Sunday Classic / The Myth of Manual
IT’S A COMMON MISCONCEPTION THAT “REAL PHOTOGRAPHERS” ONLY SHOOT IN MANUAL.
It’s not true. Certainly not for me. I grew up using manual cameras. Cameras that didn’t even have light meters. In fact I’ve spent as much time looking at the ground glass of a view camera as through the lens of a DSLR. I’m perfectly comfortable with it but I recognize that the automatic features of modern cameras offer benefits that can improve my work and I see nothing wrong with using them.
What “real photographers” do, is understand their exposure choices. How a photograph is exposed has an enormous impact on its emotional content as well as its clarity and color palette. The proper exposure for any given image is a highly subjective thing and possibly the most important choice the photographer has to make. Whether in manual or automatic mode, there are choices to be made and good choices are never made blindly. The key is in understanding what your camera sees and knowing how to control it.
UNDERSTANDING YOUR METER
The first issue is understanding how your light meter works. There are two components to this. First, how the light meter judges a scene and second, how that judgment is influenced by the meter mode selection. First we will look at what your meter sees.
No matter how advanced your light metering system, it is still a dumb machine. That holds true for use in manual mode as well as automatic. This is where novice photographers go wrong in switching to manual mode. The meter functions in exactly the same way and the user either understands that functionality, or they don’t.
To put it simply, the camera doesn’t know what it’s photographing. It is only able to judge tone. To some extent modern cameras know about highlight and shadow but what they really see is the middle of the tonal scale. A value that photographers call
Read More »Saturday Shoutout / Getting Started
Saturday Shoutout / Getting Started
Orvis has a great new series of videos on fly fishing basics.
If you are interested in learning to fly fish, or sharpen your skills, I can’t think of a better guy to help than Tom Rosenbauer. Tom, and Orvis instructor Pete Kutzer, have created a 13 part video series to do just that.
These are not two minute tip videos but twenty minute, in depth shows that cover the most basic idea and some advanced techniques in a concise, easy to understand format. I think it’s great that Orvis has put their time and resources into educating new anglers. Give these videos a watch. You just might learn something.
THE ORVIS GUIDE TO FLY FISHING, EPISODE I – THE BASICS OF FLY FISHING
Read More »Browns Rising
Back in 2013 Kent Klewein and I were in a tire commercial.
I was encouraged by a reader to reshare this video from 5 years ago. It seems like yesterday but our readership has grown so much since then that plenty of you have not seen it. If you have, please excuse the old news. If you haven’t, take a few minutes and enjoy some cool fishing footage. It is of course a tire commercial, so there’s that too.
BROWNS RISING
Read More »Catching Big Trout Sometimes Takes Multiple Attempts
By Kent Klewein Several times this past year guiding, my clients would miss a big fish opportunity during our fishing trip. Sometimes it would be because of a poor hook set, other times, it was completely out of their control by last second refusals or turn offs from the big fish. We’d always make several more casts and try using different flies, but most of the time the big fish would have already caught on and would ignore our offerings despite perfect presentations. Without giving up on the cause I would tell my clients, “no worries, let’s come back later in the day and give that big fish another go”. Not always but quite often, we’d come back and catch that big fish the second time around. When we were fortunate enough for it happened it was the most thrilling guiding for me, and my clients couldn’t have been more pleased and proud of themselves. If you find yourself wading a river or stream and spot a big fish but don’t catch it, don’t accept defeat, let the fish cool off and come back an hour or two later for a second shot. If you do everything right, most of the time you stand a very good chance at catching the trophy. This simple fly fishing tip, is overlooked by a lot of anglers and it’s paid off for me time and time again throughout my years guiding. Don’t be disappointed if you strike out the second time around, because you’ve got one thing going for you that you didn’t have before, and that’s the fact that you now know where the big fish likes to hang out. Sooner or later, if you keep coming back and trying, you’ll catch that big fish. And when it happens you’ll feel a … Continue reading
Read More »Unhang My Fly You Villain Stump!
One of the unavoidable happenings in fly fishing is the oh-so-wonderful snag.
Overhead limbs, rocks, submerged timber, rhodo, your net man… you name it, it’s out there just waiting to snatch your fly from the air. A lot of the time it’s game over for your rig. You just have to break it off and move on after a short grieving period. There are, however, certain scenarios where one simple trick can save your flie(s) from being lost to the Water Nymphs. It’s by no means 100% effective, but it’s easy and worth a few tries before snapping your tippet.
First thing, if you’ve discerned that your fly is hung up on something solid on the bottom, or you’ve laid your flies across a log, or any other obstacle, sit tight for a second. Don’t set the hook into it any further! Before you going tugging on your rod like you’re Magnus Ver Magnusson, do this….
Strip in the majority of your line, leaving it just taught enough to lift your fly line above the water. Once the fly line is ABOVE the water, bring your fly rod tip to 12 o’clock like you would to make a roll cast. You may need to slip a little more line as you position your rod correctly. Once you’ve gotten everything situated, execute a firm roll cast straight at your fly. The loop created by the cast will transfer momentum past the fly, opposite of the direction that it was snagged, potentially releasing the hook from the snag. Didn’t work the first time? Try again, but this time
Read More »Sunday Classic / The Thrill that Comes From the Unknown
If you ask me, I think the surprise factor in fly fishing is underrated. Most of us choose to spend our time preparing and planning out every single detail of our fly fishing trips, so we can eliminate it. We spend hours tying recommended flies, we go threw our gear with a fine tooth comb checking for imperfections, and we research everything we can about the water and species we’ll be tackling. We do this because we want to feel in control. Furthermore, we do it because we want to catch fish. Problem is, fly fishing isn’t all about trying to squeeze out every bit of success we can muster out of a day on the water. A big part of fly fishing for me is letting go and
Read More »Saturday Shoutout / On Appeal
Mike Sepelak is a free man.
Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling in February, Mr Sepelak’s long running legal nightmare has come to an end and he is once again free to wade the rivers and streams of North Carolina. The lawsuit, filed by the RFA has been thrown out and the details will now surely come to light in coming weeks.
Congratulations Mike! We are happy to know you are out there, fighting the good fight for the rest of us. Stay strong brother. We have your back.
Click here to see the images for Mike’s incarceration in the state of Louisiana.
Read More »3 Reasons I like To Fish The Bahamas In January
By Louis Cahill
I’ve been fishing South Andros, in the Bahamas, for bonefish every January for about a decade.
I’ve fished there, and other spots in the Bahamas, during every season and the fishing has always been good for me, but I think January is my favorite time to visit. The fishing is much of the reason, but there are a couple of other things that make January special.
BIG BONEFISH
January is a great month for big fish. Especially when there has been a lot of rain. Many anglers shy away from the winter months because the weather can be unpredictable, but there is a big upside to that weather. Cooler temperatures, meaning days in the 70s, encourage smaller fish to school up in deeper spots, leaving a higher percentage of big fish on the flats. Rain oxygenates the water, bringing out the larger crabs and other tasty creatures. That, in turn brings in the big ocean bones.
Your chances of landing a double-digit bonefish are better then than at any other time. This year was a great example. I can’t remember a time I saw more really big bonefish on the flats. Several of the folks attending the January bonefish school landed double-digit fish. For a couple of them, it was their first bonefish trip. That’s pretty exciting.
IT’S A GREAT REBOOT
When January rolls around, I need a break. I’m worn out from the hustle of the holidays and, even here in the Southeast, I’m ready for a break from the cold weather. The photos on the right show Josie, my potcake dog, playing in the snow and the view at Bari’s Lodge just a few days later. A week of bonefishing on beautiful white sand flats and sipping cocktails on the beach is just what I need to recharge for the coming year. I have always
Read More »Choosing the Right Tippet Size
I’ve talked quite a bit about how important it is to correctly select the proper tippet size when your fly fishing for trout.
Most fly fisherman have no problem grasping this, after all, small fly patterns generally call for using smaller tippet and big fly patterns call for larger tippet, right? Well, that’s a general guideline most anglers fish by on the water, but it’s not the only factor fly fishermen should use when choosing what size tippet to fish with. Equally important in tippet choice by anglers is how clear or stained the water is that’s going to be fished, and also what level of fishing pressure the water sees (how educated the trout are).
Choosing the Right Tippet Size Guide
(This is your typical text book guide you would find for a beginner wanting to learn to match the appropriate tippet size with fly pattern size. For the most part it’s spot on, but I think it’s important to point out and understand you don’t always have to follow it exactly)
Sunday Classic / The Homemade Yeti Cooler
Don’t get me wrong, your Yeti is a great cooler and, yes, you can use it for a poling platform, sort of, and it does make you look very cool but if you’re like me and you travel a lot to fish it’s just not practical.
What I need is a cheap cooler that I can use for a week or two, then toss in the garbage on the way to the airport. I suffer a little guilt for landfilling a bunch of styrofoam, but the damage to my wallet is minimal.
I’ve used styrofoam coolers from grocery stores for years. On photo shoots I will sometimes have a half dozen of them. The problem is, they don’t hold up. You can buy cheap plastic ones but they are still twenty bucks or so and they’re not as good as the styrofoam at keeping ice. If you pitch six of them, you’re tossing $120. My frugal soul can’t stand that.
Five or six years ago I figured out this cool trick for making your styrofoam cooler bomber. A couple of layers of strategically placed duct tape on the sides, top and bottom make them surprisingly tough. Adding duct tape hinges and a lid helps to keep your ice longer by keeping the lid shut tight.
I’ve been doing this for years and I have
Read More »