Nebraskaland

58 Nebraskaland • June 2026 The staff has always been quick to take advantage of advancements that allowed them to capture photos in ways they previously couldn't. Capturing an up-close photo of a bird on a nest, for example, once required either sitting in a blind nearby or placing a camera even closer that could be fired remotely from a blind nearby. The first remotes were air activated, and the range was extremely limited. It increased with the advent of infrared remotes, but only slightly. Radio triggers increased the range to a mile. Now we can use motion-activated camera traps equipped with multiple flashes to capture intimate portraits of wildlife 24/7 while we are back in the office or sleeping at home. While they existed long ago, camera traps weren't practical until digital expanded the number of photos you could capture from 36 exposure roll of film to thousands. The perspective of aerial photographs is sometimes the best way to tell the story about a landscape, and aerials have been a part of Nebraskaland since the 1930s. Now, in addition to pointing the camera out of the window of a Cessna from 500 to a few thousand feet above the ground, we now have drones to capture images from lower elevations. I got my start in photography in 1989 when my dad gave me a Pentax Spotmatic his uncle had purchased in the early 1960s. It was the camera that began the shift to 35mm at Nebraskaland. I had four lenses up to 300 mm, set my exposure and focused manually, and advanced the film with the fastest thumb in the west. The advancements that have come since are mind boggling. We now carry mirrorless cameras with incredibly accurate autofocus that you can set to automatically detect and track a subject like a bird or person. The maximum speed of the electronic shutter is 1/32,000 second. Advanced metering makes automatic exposure settings extremely reliable. You can rattle off 120 frames per second if you really want to catch the peak action. In the film days, exposing 10 36-exposure rolls of film in an outing was a lot. We can now do that in 3 seconds. We can even back up in time, recording images up to a half second before we actually tripped the shutter. We can change ISO on the fly, or let the camera do it for us. And we can capture usable, albeit barely, images at ISOs up to an insane 102,000, nearly allowing us to shoot in the dark. Yet while much has changed in photography, the subjects photographed by Nebraskaland staff remain the same: its striking, diverse landscapes, its wildlife and its people enjoying both. ABOVE: Haag began using a camera trap with external flashes to capture wildlife photos 24/7 in 2015. The tool is practically the only way to photograph reclusive species like mountain lions. RIGHT: Justin Haag has photographed the Pine Ridge from a helicopter and with a drone. Technological advances and lighter materials used in super telephoto lenses have made life easier for Nebraskaland photographers during the past 70 years. Three lenses staff have used include: Nikkor T C 1:5 f+50cm (Introduced in 1955, 19.9 lbs.), Nikon 600mm f4 ED (1987, 14.4 lbs.) and a Nikon AF-S 600mm f4 FL ED VR (2015, 8.4 lbs.).

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