Louisiana Fishing Pictures Moving To My Main Site

Thank you for visiting Louisiana Fishing Pictures. I have decided to centralize this blog onto my main blog at www.chrisginn.com. Hope to see you over there!

Lake Pontchartrain Troller Taken By Surprise

Those that have seen this picture seem to either love it or hate it. I'm in the love-it camp. I always try to get some kind of reaction from the anglers in my images, and have them laughing or, as in this case, saying something like "oh, sh**."

If a photograph is supposed to capture a moment, I think this picture did exactly that. The guide, Captain Greg Schlumbrecht with To Fish Charters on Lake Pontchartrain, was trolling down the Twin Span in the eastern section of the lake when his rod tip started bouncing around under the pressure of a fish. Sometimes these trolling bites take you by surprise.

Thanks for looking.

Chris Ginn

First Cast at Calcasieu Lake

This silhouette of a saltwater angler casting his lure in Calcasieu Lake near Lake Charles, Louisiana was captured by first focusing on the distant sunrise to get a light reading off of the sky rather than the angler. If I had took a light reading off the angler, the sky would have been overexposed and the shutter speed would have been too slow.

As it is, the light from exposing for the sky gave me just enough shutter speed to freeze the angler while allowing for a little bit of motion on the quickly moving lure.

Jason Bordelon Flips A Jig While Fishing The Red River Near Alexandria, Louisiana

Live that Canon 10-22 wide angle lens on my 40D. If you're going to do wide angle, though, make sure you watch everything in the image, and I mean everything. I can't tell you how many times I got what I thought was a great shot only to have my feet at the bottom of the image.

This is Alexandria, Louisiana tournament bass angler Jason Bordelon during a photo shoot we did on the Red River near his hometown. I had all the shots I needed, but I didn't feel like I had THE shot. I put on the wide angle and started playing around, and this is what I got.

I don't know why, but I love putting a strong foreground element like his shoe at the base of a wide-angle image. I think it really anchors the shot. 

Thanks for looking.

Chris Ginn

Picture of Louisiana Bass Pro Homer Humphreys Fishing Crappie

One of the keys to making anything look good is to eliminate everything that looks bad. And in outdoor photography, and any other kind of photography for that matter, the bad looking stuff is all that space that usually winds up taking up the majority of an image.

If I could pass along just one thing that would help you take better pictures, it would be fill the frame, fill the frame, fill the frame. But what exactly does fill the frame mean? It means zoom in, either with your lens or your feet, until your subject takes up the majority of the frame when you look through your eyepiece.

Other than actually being able to see your subject, another benefit of filling the frame is getting a better exposure. When you have too much space around your subject, it often throws your light meter off by trying to expose for the space, which typically throws your subject into dark shadows.

Fill the frame the next time you take some fishing pictures and watch your images improve.

Thank you for your interest in my work, and please keep checking back in.

Chris Ginn

Fishing Bayou Desiard in Monroe, Louisiana with a Spinnerbait

This image is in the February 2009 issue of Louisiana Game and Fish. It's a picture I got while doing a shoot with a good friend of mine, West Monroe bass angler Kenny Covington, at Bayou Desiard in Monroe, Louisiana. This kind of shot takes a little skill and LOT of luck!

So many fishing pictures are what's typically referred to as grip-and-grin, which is a picture of an angler holding his fish up and smiling ear to ear. While there is a need for those kinds of shots, there is an even greater need for action shots of fighting fish, casting anglers, and lures flying through the air.

Don't know if I meant to do it at the time, but to prove that your camera does not matter (something I learned from reading Ken Rockwell's site. I'm not sure if it's a blog or a typical website, but it's one of my main "must-reads" every day of the year. You can see his site here, but I digress. I shot this picture with my little bitty Canon PowerShot A640. (If I were buying a camera like this today, I would probably go with the Canon PowerShot A650IS)

I'll bring up this camera in the future to let you know how it almost immediately improved my ability to compose unique images.

As always, thank you for your interest in my work. And don't forget to check out my website here.

Chris Ginn

Spot Tailing Redfish Better By Stepping Up

I conducted a digital photography seminar recently at a Louisiana Outdoor Writers Association conference. I told the attendees that the only way to get more interesting pictures is to put their cameras in front of something more interesting. Rather than mess around with f-stops, shutter speed and ISO, I told them they had to master the most important part of their cameras - the 12 inches behind the eye piece! (that would be your brain if you're trying to figure that one out)

If you can't find anything interesting, try moving your camera to a more interesting angle or height. Go high. Go low. Tilt your camera. Angle it up. Angle it down. Do anything rather than the same thing everybody else is doing. You'll get a lot more interesting images.