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Field Trip!
Nature photographer Don Gale travels all over the country to capture outdoor landscapes and resident wildlife, and he's often able to do it with just two Tamron lenses: the 11-18mm Di II and the 18-200mm Di II.
© Don Gale © Don Gale © Don Gale © Don Gale © Don Gale
SP AF11-18mm F/4.5-5.6 Di II & AF18-200mm F/3.5-6.3 XR Di II
by Jennifer Gidman Zumpano 		 

He may be trekking across the salt flats of Death Valley, hiking through Acadia National Park, or rising at 3 in the morning to capture a sunrise in the Eastern Sierras. But no matter where his photographic adventures take him, nature photographer Don Gale needs to travel with the right equipment so he can create the panoramic and wildlife images that have made a name for him in this niche.
What Gale has found is that he can capture nearly everything he's looking to capture with just two lenses on one trip: the Tamron 11-18mm Di II lens and the 18-200mm lens. "These really are great lenses," he says. "I typically keep the 18-200 on the camera as my primary lens, and if I have to switch lenses, then I'll grab the 11-18. Or if I'm lucky enough to have two bodies, I'll have each lens on a camera. I have two Fuji S3s right now, one on a tripod and the other one hanging on my neck. I've had situations where something has happened, some temporary electronic failure, so I try to always have two with me. I'd probably have three with me if I could, just because I'm usually out in the middle of nowhere, where I'm not near a car or near a hotel room. If anything goes wrong with any of my equipment, the redundancy factor is really crucial."

Most All-Around: The 18-200
Gale relies on his 18-200 for versatility and convenience. "Most images I'm going to shoot are going to fall within that focal range," he says. The 18-200 is a pro at handling fluid shots, like when Gale captured a foggy scene at Field River, located at the southern end of Yellowstone, in September. "Capturing fog can be interesting," he says. "I try to place the fog between me and the sun for a backlit effect. I'll stand there, pick out my subject matter, and hope that the fog keeps moving around-if it does, you can get several images out of one location because the fog keeps moving. The sky was so bright in this scene that I used a 3-stop neutral density graduated filter."
He also used the 18-200 during a sunrise trek to Marsh Lake in the Eastern Sierra, in Rock Creek. "To get to that place at sunrise, we had to get up at 3am, drive an hour, then hike about 45 minutes-that put us there about 15 minutes before sunrise," he says. "It was a big effort for what could have been a total wash if we had had clouds! We'll sometimes get some really cool light even before sunrise, so we'll start shooting maybe 45 minutes before the sun comes up."
A rainforest within Olympic National Park in Washington State allowed Gale to test out the 18-200 in less-than-ideal lighting conditions. "It's one of the only real rainforests in the United States," he says. "It gets something like 190 inches of rain every year there. It was really dark in the forest, because the canopy is so thick. Plus it's almost always raining, so there's usually a thick cloud cover. It's so dark you wouldn't normally think about taking a picture. I had to shoot this with a very long exposure, something like f/22 at 10 seconds. But the colors were so vibrant, and the lens captured every detail."

Getting the Big Picture: The 11-18
Because he's been shooting with the S3, which still uses an APS-size sensor, Gale is thankful for the 11-18mm lens. "Luckily they've come up with this super-wide lens," he says. "Now my camera becomes about a 17mm to a 28mm. From a technical point of view, the 11-18 is extremely sharp and rectilinear, and it has almost no barrel distortion."
The lens works especially well when you want to emphasize the foreground, Gale explains. "Any wide lens has distortion built in, in a good sense," he says. "It's not problematic distortion-it just makes things closer to the camera look much bigger. As a result, you can cause emphasis to be placed on subjects that are closer. For example, I could be on the beach, and there could be some seashells-I can just lay down on the sand and make a little one-inch seashell take up half the frame." This technique worked well on a recent trip to Jordan Pond, in Maine's Acadia National Park. "I really wanted to focus on those foreground rocks," he says. "The 11-18 enabled the rocks in the foreground to appear a little bigger than they really were as you looked at the scene."
The 11-18 is truly the salt of the earth when it comes to lenses-even when Gale actually is photographing the salt of the earth. "I was in the section of Death Valley known as Badwater, which is the lowest elevation in the 48 contiguous States," he explains. "It's almost 300 feet below sea level. The stuff you see in the images I took there are actually borate mineral deposits. Year-round, there is a very small puddle of water probably less than 50 feet in circumference), but with the 11-18 I can make it look huge. I shot these images at 11mm, with the lens right down on the ground-in fact, my pants are still filled with salt, even after my wife washed them twice!"

Tip Box

Roadside Discoveries
You don't need to hike hours into the rainforest or over frozen tundra to successfully capture Mother Nature's bounty. In fact, Gale was able to capture a bunch of blossoming wildflowers right along the highway. "This was located in central California, up near Cambria," he says. "I was lying on the ground, with the tripod legs extended as far as they could go, and focused at about 8 inches away. The problem was, this scene was located right along the highway-when I say that, it takes away a lot of the romance of the shot! The biggest challenge here is that the cars and trucks driving by on this major east-west highway would create such turbulence that it would knock the water drops off some of the branches and they'd move. But I'd simply wait a couple of minutes for them to stabilize and then shoot away."