Hokkaido wildlife tours and Japan photography workshops are a birding and nature lover’s paradise.  Tens of thousands of visitors annually visit Hokkaido to witness the aerial warfare of the Steller’s Sea Eagles and White-tailed Eagles on the pack ice during a Shiretoko nature cruise.  The smaller wildlife somehow gets missed, which is not completely surprising since the smaller wildlife species are more difficult to spot.  That elevates the Japan nature wildlife photography workshop tour and lends a measure of refinement to the workshop overall.  The Shima Enaga (Parus caudatus) is one of those astonishing, one-of-a-kind additions.  I adore photographing them on my annual winter Hokkaido tour.  The Steller’s Sea Eagle, White-tailed Eagle, Glaucous Gull, Blakiston’s Fish Owl, Whooper Swan, and Hokkaido’s snow ballerina, the Red-crowned crane are all breathtaking avian wildlife.  Still, when I have only birders that don’t mind quietly waiting for bird photo ops in my group, we wait and seek out the Shima Enaga.

The Shima Enaga is a subspecies of the long-tailed bushtit, sometimes referred to as the silver-throated tit or silver-throated dasher.  The species has been described as tiny at 12 - 16 cm (4.7 - 6.3 inches) in length, including their tail at 7 - 9 cm (2.8 - 3.5 inches).  Males and females have an identical appearance.  Their call while in flocks is constant and high pitched, and most often, you will hear them before you see them; their call is a ‘juri juri’ and at times a ‘tsee-tsee-tsee.’   Outside of the breeding season, they live in flocks of 10 - 20 birds, mainly parents, and offspring make up the flock, together with any adult birds that help raise the brood.  These flocks are highly territorial and will protect their territory against neighboring flocks. The Shima Enaga occurs mainly in Hokkaido, Japan, but they inhabit the entire Palearctic realm.  Many people mistakenly believe that all birds migrate, but I can assure you this is false, and the adorable Shima Enaga is a year-round Hokkaido resident.  Subspecies of the Shima Enaga found outside of Hokkaido have what is commonly referred to as ‘eyebrows’, little dark brown or black stripes on their stark white faces.  The Hokkaido Shima Enaga also has these eyebrows as juvenile birds, but as they reach adulthood, the eyebrows give way to an entirely white, elegant visage.  As mentioned beforehand, their entire body length is between 12 - 16 cm (4.7 - 6.3 inches), and one 1/2 of that measure is their long tail, so spotting them in the wild in pure white powder snow is even more formidable, but when I do set eyes on them, everything seems right with the world.

When photographing in snowy conditions, the majority of the composition is pure white, so your DSLR, film camera, and/or mirrorless camera meter is going to make the snow middle grey, and if you trust your camera meter, you will be underexposed the majority of the time when shooting white on white.  Most photography instructors will teach you to use exposure compensations and open by 1 stop to 2 stops, to adjust for the expected underexposure resulting from the meter’s reading when photographing in snowy conditions.  Personally, I recommend compensating manually with the command dial, checking your histogram for exposure "as I do," 99% of the time; I don't enjoy fiddling with my camera settings in the field or trying to rely on the display or viewfinder to view my images and see if the exposure is correct.  I am focused on the subjects I am photographing and not my camera; my camera is just my medium an extension of my visual artistry.  I don't want to think about my gear in the field; wildlife photography is similar to sports photography.  A lot is going on around us, and if we are thinking too much and trying to figure out our settings in the field, our wildlife will more than likely be gone.  Today's cameras are getting better.  Soon, we will have more accurate displays, such as my Nikon Z7 Mark ii, D6, and D850 which have much more accurate displays than my D810 or previous digital cameras.  And if your image is a little dark in the snow, that is okay; with today's digital camera sensors, ranging from 20 to 100 megapixels, we can easily lighten a darkened image when editing on our computers and software by 1 - 5 stops, without affecting the quality of our image.  Overexposing runs the risk of blowing out the highlights, and possibly your subject will have little or no details making your image unusable, so a little darker in the snow to keep the detail is my rule of thumb.

When first-time clients join my Hokkaido winter Japan nature tour expedition workshop, I like to take a moment to discuss photographing Hokkaido wildlife in the snow.  When I have a friend or client often checking the back of their camera in the field, I know they are having difficulties photographing in the snow, so this is my cue to shoot together, giving them my settings under my breath.  If time permits, I prefer to retake ten minutes and explain how to properly set the exposure for white on white so my friends and clients will never run into the problem again.  My camera settings for small, alert birds are 1/2500s to 1/5000s, f8 - f7.1, and if the lighting is low, I have been known to stop up to f4, but this is rare for me.  For big birds, I choose f11, so the entire bird will be in focus, such as the Red-Crowned Crane Tancho, which stands at 150 - 158 cm (4 ft - 5 ft) tall, weighing 8 - 11 kg (17 - 25 pounds) with a huge wingspan measuring 200 to 260 cm (6.5 ft to 8.5 ft).  ISO I adjust manually according to my shutter and f-stop preferences for the shoot.