

Thanks for being here today Max. I love how so many of your photos go beyond just a wildlife portrait, but really tell a story. It difficult to script a story but there are ways to know where a story might be and then be there to capture it. How often do you just stumble on to a story and how often is the image the result of careful planning?

[Max_Waugh]

Hi Pat!

On the surface, I’m sure we’ll see a few more headlines about winners using AI to “cheat” the system, but ultimately it will still come down to the contest organizers. How many restrictions do they put in their rules, and how much vetting do they do to sniff out over-processing/illustration?

This is already the case, as some competitions allow more in the way of digital illustration and processing than others. In one instance, full cloning is okay, while another committee could bar cloning but allow for heavy dodging and burning. I was surprised to learn that the grand prize winner in a prominent competition—which is generally pretty strict about editing—actually had their winning image disqualified one year due to cloning some spots of glare in the background, but the next year they resubmitted the scene having burning rather than cloned those areas. They won the whole thing.

So it will still come down to the parameters a jury sets. Topaz is technically AI, but is still thought of as basic NR/Sharpening software these days. Will it be treated differently as AI in general becomes more and more powerful down the road? It will be interesting to see.

There’s already software out there that can scan an image and see how much of the frame (X%) has been edited in post, say in PhotoShop, so right now it’s just a matter of how much effort the rule makers want to put in to detect the rule breakers. The point of real concern will probably come if/when AI and technological advances can somehow get to the point of recreating RAW files without detection.

[jodiA (Jodi Anderson)]

Sharpness is the bane of my existence most of the time - where can I get started with improving?

[Max_Waugh]

I love how so many of your photos go beyond just a wildlife portrait, but really tell a story.

Paul, I appreciate hearing comments like this, because I’m often at a loss when people ask me about my “style” of photography. I can’t really pinpoint it, perhaps because I’m uncomfortable spending too much time examining my work (yes, I even hate editing). This, perhaps, is not the best recipe for success when it comes to improving as a photographer, but I suspect I’m focusing too much on deriving enjoyment from being in the moment and sharing these experiences with others.

In a similar vein, I’m not much of a planner. I highly respect those who tackle huge projects—either professional (i.e., contracted) or personal—but I’m not very technical, and I’ve also made something of a conscious decision to not overload myself and my schedule on the photography side. Balance with family life (we have a young son at home) is huge for me. As a result, even something that I’d love to do some day, like a book project, gets put on the back burner.

So the stories in the field largely develop organically. I’m fortunate at this point to be enough of a grizzled vet to be able to draw on plenty of past experiences… which may influence how I approach a subject or scene (“what’s something new I haven’t tried here?”). This is what drives much of the story told in compositions or camera settings.

In other instances, I’ll stumble across something that I may recognize from others’ work or documentary films, and I hope to recreate that for my audience and take a different approach altogether. Or there will be a literal story that was completely off my radar, but which surprises me by how exciting it is in the moment.

Two recent examples occurred during my Guyana trip in January. Early in the trip, we stayed at a lodge run by an indigenous community that was very active in local conservation efforts. Because I was scouting this location, the local outfitter had planned a variety of activities… including some stuff I would not have opted for of my own volition. This included an evening session on the nearby river, following caiman researchers as they captured animals for scientific study. I usually shy away from photographing people (I’m not that comfortable invading personal space), but we spent a couple hours witnessing the capture, study, and release process. I snapped away the entire time… and only afterward, did I get excited about the resulting images. They ended up being far more compelling and successful than I imagined. It was only two hours of “coverage,” so I don’t expect there to be any major benefit to me professionally or commerically, but I’m proud of the work I produced in an unfamiliar environment, and am mostly excited to share a look at this side of the human/wildlife world that my audience doesn’t normally get to see.

The other Guyana example has to do with my newfound love of termites. I’m still a middling macro photographer, generally too indecisive about gear to make any serious advances when it comes to actual skill photographing small subjects. But in Guyana I saw my first real termite colonies, and witnessed some behavior from them I’d only seen in documentaries. I started geeking out right then and there, and was excited to capture some of this behavior. Was it something new in the world of wildlife photography? Absolutely not. But it was a) new for me, and b) a story my audience probably isn’t familiar with, about an animal 99% of them would typically shy away from or ignore. Having the opportunity to educate folks, even about this one little thing, does provide a small thrill.

[Max_Waugh]

Jodi, I just wrote out a big long answer about photo processing, when I realized you were likely referring to actual shooting rather than editing. So I’m going to approach this question from the shooting side…

When it comes to capturing sharper images, I find it often comes down to two obvious things: gear and technique. A good craftsman never blames his tools, but there are things like lens “sweet spots” (e.g., many longer lenses are sharpest at f/8-10) or softness on the longest focal length of a zoom lens that can be factors. Be wary of 600mm on a 200-600mm lens… the technology keeps improving and today’s zooms are so good, even on the long end, but they may be less forgiving.

Something more obvious is camera settings, and shutter speed in particular. But sometimes wildlife shooters are only taking into account the speed of the subject. Yes, a running wolf or bird in flight demands a “fast” shutter speed to freeze the moment, but sometimes folks forget that hand-holding big lenses (which more and more people are doing these days as those lenses shrink a little) introduces a lot of camera shake. I have relatively shaky hands, so when I’m in the field, I’m accounting not just for the subject but for my own shortcomings when choosing shutter speeds.

There are other factors on the technical side. Think about the insane number of AF settings choices you could pick from with today’s cameras. I have two different back buttons set up, one for “normal” AF and one for “Animal Eye.” But beyond that my camera allows for all manner of tweaks to the AF settings. And what I’ve found is that the same settings don’t always work for every individual. Back during my sports photography days, I had just picked up my first Canon camera body that introduced “AF cases,” the presets used for different types of subjects and their movements. I was picking the brain of a veteran newspaper photographer about this body, and he cited Case 6 as his go-to for football. The Canon manual recommended Case 4 (or something like that). For me? Case 3 ended up working best! So even if you sit down and listen to other shooters about their settings, you may ultimately find that even the best suggestions don’t mesh with your style.

One last note about sharpness: environment can be a factor. Heat haze is an underrated challenge. Even in cold environments, I’ve dealt with atmospheric conditions that softened a frame. In Patagonia, a cold evening was setting in, and we had a lovely puma family scene playing out in front of us: the cute cub was climbing on a boulder while Mom was standing guard nearby. Amazing… but all totally soft, because they were in a rocky area, and the rocks were still giving off heat waves after being warmed by the sun all day. In such cases you’re often out of luck, but you can try to change your position or wait for your subject to move in hopes of improving your chances. In our case, we had to wait for the cats to walk to a grassy hillside before we could capture some sharper (though less interesting) photos.

[Ed_Williams]

Max, thank you for doing this for us today. I know this is a very broad question. What are some key things you look for in composing wildlife photographs? e.g. balance, lines, colors, BG, etc.

[lucy (Lucy Jaxon)]

Hi Max - from your photography you can tell that you like to shoot a variety of species. If you could only shoot one type of species for the rest of your career, what would it be and why?

[Max_Waugh]

Ed, thanks for asking about composition. I think folks will see that many of my critiques on this site are related to composition, because I’m a big believer in finding balance in the frame and searching for the most effective ways for the viewer’s eye to explore a canvas smoothly.

I’m not an ardent rule follower. That is, I don’t believe the Rule of Thirds is a commandment… but I do think it’s rooted in some sound reasoning. There’s some logic to finding a main subject, and subsequently a secondary, tertiary, etc. subject in a frame in order, as well as finding an uninterrupted route for the eye to take while going from each point. To me this means leaving the right amount of space behind a profiled subject, for example: not too much (empty space will drag the eye backward), but not too little (the edge of the frame is in itself a distracting line if it’s too close).

It also means composing for or cropping out distractions. I sometimes go overboard with this. That leaf is too bright, that patch of grass is too dark… can I crop in to remove these from the scene—important note: I’m not a “cloner” usually—without crowding or cramping my subject? Sometimes I get to the end of this process in editing and find I’ve lost too many pixels. I have to go back in these instances and find a compromise.

Sometimes, I’ll veer away from the RoT and center a subject when it’s not necessarily expected. I think there are instances when even a profiled subject doesn’t demand a “thirds” composition, or even that extra space in front. What are the other elements of the scene offering up? Does a glance from an animal, or perhaps its movement justify going against the grain and leaving more space behind, above or below? It’s certainly possible, and a non-standard composition may more effectively tell the story (a good example is a bird taking off from a body of water… sometimes the trailing splash behind tells a better story that a clean empty space ahead of the bird). Or maybe the layers of landscape surrounding one of the subjects are, to me, the most important part of the frame. The textures and lines may tie together so well that the placement of the subject itself becomes less of a priority for me.

[Max_Waugh]

Lucy, that’s a good question, and for me it’s very difficult to answer. I was “raised” as a mammal guy. It took me a while to branch out and really start to appreciate birds and macro subjects. These days, owls are way up there for me (the only bird I’d often ditch a mammal sighting for ).

Of the furry critters, my favorite subjects are wild cats (exception: lions) and mustelids. I really like the challenges posed by the weasel family: they’re often elusive individuals, and when one does find them they can be incredibly fast, agile, and difficult to photograph.

When it comes to cats I greatly admire their stealth and their beauty. As with many of my target subjects, I feel more excitement about the rare or hard-to-find stuff, so something like a wild black panther, a snow leopard, or even something small and obscure like a flat-headed cat would excite me a great deal more than a pride of lions.

I think maybe the cats would win this one, by a whisker.

[Mike_Friel]

Hi, Max, and thanks very much for doing this. What for you would be the optimal number of participants for one of your tour groups in far-flung places?

[Max_Waugh]

Mike, I prefer to keep my groups smaller. Traditionally, this has meant 4-6 participants at most. While I’d love to make more money with larger groups, there’s something to be said for more intimate experiences and more one-on-one attention for clients.

But sometimes location or transportation logistics dictate the numbers. For example, I’ve recently had a few tours that take us to more exclusive camps or lodges… which sometimes require us to book the full lodge in order to stay there. In these instances I have expanded to as many as eight people, but only when the destination and shooting situation isn’t compromised (for example, on an Africa trip we can add an extra safari vehicle to ensure everyone still gets the space they need).

More often, I find myself trying to find ways to make the group smaller. In a rainforest setting I wouldn’t think of bringing more than six guests. Because many of my jungle trips are trail-based (not just sitting at the lodge or at feeder setups), we’re searching for subjects in a dense environment with more limited sight lines. I can’t imagine having a group of 8-12 guests fighting over space in such confines. In other cases, vehicle logistics prohibit our numbers, either due to tighter conditions (e.g., a smaller vehicle on a narrow one lane road in the forests of Borneo), or due to permit limitations.

I’ve been reducing my guest numbers on trips more often lately. The downside is that the price goes up slightly, but in general it has made for a much more positive experience for guests.

[Max_Waugh]

Big thanks to everyone who submitted questions! This was a lot of fun.

If you’re interested in learning more about my wildlife photo tours, you can do so here. I like to balance some popular long-time standards (Yellowstone, Costa Rica, Alaska), with some spots that are a bit more unusual (Mongolia, Zambia, Guyana), so there’s a nice mix that may include something interesting for you.

NPN is a wonderful educational resource, and I highly encourage everyone to take advantage of this community, including accessing the knowledge of so many of our long time shooters and professionals that are offering advice and critiques. However, if you’re looking for something more specific when it comes to wildlife photography (e.g., travel advice, info on certain subjects, or other more robust one-on-one discussions and feeback), I do now offer virtual consulting sessions. You can learn about those here.

Thanks again to Cynthia, David, and the NPN crew for hosting this event!

Max

[jodiA (Jodi Anderson)]

Thank you for this thoughtful response - this gives me great tips to pursue