General, Natural History Photography Blog

Please link to this website!

Do you like these photos? I hope so! I’ve gone to a lot of effort to not only take these photos but put them on the web for you and others to enjoy. If you like them, please consider linking to my web site. That’s right, make a link to my site (OceanLight.com) from your Facebook page, MySpace page, your Twitter account, your favorite internet community or from your school’s website. Linking to my site is a cost-free and effective way to support my photography efforts since your link will raise the visibility of my website and, hopefully, lead photo buyers to use my images in their publications. If you do link to my site, drop me a line and let me know. I’ll do my best to respond personally and say “thanks”.

If you want to link to my site, here is some HTML you can use. Just put your cursor in the box below, hit Control-A (”select all”), then Control-C (”copy”), and then paste it. Thanks!

Student Questions About My Photographs and Requests to Use My Images

Since this site was first published on the web in 1996, I have received many questions from students worldwide regarding my photos and the animal subjects I photograph. Regrettably, constraints on my time do not permit me to respond personally to all questions these days.

I also receive numerous requests from students and well-meaning organizations to use my images in school reports and on school or personal web sites. Please know that these images are costly to produce and I cannot give them away in high resolution form without a fee. However, you may use a printed copy of one of my images in your printed report, see below.

Printed Reports:

Students may use the images appearing on my site (OceanLight.com), in printed reports only for use in an elementary school, middle school or high school setting, provided that all three of the following conditions are met:

• The image is not altered in any way. This means that the watermark credit embedded in the image (if there is one) remains intact. I hope you understand, the watermark embedded in the image really needs to be there. The reality of the internet is that if I don’t put my name in the image, people will use it without even mentioning me or the fact that I worked hard to produce the image.
• The image is reproduced in printed form only. It may not be copied to another web site, emailed to others or stored on a computer server.
• A link to my website (Oceanlight.com) is created on your Facebook or MySpace page, Twitter account or your school’s website, and a written acknowledgement is included in the report, with a statement like “Blue whale image copyright Phillip Colla / Oceanlight.com.” See above for how to make a link to my website.

If you are really curious about the copyright, you can see my Full Copyright Statement.

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Oceanlight.com is a natural history stock photography website that first appeared in 1998 as an exercise to learn what the world wide web and websites were, learn to write the HTML to bring a site into being, get it hosted and see if the world thought anything of it. Considerable thanks is owed to Mike Johnson, a good friend and skilled photographer with sublime images of pelagic animals and blue whales, who offered much early advice about the entire process. For the first few years, the only photos on Oceanlight.com that were worth looking at were blue whales (and even the descriptive “worth” is questionable). The pages were static and created either by hand or with primitive tools such as NetObjects Fusion.

As inbound links to Oceanlight.com began to accumulate and the resultant traffic (mostly from AltaVista and later Google) built, more images were added to the site and publishers began to contact me to license them, usually for use in editorial books, magazines and news publications. I realized that Oceanlight.com had become a defacto stock photography enterprise, and was actually one of the first of its kind for marine and natural history photographs on the web. I was represented by a couple small agencies but had to learn how to field requests and license images properly on my own. Sometime around the turn of the century, armed with about 1000 images and a need to search by keywords (open vocabulary) and hierarchical relationship (closed vocabulary), I decided to learn PHP and MySql in an effort to create what has now become a powerful, well-indexed and comprehensive online image search program. The result is so effective, in fact, that many of the subjects of which I have coverage now appear quite high in Google rankings. For example, Google “kelp forest photo“, “Guadalupe Island“, “blue whale photos” or “Carcharodon carcharias photos“; as of January 2005 (and October 2007, and June 2009), these all show up in the top 3 or 4 Google results, some of them via Gygis.com, a companion site of mine that is driven by the same self-authored PHP/MySql/search code. Alas, it is inevitable that as better photographers than I shoot these same subjects, my pages are bound to lose traction in the Google ranks. But at the same time my setup allows new subjects to quickly gain traction and show up in Google, e.g., Mobius Arch, The Wedge, Silver Salmon Creek Lodge. While there are exceptions, in general most of the animal and plant subjects for which I have coverage will appear on the first page of Google results when searched by their latin/scientific names, e.g., Zalophus photos, Corynactis photos, and often by their common names as well.

The last 6 years or so have seen an acceleration in the process of making photos, getting them on the web and in front of photo researchers and publishers, and licensing them. I am adding about 4000 new images to the library each year, using Canon digital cameras (Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III & II) with lenses like the 500 f/4, 400 f/5.6, 300 f/2.8, 70-200 f/2.8, 24-70 f/2.8, 16-35 f/2.8 II and 15mm fisheye (all killer lenses).

The image search, keywording and categorization aspects of the Oceanlight.com photo library are now highly automated and need little further work, so that as new images are added to the stock files they appear online with rich metadata in a few days, and are eventually indexed and have the potential to appear in Google search results rapidly. The addition of textual (non-image) content naturally requires more time. Some photographers hand-build individual pages for their subjects. I just don’t have the patience for this, so instead I use weblogging software to add new text content to the website. Currently, I use WordPress that I have customized in a number of ways. There are 650+ posts so far, as of June 2009.

At present, Oceanlight.com has a Google rank of 6 (update: looks like it just changed to 5, huh?) and receives about 5000 unique visitors (omitting robots and crawlers) each day. Sure, there are other measures of a web site’s traffic and relevance. However, I think Google’s opinion of my website is more important than anyone else’s, and counting the unique visitors to a site is a no brainer. These numbers are quite good for an individual photographer’s web site, and I think they are attributable primarily to smart use of metadata, longevity, inbound links from people who have found my site worthy, and simple HTML design. Note that I have never placed any advertising on my site, and probably never will. All the traffic is organic; I have never resorted to link exchanges or any of those get-ranked-quick gimmicks. By the way, I found a tool that can help one fine tune a website for SEO and web presence, and described it in a post entitled Post Up … Shoot … Score.

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Photographer, Floridian, traveller and blogger Bill Lockhart was kind enough to take an interest in my photography and interview me recently. Bill is building a collection of fine interviews focusing on a diverse collection of photographers. I am fortunate to be considered among them. Thanks very much, Bill!

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The Witch Creek fire has now eaten 200,000 acres and at least 500 homes. It is the largest plume visible from space at the moment, dwarfing the fires in other parts of California. Temperatures have dropped noticably today, humidity has risen and the fire seems to have lost some of its strength, but I don’t want to jinx things by feeling too optimistic.

Sarah and I went down to check the surf at Ponto tonight. It was strange. The water was glass, with small shapely waves. It looked at once fun and depressing. I wish I had had time to get in the water. There were a handful of surfers out. The sky was bizarrely red and it was hard to distinguish the horizon due to the haze. A layer of soot and ash lay over the beach and was pooled thickly in some of the depressions in the sand where the breeze could not pick it up. Groups of helicopters were passing by just offshore every few minutes, some going north and some south, busy with their firefighting efforts. A gal that my daughter spoke with had come from Jamul earlier in the day, trying to help a friend of hers save property and horses, but I sensed from her mood that they did not have much success. The sky and sun were so super saturated red/orange/yellow that they practically fried the electronics in our little point and shoot pocket mini micro digicam.

Some links:

The best page for info about the perimeter of the fires, but it is getting very heavy traffic: San Diego Fires - Information.
SD Union-Tribune blog, updated frequently. Traffic was so heavy they had to move this page to Blogspot, the U-T servers couldn’t deal with the demand.
SD Union-Tribune main website (often down due to heavy traffic)
Local TV news coverage: NBC, ABC, CBS.
Area Traffic: SigAlert, Dept of Transportation
An interesting, animated look at the smoke plumes from space: Satellite Animated View.

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We’ve received many phone calls and emails about the wildfires that are raging throughout Southern California. Immediate danger to our house appears minimal, although the air quality is unbelievably bad with ash raining down. The fire that was going yesterday (Monday) in San Marcos (due east of us) was a real concern as the Santa Ana winds would have blown it right through us. It appears that particular fire is now 100% contained and mostly under control. The major tragedies are the Witch Creek, Harris and Rice fires. About 6-12 miles to the south of us, the huge Witch Creek fire has mowed down a broad swatch of open space, rural and residential communities from Ramona, through Rancho Bernardo and Escondido, touching Rancho Santa Fe and Fairbanks Ranch and continuing on towards the coast. It currently threatens areas near Del Mar near the ocean. Many of our friends in Encinitas, Olivenhain, Leucadia and La Costa have evacuated, either voluntarily or at the request of authorities. We are packed to leave but so far do not feel seriously threatened, and consider ourselves very lucky. At the moment.

Some links:

The best page for info about the perimeter of the fires, but it is getting very heavy traffic: San Diego Fires - Information.
SD Union-Tribune blog, updated frequently. Traffic was so heavy they had to move this page to Blogspot, the U-T servers couldn’t deal with the demand.
SD Union-Tribune main website (often down due to heavy traffic)
Local TV news coverage: NBC, ABC, CBS.
Area Traffic: SigAlert, Dept of Transportation
An interesting, animated look at the smoke plumes from space: Satellite Animated View.

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Just back from my ‘07 trip to coastal Alaska. I was scoping out some places for a longer trip next year, to determine if they make sense for a family (they do). I made five flights in bush and float planes over two national parks, did some easy hiking, got to see 30+ brown bears, 25+ glaciers, lots of seabirds, some eagles and a marmot, ate really well and managed to make a few new friends along the way. I’ve got 5500 images to sort through, so it will be a few weeks before I get any posted.

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OK, I’m back now. The trip was killer, the photography conditions were top notch and the scenery beautiful. The weather was really cold. I got a sunrise in Bryce at -4°F, two sunrises at Mesa Arch in Canyonlands National Park at 0°F and 8°F, and sunrise in Arches National Park at about +11°F. Each morning I would scrape the ice off my windshield with a credit card. All the food in my car froze solid each night — it’s not easy eating frozen pesto pizza from Jax in Moab for breakfast the following morning, and I damn near cracked a tooth on a rock hard Clif bar. Fortunately, the cold front had dusted the landscape with snow and provided for clear skies — not a cloud in 4 days. It finally warmed up a little by the time I got down to Monument Valley and Antelope Canyon, and the drive home through Zion was downright balmy at 30°F. I’ve got 1700 images to sort through now, so it will take a few weeks to get them edited and selected for the stock files, and then I’ll start posting them.

I’m in Utah right now, shooting landscapes in Bryce, Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, and running some control tests to determine just how bloody cold the weather must be before my camera freezes and I switch my attention to sampling the microbrews of Moab. My office will be handling requests for comps (for layout) and low-res images (for publication), sending those by email but with a delay of up to 6 hours before those requests are sent. Unfortunately, I will not be able to deliver high res images until I return after January 12. Happy New Year!

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Quality conversation from this morning:

“Girls, don’t get any bagel crumbs on the couch, we got ants threatening and they will take over if they find any food around.”
10-year-old: “aaah, ooomf. (sound of crumbs leaving mouth.) Huh?”
6-year-old: “Yeah, that’s why we need to move. Plus I want a bigger room. Word.”

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Using an .htaccess file we found that we can produce a virtual distinct page for every species (e.g., http://www.oceanlight.com/sp/genus_species.html) as well as a distinct page for every common name (e.g., http://www.oceanlight.com/co/brown_pelican.html) in our database. So we’ll see if the Google spiders eventually pick these up, prefer them to the existing pages and run with them, or not. Here they are: Species and Common Names.

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Recently we were approached about producing Fractal Images for a client. With the correct software, and a sufficiently powerful computer, these are quite simple to create. Here are a few examples we made:

The Mandelbrot Fractal. Fractals are complex geometric shapes that exhibit repeating patterns typified by self-similarity, or the tendency for the details of a shape to appear similar to the shape itself. Often these shapes resemble patterns occurring naturally in the physical world, such as spiraling leaves, seemingly random coastlines, erosion and liquid waves. Fractals are generated through surprisingly simple underlying mathematical expressions, producing subtle and surprising patterns. The basic iterative expression for the Mandelbrot set is z = z-squared + c, operating in the complex (real, imaginary) number set. Image: 10370   Species: Mandelbrot set

Detail within the Mandelbrot set fractal. This detail is found by zooming in on the overall Mandelbrot set image, finding edges and buds with interesting features. Fractals are complex geometric shapes that exhibit repeating patterns typified by self-similarity, or the tendency for the details of a shape to appear similar to the shape itself. Often these shapes resemble patterns occurring naturally in the physical world, such as spiraling leaves, seemingly random coastlines, erosion and liquid waves. Fractals are generated through surprisingly simple underlying mathematical expressions, producing subtle and surprising patterns. The basic iterative expression for the Mandelbrot set is z = z-squared + c, operating in the complex (real, imaginary) number set. Image: 10376   Species: Mandelbrot set

Detail within the Mandelbrot set fractal. This detail is found by zooming in on the overall Mandelbrot set image, finding edges and buds with interesting features. Fractals are complex geometric shapes that exhibit repeating patterns typified by self-similarity, or the tendency for the details of a shape to appear similar to the shape itself. Often these shapes resemble patterns occurring naturally in the physical world, such as spiraling leaves, seemingly random coastlines, erosion and liquid waves. Fractals are generated through surprisingly simple underlying mathematical expressions, producing subtle and surprising patterns. The basic iterative expression for the Mandelbrot set is z = z-squared + c, operating in the complex (real, imaginary) number set. Image: 10383   Species: Mandelbrot set

Detail within the Mandelbrot set fractal. This detail is found by zooming in on the overall Mandelbrot set image, finding edges and buds with interesting features. Fractals are complex geometric shapes that exhibit repeating patterns typified by self-similarity, or the tendency for the details of a shape to appear similar to the shape itself. Often these shapes resemble patterns occurring naturally in the physical world, such as spiraling leaves, seemingly random coastlines, erosion and liquid waves. Fractals are generated through surprisingly simple underlying mathematical expressions, producing subtle and surprising patterns. The basic iterative expression for the Mandelbrot set is z = z-squared + c, operating in the complex (real, imaginary) number set. Image: 10391   Species: Mandelbrot set

A fractal is a geometric object which can be divided into parts, each of which is similar to the original object. Fractals are said to possess infinite detail, and are generally self-similar and independent of scale. In many cases a fractal can be generated by a repeating pattern, typically a recursive or iterative process. The term fractal was coined in 1975 by Benoît Mandelbrot, from the Latin fractus or “broken”.

The Mandelbrot set, named after its discoverer, is a famous example of a fractal.Fractals of many kinds were originally studied as mathematical objects. Fractal geometry is the branch of mathematics which studies the properties and behaviour of fractals. It describes many situations which cannot be explained easily by classical geometry, and has often been applied in science, technology, and computer-generated art. The conceptual roots of the fractals can be traced to attempts to measure the size of objects for which traditional definitions based on Euclidean geometry or calculus fail.

Here are all of the fractals we have produced so far.

Here are more fractal pictures.

Keywords: fractals, fractal, fractal picture, fractal pictures, Mandelbrot set, fractal geometry, photograph

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Oceanlight.com is a natural history stock photography website that first appeared in 1998 as an exercise to learn what the world wide web and websites were, learn to write the HTML to bring a site into being, get it hosted and see if the world thought anything of it. Considerable thanks is owed to Mike Johnson, a good friend and skilled photographer with sublime images of pelagic animals and blue whales, who offered much early advice about the entire process. For the first few years, the only photos on Oceanlight.com that were worth looking at were blue whales (and even that is questionable). The pages were static and created either by hand or with primitive tools such as NetObjects Fusion.

As inbound links to Oceanlight.com began to accumulate and the resultant traffic (mostly from AltaVista and later Google) built, more images were added to the site and publishers began to contact me to license them, usually for use in editorial books, magazines and news publications. I realized that Oceanlight.com had become a defacto stock photography enterprise, and was actually one of the first of its kind for marine and natural history photographs on the web. I was represented by a couple small agencies but had to learn how to field requests and license images properly on my own. In mid-2002, armed with about 1000 images and a need to search by keywords (open vocabulary) and hierarchical relationship (closed vocabulary), I decided to learn PHP and MySql in an effort to create what has now become a powerful, well-indexed and comprehensive online image search feature. So powerful, in fact, that many of the subjects of which I have coverage now appear quite high in the Google rankings by virtue of the PHP/MySql code I wrote. For example, Google “kelp forest photo“, “Guadalupe Island“, “blue whale photos” or “Carcharodon carcharias photos“; as of January 2005 (and October 2007, and June 2009), these all show up in the top 3 or 4 Google results, some of them via Gygis.com, a companion site of mine that is driven by the same self-authored PHP/MySql/search code. Alas, it is inevitable that as better photographers than I shoot these same subjects, my pages are bound to lose traction in the Google ranks. But at the same time my setup allows new subjects to quickly gain traction and show up in Google, e.g., Mobius Arch, The Wedge, Silver Salmon Creek Lodge. While there are exceptions, in general most of the animal and plant subjects for which I have coverage will appear on the first page of Google results when searched by their latin/scientific names, e.g., Zalophus photos and often by their common names as well.

The last 6 years or so have seen an acceleration in the process of making photos, getting them on the web and in front of photo researchers and publishers, and licensing them. I am adding about 4000 new images to the library each year, using Canon digital cameras (Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III & II) with lenses like the 500 f/4, 400 f/5.6, 300 f/2.8, 70-200 f/2.8, 24-70 f/2.8, 16-35 f/2.8 II and 15mm fisheye (all killer lenses).

The image search, keywording and categorization aspects of the Oceanlight.com photo library are now highly automated and need little further work, so that as new images are added to the stock files they appear online with rich metadata in a few days, and are eventually indexed and have the potential to appear in Google search results rapidly. The addition of textual (non-image) content naturally requires more time. Some photographers hand-build individual pages for their subjects. I just don’t have the patience for this, so instead I use weblogging software to add new text content to the website. Currently, I use WordPress that I have customized in a number of ways. There are 650+ posts so far, as of June 2009.

At present, Oceanlight.com has a Google rank of 6 and receives about 5000 unique visitors (omitting robots and crawlers) each day. Sure, there are other measures of a web site’s traffic and relevance. However, I think Google’s opinion of my website is more important than anyone else’s, and counting the unique visitors to a site is a no brainer. These numbers are quite good for an individual photographer’s web site, and I think they are attributable primarily to smart use of metadata, longevity and simple HTML design.

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Phillip Colla bio: I am a natural history photographer and writer. I focus on wild marine mammals, the California kelp forest, inhabitants of remote eastern Pacific islands, National Parks of the American West and, most recently, waves. I am fortunate to have visited many spectacular terrestrial and underwater settings as well as to have encountered a variety of threatened and endangered animal species on and in the ocean. My natural history photography has appeared in the pages of BBC Wildlife, National Wildlife, National Geographic Magazine, Ocean Realm, New York Times, Ranger Rick, Reader’s Digest and Skin Diver as well as many others, has been used in various advertising and publicity campaigns, is on display in aquaria and museums, and is occasionally recognized in photographic competitions. My underwater videography has been broadcast in various productions in the United States and abroad. My current plan is to shoot it all.

Click here for a list of my publication and broadcast credits.

Bored photographer takes own picture. Tabletop, Cardiff by the Sea, California, USA. Image: 18973   Location: Tabletop, Cardiff by the Sea, California, USA View this Image in Google Earth!

Bubble ring. Image: 06998

The long shadow of a hiker lies on Mobius Arch, a natural stone arch in the Alabama Hills. Alabama Hills Recreational Area, California, USA. Image: 21733   Location: Alabama Hills Recreational Area, California, USA View this Image in Google Earth!

Phillip and Tracy Colla. Galapagos Islands, Ecuador. Image: 03469   Location: Galapagos Islands, Ecuador

Mesa Arch, Utah. An exuberant hiker greets the dawning sun from atop Mesa Arch. Image ID: 18036   Location: Island in the Sky, Canyonlands National Park, Utah, USA View this Image in Google Earth!

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