Jim Zuckerman

Jim Zuckerman Capture wonderful images with the help of Jim Zuckerman Photography. Capture wonderful images with the help of Jim Zuckerman.

Jim is a passionate photographer based in middle Tennessee. He has been published in leading photo magazines, books, DVDs and blogs for decades. By leading photo tours and workshops, he shares his creative techniques and visions as an artist/photographer.

I was home for two days from Patagonia and then I started my Louisiana swamps tour in which I take clients to primeval a...
10/31/2024

I was home for two days from Patagonia and then I started my Louisiana swamps tour in which I take clients to primeval and mystical bald cypress swamps in both Louisiana and Texas. It's very unique landscape photography. On the way to our first swamp, we stopped at a couple of plantation houses. One of them had a small collection of exotic birds and it was fun to photograph them. This turkey has to have the strangest face in the animal kingdom. I took the picture at eye level with a 500mm focal length on my 100-500 Canon zoom. My settings were 1/500, f/8, and 2000 ISO.

I associate brightly colored birds with the tropics, so this austral parakeet is a surprise in such a harsh climate as P...
10/28/2024

I associate brightly colored birds with the tropics, so this austral parakeet is a surprise in such a harsh climate as Patagonia. I photographed this bird in mid-morning with bright, direct sunlight, but I waited and hoped the parakeet would move behind the large tree trunk into a shaded area. That made the colors appear more intense -- contrary to the belief of most amateurs who think a bright sun makes colors brighter. The contrast created by harsh light works against an attractive color palette. I used a 100-500mm Canon zoom, and the settings were 1/800, f/6.3, and 3200 ISO. I find it interesting that my first digital camera, the Canon 1Ds Mark II, which cost $8000 in 2005, produced images at 3200 ISO that were so noisy they were essentially unusable. Now, 3200 ISO is commonplace and the images look great.

Another beautiful sunrise we had was a couple of days ago was on the striking peaks of Torres del Paine in Chile. We've...
10/26/2024

Another beautiful sunrise we had was a couple of days ago was on the striking peaks of Torres del Paine in Chile. We've had incredible luck with light on this tour; every morning when we got up early and drove to a great vantage point, we had phenomenal light and dramatic color. Often, the mountains here are so obscured by clouds you can't even see a trace of them. On this morning, there were thin clouds that allowed us to see the peaks but with a touch of mystical light. The eastern sky was clear, so the reddish glow reflected off the clouds as well as the peaks to give us memorable images. My settings here were 1/500, f/4.0, and 800 ISO, and I used a 24-105mm lens. One of the challenges we've had on this tour has been high winds, and even though we used tripods much of the time, the wind buffeted our supports forcing the use of fast shutter speeds a majority of the time. The wind gave us amazing clouds, but it was a problem best dealt with by using shutter settings of at least 1/500.

As I've written in the past, clouds in Patagonia can be, and often are, amazing. Almost every day, we've seen lenticula...
10/24/2024

As I've written in the past, clouds in Patagonia can be, and often are, amazing. Almost every day, we've seen lenticular clouds that indicate high winds in the upper atmosphere. But I had never seen anything like this one. This lenticular cloud was stacked several layers high, and my first impression was an alien mothership and I finally had proof we're not alone! I took about 50 pictures of it as it slowly changed due to the force of the wind. The dead tree in the foreground was a casualty from a massive and very destructive fire in this area that occurred in 2011. It took almost 2 months to extinguish it, and because plants grow so slowly here in the harsh climate, it can take as much as 300 years for the fire scars to disappear. My settings were 1/100, f/22, 800 ISO, and I used a 24mm focal length for the shot. To maximum depth of field, I focused 8 feet into the frame.

This morning, my photo tour group left our hotel at 3am to hike to a waterfall at the base of Mt. Fitzroy. We used flas...
10/20/2024

This morning, my photo tour group left our hotel at 3am to hike to a waterfall at the base of Mt. Fitzroy. We used flashlights and headlamps to negotiated the well-worn trail in the dark, and arrived at the blue hour. It was about 3 1/2 miles one way with a 1200 foot elevation gain. A few people decided not to do it, but most of the group took the challenge and were rewarded with another spectacular sunrise. This time, the peak was somewhat obscured in clouds, but the orange/pink light made the giant monolith glow with intense color and the clouds added a wonderful mystique to the scene. You might think I've added a lot of saturation in post-processing, but I didn't. This is the actual color. It was stunning. The photographic challenge I had to deal with was that the waterfall was nestled between walls of a canyon and, therefore, was several f/stops darker than the mountain. To create the effect of blurred water, a long shutter speed was necessary, but that blew out the sunrise lighting on the peaks. The only thing I could do was to take two shots -- one of the mountain and another, with different exposure settings, of the falling water. My shutter for the latter was 1.6 seconds. Then, in Photoshop, I pasted the two parts of the image together to give me a perfect exposure throughout of what I saw with my eyes.

So often Mt. Fitzroy is obscured by clouds, but this morning it was clear. We had a stunning sunrise. Usually early mo...
10/19/2024

So often Mt. Fitzroy is obscured by clouds, but this morning it was clear. We had a stunning sunrise. Usually early morning light is golden in color, but here in Patagonia it can be red-pink. The eastern sky was on fire. The super intense colors were dazzling, and the first rays of direct light lit up the mountains beautifully. The problem we had, though, was the wind. It was fierce. You had to hold on to the tripod or else it would keel over. I tried to shield my camera and tripod from the wind with my body, and at the same time I used both hands to put a continuous downward pressure on the legs of the tripod to steady it. I also waited for a lull in the wind to shoot. Even though I used a tripod, I still chose a fairly fast shutter simply because I didn't want even the slightest degradation of quality in a scene that was so beautiful. My settings for this image were 1/160, f/5.0, and 2000 ISO.

This is a chimango caracara we passed on the highway here in Patagonia. It was perched on a fence waiting its turn to f...
10/19/2024

This is a chimango caracara we passed on the highway here in Patagonia. It was perched on a fence waiting its turn to feed on a small road kill. When it flew, it skillfully used the wind to hover over the dead animal and that's when I took this shot. From the angle I was shooting, the background was less than ideal. It was out of focus, which worked, but you could make out the light fence posts and that really detracted from the image of the bird. So, I switched my 100-500mm Canon zoom from autofocus to MF, and then I took several out of focus potential background pictures. I wanted to maintain the same lighting condition and the correct colors indicative of the original environment. Next, I carefully selected the caracara using a combination of the quick selection tool and the lasso tool in Photoshop. When I then chose Select > inverse, everything except the bird was selected, meaning the background. I pasted into this selected background the new and natural looking blurred background to complete the composite. The settings for the image of the raptor were 1/3200, f/9, and 2000 ISO.

My photo tour group visited the Perito Moreno glacier today in Patagonia, and I was hoping to see some calving but it wa...
10/18/2024

My photo tour group visited the Perito Moreno glacier today in Patagonia, and I was hoping to see some calving but it was not to be. So this is a shot I took the last time I was here. The glacier is under tremendous pressure, and that plus the warming temperatures of spring and summer cause large chunks of ice to break off and fall into the lake. The columns of ice can be anywhere from 200 to 400 feet high. The sound of the crash is amazing, and the monstrous splash makes a great picture if you are fast enough to capture it. My estimation is that all of the action happens within about 2 seconds. My settings for this shot were 1/500, f/8, and 400 ISO, and I used a 100-500mm Canon telephoto.

So often in Patagonia the clouds are ultra dramatic. In this picture lenticular clouds create the perfect backdrop to M...
10/17/2024

So often in Patagonia the clouds are ultra dramatic. In this picture lenticular clouds create the perfect backdrop to Mt. Fitzroy, one of the iconic mountain landscapes of Argentinian Patagonia. It is Spring here in the Southern Hemisphere, and the snow will last well into summer. My settings for this shot were 1/250, f/11, and 100 ISO. My photo tour group will be photographing this mountain from various angles and a variety of distances; it makes a stunning image from pretty much everywhere. In 3 days, we'll be making a three mile hike one way to a beautiful waterfall that provides a wonderful foreground to the mountain.

The mountains in Patagonia are so dynamic and so photogenic it's hard to stop staring at them. If the sky is clear, the...
10/15/2024

The mountains in Patagonia are so dynamic and so photogenic it's hard to stop staring at them. If the sky is clear, the golden light of sunrise and sunset is simply breathtaking. Contrast is relatively low at this time and that makes photography much better. If the sky is overcast, as it was in my last post, the Patagonian Andes are just was captivating in the diffused light. These particular mountains are called Torres del Paine. This shot was from the last trip down here; it was exciting to see these massive peaks bathed in exquisite light. My settings were 1/250, f/5.6, and 200 ISO. At this distance and with nothing in the foreground, depth of field becomes irrelevant, so I opt for either f/5.6 or f/8, the two sharpest lens apertures.

I'm flying to Buenos Aires this evening to begin my photo tour to Patagonia, one of the best areas in the world for grea...
10/13/2024

I'm flying to Buenos Aires this evening to begin my photo tour to Patagonia, one of the best areas in the world for great landscapes. Several years ago when I traveled here, they had had a fire that unfortunately damaged a lot of the very slow-growing vegetation. This is one example. It's a favorite picture of mine from the trip, but at the same time it's sad that the hand of man is so often destructive. For the composition, I used what I call the 'Classic landscape technique' that I learned from David Muench at the beginning of my career way back in the 70's. It involves finding a striking foreground and composing it very close to the camera position while using a wide angle lens and a small lens aperture for maximum depth of field. This makes the foreground disproportionately large compared to the background. My settings for this shot were 1/60, f/32, and 400 ISO, and I used a 24mm wide angle.

These are sandhill cranes I photographed at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico. I used a Canon 100...
10/12/2024

These are sandhill cranes I photographed at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico. I used a Canon 100-500mm telephoto along with a 1.4x teleconverter giving me 700mm of focal length. This image is uncropped. Even though these birds are relatively slow flyers, I still used a fast shutter speed to guarantee even the wing tips would be sharp. My settings were 1/3200, f/10, 3200 ISO, and I was shooting at 20 frames per second. The focus point arrangement – a very important setting when shooting birds in flight – was a center cluster of 9 points. The early morning sun was behind the birds off to the right, and that created the nice rim lighting on them.

Address

Arrington, TN
37014

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Jim Zuckerman posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Jim Zuckerman:

Shortcuts

Share

Category