Forrest Brown

Day five of the 2009 Hokkaido Japan Winter Wonderland Nature Photography Workshop put on by Martin Bailey.

This is the breakfast at one of the Hotels we stayed at while in Hokkaido.

Day four of the 2009 Hokkaido Japan Winter Wonderland Nature Photography Workshop put on by Martin Bailey.

I’m on a week long nature photography workshop traveling around the northern island of Japan. So far we’ve been shooting mostly birds (cranes, eagles, swans) and we’ve also done some landscape photography. I haven’t shot birds before, so it’s been fun and pretty challenging. Each day we get up around 4:30 in the morning so that we can be on our bus heading for our morning location before sunrise. It’s been pretty cold, but what makes the cold bad is that for the most part there’s not a lot of movement involved in taking pictures, so the cold can really sink in. I’ve been wearing Under Armor top and bottom, a second long spandex on the bottom, sweatpants, snow pants, two pairs of socks, boots with hand warmers in them, hoody, jacket, gloves with finger and a pair of mittens over the gloves.

Day three of the 2009 Hokkaido Japan Winter Wonderland Nature Photography Workshop put on by Martin Bailey.

Day two of the 2009 Hokkaido Japan Winter Wonderland Nature Photography Workshop put on by Martin Bailey.

This is a shot of all the photographers at the Akan International Crane Center. I was pretty surprised at how many people were there to shoot photos of the cranes.

Day one of the 2009 Hokkaido Japan Winter Wonderland Nature Photography Workshop put on by Martin Bailey.