15 - Beautiful weather for photography

If you are taking pictures outdoors then this podcast is for you. The weather is an important consideration to the type of picture you are going to get, and it can even determine where you can go.

The weather forecasts we had access to were so vague, we found that we were wasting time, by going to places, only to find the weather was not as predicted. Weather is so important to us, we decided that we had to do something to try and increase our odds of getting a get picture. We decided meteorology is a vast and complicated subject but there had to be a better way of knowing what the weather is going to do.

It seems impossible for amateurs, to be able to do better than teams of trained meteorologists but it is not such an impossible task. What we learned, and use daily and why we took the decision to be our own weather forecasters. How we use the information that is on the internet to make our own predictions and give you some pointers on how to get started yourself. Are all in this episode.

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Transcript

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Welcome. You're listening to Mark and Jacky's Wildlife Photography podcast. Explore and learn about the natural world and how to take pictures. This podcast is all about photography. Our aim is to help you improve your pictures. It doesn't matter what camera you use. We want to stimulate your creative side. Get you taking pictures that you want to share. With other people. Episode 15. Beautiful Weather for Photography. This podcast is all about weather forecasting, which is an important ingredient if you're taking any sort of photograph outside. It's important that we know what the weather is going to be. If the light is going to be good or whether we should go at all. There's always the question about what's the weather going to be like, where we're going to be photographing. If it's local fine, we can look out the door and look at the sky and go, Yeah, it's great. We'll just nip up the road and take a few pictures. Where it is a fair distance to travel, we need to know what the weather's going to be like, where we're going to travel to. So it's an important element of any sort of pictures that we take. Now, where you live on the planet's surface has a dramatic influence on your attitudes to weather. I know people always say the British are always talking about the weather. That's their only topic of conversation. And that is true. And there's a good reason for it. If you live somewhere on the planet's surface where weather is constant for large amounts of time, it's easy to predict. For instance, it'll be hot and sunny until November. Then it will rain for a couple of months. So it's easy to see why people living in those sort of areas don't really bother about the weather. What's there to talk about? It was sunny yesterday. It's going to be sunny tomorrow. It'll be sunny the day after. But if you live as we do in an area that's got an active weather system, life is very different. It changes day to day. Even to our to our your life and what you're going to do today is almost certainly going to be dependent on today's weather. If you're working outside, that is and as wildlife photographers, we work a lot outside. So the weather and what it's going to do, what it's going to be like is very important to us. You may ask, is it because we don't like getting wet? No, there's never the wrong weather, just the wrong type of clothing. After all, we've got waterproofs, warm clothing for both the cameras and for us. Our problem with the weather is twofold. Well, maybe threefold. Let's face it, the weather is just a pain. It's either too hot, too cold, too wet to dry. Too windy, too cloudy. And that's on a good day. The amount of light that's available and the wind speeds are the two major factors in our lives. When you're taking pictures of wildlife outside. The amount of light that you have is vitally important. Heavy cloud block the sun out, pictures look flat. You have to bump up the ISO levels on your camera to get even a reasonable sort of shutter speed and a lack of sun or lack of light. It's a problem if your subject is reasonably fast moving. You need a very high shutter speed just to freeze any movement. Otherwise, the picture you take is going to look blurred, not through out of focus, but because the subject is moving too quickly. Use a slow shutter speed and that blur becomes longer and longer in fact, if you're using such a slow shutter speed because there's no light around, even an animal's breathing or chewing food can blur your subject. So the picture you take is unusable. A quick tip if you want one. If you are in that situation and you have to take the picture and you want to increase your chances of getting a sharp image, try putting the camera you using on continuous shooting or the fastest number of frames you can get in a second. Then it's just a question of holding down the shutter button for a few seconds. And perhaps if you're lucky, out of 30 or 40 pictures, you may get a couple of sharp ones It's a great technique if you're working in low light conditions. And one that we use all the time The problem is noise. A camera firing away is often more than enough to unsettle your more nervous subjects. Or if they weren't nervous when you started They certainly will be. By the time you finished. Trying to take just one more pose and your subject will be off and over the nearest hill. Also, don't underestimate the influence the weather has on wildlife. An animals behavior and awareness changes with the different conditions of the weather. Wind and rain produces a lot of noise. Small birds don't fly very much in high winds. It's just too dangerous for them. So if you're trying to take pictures of small birds and it's blowing a young gale out there, then the chances are you're not going to see many examples to try and take photographs of. The noise that wind and rain produces also robs a lot of animals at their most important facility for avoiding predators, and that's their hearing. When the rain's beating down or when it's blowing and there's a lot of noise, they tend to hide away because it's the safest way for them. They can't hear a predator approaching The wind and rain also makes your subject very alert, and it can be all it takes to spook them is just a very, very tiny noise from you. And they're often away. If you're trying to approach an animal on foot, you've got to take into account where your scent is coming from. So what do you always try and do is you try and approach an animal from downwind that the wind is continually changing and swirling. The chances that you're scent will sometimes be blown towards the animal you're trying to approach increases. And that's enough. As soon as they catch a whiff of you, a lot of animals will move and be off. So again, the wind plays an important part in its direction as to where you can approach an animal from. If you're like us and you're taking pictures outside. The weather is going to have a big influence on your final pictures, and you need to be able to predict what the weather is going to be and then only take pictures in good conditions seems reasonable. That's not always the way, but at least you can predict what the sort of weather might be. Now, I bet you're all thinking just download a weather app onto your phone or tablet or computer and all your troubles will be over. Unfortunately, that tends to be the start of your troubles rather than just the end of them. Now, if you're looking for suggestions for weather apps, for the UK, at least we've got thousands of no, we haven't got thousands. There's a few, but more than a few that we use on a regular basis. We've got the Met Office, Windy, which is literally windy. The BBC, Clear Outside and SAT 24. And yeah, we've got all of those and a lot more on our phones. The only problem with all these apps is that normally they all predict different weather for the same time on the same day. So which do you believe. Well, the answer is probably none of them. Which is the unfortunate consequence of looking at so many apps because their weather forecasts are predictions of what's going to happen rather than what is actually happening. Weather apps and their forecasts are only partially accurate. What we need for our photography is certainty. Well, that's never going to happen, I suppose. So second best is a probability of what the weather will be like at the location we're going to visit. So let me try and explain that I bet some of you listening to this podcast are going, I know what the weather is going to be tomorrow. But there again, I bet you live in a part of a country that's predictable weather you really can't see what all the fuss is about. For you it would be the same tomorrow as it was today, and the weather is regular and predictable. How I wish it was so for us, we could just go out and take pictures all day long. When we visit places like Kenya at given times of the year, the weather will either be sunny or rainy. Oh, bliss. But we live in Scotland in the UK which is located on the eastern edge of the Atlantic Ocean. Our weather changes dramatically in very short space of time. So much so, it's become a topic of everyday conversation. As I said earlier, we have a whole bunch of words in Scotland used to describe weather there's Fret, Dreich, Drookit, Snell, Jeelit, Stoating, Haar, Mochie, Oorlich, and Smirr. Why does Scotland have so many words? Well, maybe because in one day you can experience snow, rain, wind and sun and that's just the typical summer's day. Where you are determines what type of weather you can expect. And to an extent, how accurate the forecasts are going to be for us at home in Scotland. It's important that we try and photograph in the best possible conditions for any picture that we're trying to get. So what we need is a weather forecast that's going to be accurate. And don't get me wrong, they are accurate, reasonably accurate forecasting is an amazing process. It's one that's been practiced for hundreds of years. You need to collect vast amounts of data about things like sea temperature, air temperature, air pressure, humidity, sea states, all sorts of manner of data. All from around the world. It's then fed into a supercomputer and numbers are crunched. And the way the forecast is produced It sounds very simple, but our atmosphere is so complex. It's a miracle to me at least that meteorologists can produce any sort of forecast. A man called Edward Norton Lorenz, published a paper. Predictability Does the flap of a butterfly wings in Brazil. Set off a tornado in Texas. And so was born the butterfly effect. Much quoted in popular films and media What he was actually trying to explain is chaos theory. Chaos theory goes something like this. In a complex system, any small change can have a very large impact on the final result. The data used for a forecast is out of date the second it's collected. It could be argued that the very collection of the data has some influence on the final outcome. Each model run, even on a supercomputer, can take hours to complete. They're trying to compute a model for the whole earth, and by the time it's ready, the parameters it uses could be so out of date that they're no longer true. Most of the weather apps that I mentioned before rely on these forecast models. These forecasts are generated by different organizations who use different data and different models to generate their forecasts. So even they're not the same. You can have two totally different scenarios, especially as you get further and further away from the day the data was collected. If you're lucky, they will agree, perhaps over the short term, maybe a day or two as the time from the collection of the data to the predicted weather is increased. The more they tend to diverge. So billions of dollars are spent each year on forecasts. Why do they get it so wrong some of the time? Well, I'll give you an example. Take our home. It has an oceanic climate also known as a maritime climate or marine climate it's typical of the West Coasts and higher to middle latitudes of continents featuring mild summers relative to their latitude and cool, but not cold winters. With a relatively narrow annual temperature range with a few extremes of temperature. Oceanic climates are found in both temperate and subtropical areas, notably in Western Europe, parts of central and southern Africa, North America, South America, parts of Asia, as well as parts of Australia and New Zealand. The downside of an oceanic climate is something known as the water cycle, a process by which water is continually transferred between the surface of the earth and the atmosphere. Water at the surface of the earth, rivers, streams, oceans or whatever, is heated by the sun. It evaporates, becoming water vapor, then rises into the atmosphere to form clouds. When these clouds are pushed higher into the atmosphere by the temperature changes as they pass over land, we get wet it rains. Rain is nature's way of a cloud losing weight so that it can climb higher into the atmosphere. Now in the UK, we're also blessed with a thing called the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream is a small part of something called the "Thermohaline Circulation", or the "Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation", to give it its full name Gulf Stream will do. A global ocean conveyor belt. It's driven by the temperature and the salt content of the sea. It starts in the southern extremities. Of Florida, and the current follows the eastern coastline of the U.S. and Canada. It takes a quick right turn across the Atlantic towards Europe. This warm water current is why Western Europe is much warmer than it should otherwise be. The weather is also driven across the Atlantic by the jet stream. These are strong winds five to seven miles above the Earth's surface, which move from west to east in the northern hemisphere and east to west in the southern. They actually loop almost completely around the world. The jet stream causes changes not only to the wind, but also to the atmospheric pressure lower down in the air column. It produces areas of high and low pressures. These weather systems cause the weather that we are going to get. The jet stream track is always changing it buckles and meanders just like a water stream. Changes in its track bring different types of weather to those in its path. The air is constantly being moved around the earth by the jet stream. It moves energy in the form of heat from the equator to the poles. The jet stream exists largely because of a difference in that heat The Northern Hemisphere, cold air on the northern side of the jet stream and warm air on to the south. Seasons also affect the position of the jet stream. In winter, there's more of a temperature difference between the equator and poles, so the jet stream is stronger and it tends to flow over the UK. This is why we tend to see wetter weather in the winter. The reverse in summer where there tends to be smaller temperature differences. The position of the jet stream typically ends up to the north of the UK. We see calmer and drier weather So now you know why it's so wet in Scotland. It's normally about to rain, just about to stop raining. The forecast that you normally get are based on one of two or three different models. I'm going to just mention two. One is from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecast, ECMWF. And the other one is the Global Forecast System, which is the GFS. Now the ECMWF and the GFS models are all global models. They serve the same purpose the're their predict large scale weather patterns over three to ten days in advance. The only difference between them is, is that they're run by different people. The ECMWF is run by an independent intergovernmental entity supported by 34 European nations. The GFS is a global model run by the US government and the leadership of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its subsidiary agencies. GFS model is funded purely by the American taxpayers, which means its forecast out put is freely available to anybody who wants it. Global models are best to forecast large scale features such as middle latitude, storm systems, major heat waves, or cold snaps. They're also the only way to forecast weather patterns more than three to five days into the future. The weather apps that you download generally either use the ECMWF or the GFS model to create their forecasts, depending on where you are. They give you a fair approximation of what the weather's going to be in the future. The important thing to remember is these models are predicting weather three to five days away from the day. You're actually looking at it Now; both of these models are based on global models. But to understand the weather better where you are, you need to look at regional models. Now, these are run at higher resolution using the same data as the global models do, but they cover a very much smaller geographic region. Therefore, they use a lot less data and therefore can be run quicker and on an hourly or three or four hourly basis. So the regional models, are best use for localized prediction is forecasting perhaps one to three days in advance Most weather apps will give you a local forecast, pop in your location and you get a forecast. The problem we face is that we're seeing a forecast prediction maybe from a very large global model, and it's a guess about what's going to happen. Now, you may see on your weather app that it's going to rain at one o'clock, but that was a guess maybe 12 hours ago of what might happen. And it's been computed maybe from data collected 18 hours ago. So for us and perhaps hopefully for other photographers who work out doors listening to this podcast. What we need is we need an overview of what's going to happen in our little area where we're standing and what weather is all around us. To do this, we use one of the sites that lets us look at the charts the meteorologists produce using local forecast or local model. It sounds a bit difficult, but what we need to do is we need to make a risk assessment of the possible weather. The risk assessment for us is, that we may have to travel a long distance to photograph something. If we travel all that way. Spending hours in the car to get there. And when we get there, the weather is so foul that there's nothing much we can take. It's a wasted journey for us. Maybe we should have gone the other direction and taken something different. Let me give you an example. If we want to take pictures of deer, we're talking about red deer here and the red deer active during the winter at lower levels than they would be during the summer. In the summer, they're right on the tops of the hill. I'm very wary of people. But as the winter comes on, the food, the tops of the mountains decreases quite substantially. So what they do is they're driven down further and further down into the glens and straths, and they'll spend the day feeding on a fairly poor diet. But near sunset, they go even lower down to the riverbanks at the bottom of a lot of glens and straths, in Scotland. And those riverbanks are normally a lot richer in grass. So what they're trying to do is they're trying to get food by moving down lower. Now, what we need is we need to know how much light there is going to be around sunset, for instance. As they move down to the lower levels they're a lot easier to photograph, and we know roughly where they're going to be. So what we need to do is to look at cloud predictions. And to do that, we look at a local weather model. If we look at a local model and there's a complete blanket of low, middle and high cloud, it'll make photography almost impossible. With the sun setting below the mountains and the dark clouds, there is really isn't going to be a lot of light around and the deer will be moving and moving about. So you're going to get a blurred pictures through the moving. Now, as we look at the local forecast, it's possible to see if there's a chance that the cloud may break up and if there's a hole in the clouds due to some weather system moving across. Where might it be? Will the cloud break up late in the day because of if it's a high pressure, the temperature inversion will break the clouds and it might give us a clearer sky just at sunset. Now it can also be, of course, very useful if you're taking landscapes at sunset. What we want to do, we know that we can't be certain that this is going to happen. Nobody can. So as we said chaos theory in the butterfly producing tornadoes in Texas. But we want to is to put a risk associated with the clouds breaking up. We guess that the chances of the clouds breaking up a 50% chance. Maybe it will be worth a long trip to go and take the photographs. But a 30% chance of clearing maybe we can go. Maybe do something else nearby and then get into position late in the afternoon. At less than 30% or without something else to do we stay home or we go off in another direction. Now like all weather forecasts, we're not always right. We've said, oh, the cloud will breakup and we've gone there and the clouds been thicker and thicker and it started to rain. But we do do better by looking at local models of forecasts and looking at the weather charts than by looking at our weather apps. And the reason is, is that we're making a prediction. So being able to understand the weather, what might happen at a very local level, it's better for us than just a general prediction. If it looks favorable, it's a good chance we go. Why wouldn't you? And over time, we've built up our knowledge about the weather and what it's likely to do. It can be as simple as knowing if it's going to be high or low pressure overhead and each type of weather has associated with its presence, clouds, wind, sun, snow, you name it, you can predict it. So we would suggest that if you're already serious about your outdoor photography and the light it produces and the wind is an important factor in the pictures you're trying to take. It may be worth your while getting to know a little bit about the weather and what it might bring tomorrow. There are many resources online that can help you to understand it and how to look at a chart, and predict what weather it'll bring. We found that time and time again we can maximize the time we spend out photographing with a little knowledge about what's going to experience weather wise when we're a destination. Of course, it's not in any way a guarantee whether the weather's going to play ball or whether the wildlife's going to be there either. But that's a subject to a whole different episode. We hope you enjoyed this episode. If you have any questions, please reach out to us on social media. You'll find our contact details in the episodes show notes. Thank you for listening. My name is Mark Bloomfield. You've been listening to a wildlife photography podcast produced by M&J Bloomfield. For more information and details about us and our work, visit our website at mandjbloomfield.com. Thank you for listening and we hope you join us again soon. Chun an sin, mar sin leat.