After all the other photographers have left

April 9, 2011 by Robert | Comments Off

I was happy to see that one of the sug­ges­tions in Andrew Gibson’s new ebook (The Evoca­tive Image, see my review here) is some­thing I’ve been doing for years. Which is sim­ply stick­ing around after all the other pho­tog­ra­phers have gone home. Appar­ently, a lot of pho­tog­ra­phers think that once the sun has set, the good light is gone. While that may be true some­times, it’s def­i­nitely not true all the time. All kinds of things can (and often do) hap­pen after the sun has dipped below the hori­zon. The glow in the west­ern sky can turn won­der­ful col­ors, and that glow can light up the scene in front of or behind you, and/or reflect off water or rocks or… I could go on, but I’ll leave it to your imag­i­na­tion. Also, as it gets darker, our eyes can’t see color very well (or at all), but the cam­era still can — and some­times the col­ors the cam­era sees at twi­light are remarkable.

A case in point is White Sands. The pure white of the park’s gyp­sum sand is a near-perfect reflec­tor; if you spend enough time there and look care­fully, you’ll see dunes of almost every imag­in­able hue (see my White Sands pho­tographs gallery). But many of the most unusual (and some­times intense) col­ors occur well before dawn or long after sun­set. Which can be a prob­lem: The National Mon­u­ment is sur­rounded by a mis­sile range and is locked up tight at night. Gate open­ings and clos­ings vary dur­ing the year, so you need to sched­ule your visit care­fully to get as much time as you can between sun­set and gate clos­ing (not to men­tion avoid­ing the windy sea­son and the heat of sum­mer). Pre-dawn pho­tog­ra­phy is pretty much out of the ques­tion, unless you hire a ranger to open the gate early. This spe­cial ser­vice is arranged through the park office and will cost you. (Hint: it’s less painful if you share the cost with other pho­tog­ra­pher friends.) But it is totally worth it.

Tech­ni­cal Data:
Body: Canon EOS 7D
Lens: Canon EF 70-200mm f/4 L USM at 187mm
Expo­sure: ISO 100, f/11, 1/45 second

Posted in White Sands Tagged , , |

Review: The Evocative Image from Craft & Vision

February 24, 2011 by Robert | Comments Off

For most land­scape pho­tog­ra­phers, a photo is more than just a lit­eral record of the scene in front of the cam­era. It’s about mood, color, time, space, a spe­cific detail or pat­tern — what­ever it is that makes you want to pho­to­graph that par­tic­u­lar scene in the first place. Craft & Vision has launched a new ebook today, The Evoca­tive Image by Andrew Gib­son, that can help you be less (or more) than lit­eral in your pho­tographs. Gib­son sur­veys the many things you can do before and dur­ing image cap­ture, tools and tech­niques that (for the most part) don’t require Light­room or Pho­to­shop and that can have a dra­matic effect on your pho­tographs. This is not a step-by-step guide — that would take many more than this volume’s 32 pages. Rather, The Evoca­tive Image is a handy review/overview meant to jog you into action, per­haps encour­age you to exper­i­ment out­side your com­fort zone. The advice is wide-ranging, includ­ing cam­era set­tings, lens choices, what to shoot, how to shoot, when to shoot, and even when not to shoot. Some of the sug­ges­tions will be famil­iar (shoot when the sun is low, use a slow shut­ter to blur move­ment), while oth­ers may be less so (shoot after all the other pho­tog­ra­phers have gone home, use color tem­per­a­ture as a cre­ative tool). Begin­ning pho­tog­ra­phers will find much to think about, and The Evoca­tive Image includes a num­ber of cre­ative exer­cises to help you try out Gibson’s sug­ges­tions. But even expe­ri­enced pho­tog­ra­phers can ben­e­fit; I found a few wel­come tid­bits I hadn’t thought about before, and was glad to be reminded of oth­ers. At $5, it’s a worth­while addi­tion to your eli­brary. Click on the link to pur­chase the PDF ver­sion of The Evoca­tive Image from Craft & Vision.

Posted in Commentary Tagged |

Ghost Forest, Flooded Stream, Yellowstone

February 17, 2011 by Robert | Comments Off

On sev­eral vis­its to Yel­low­stone, dri­ving out to pho­to­graph at dawn, I fre­quently passed this stand of dead trees along the road north of Old Faith­ful. The first few times, hav­ing some­where else in mind, I didn’t stop. But there was always a beau­ti­ful mist among the trees, and finally I couldn’t resist. It turns out there’s a hot spring uphill from these trees, and the over­flow seeps down into the grove; the warmth of the water cre­ates the mist. At some point in the past, the over­flow killed the trees, and they acquired the char­ac­ter­is­tic white min­er­al­iza­tion at the base of the trunks that you see at many Yel­low­stone springs. All this, and the fact that the sun rose directly behind the trees and fil­tered in through the mist, cre­ated a ghostly feel­ing in the chill of the morn­ing. An irre­sistible sub­ject for Motion|Pictures, my impres­sion­ist land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy series.

Tech­ni­cal Data:
Body: Canon EOS Dig­i­tal Rebel XTi
Lens: Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM at 45mm
Expo­sure: ISO 100, f/22, 1/8 second

Posted in Motion|Pictures Tagged , , , |

White Balance for Landscape Photographs

February 1, 2011 by Robert | Comments Off

My friend Michael Frye has been post­ing some very help­ful instruc­tional videos on Vimeo. This is his third and final video on white bal­ance (fol­low the link in the video frame to view the pre­vi­ous two, plus those on other top­ics, on Vimeo). I’ve posted the last of the series because it deals specif­i­cally with the thorny issue of white bal­ance in land­scape pho­tographs. Like many pho­tog­ra­phers, I am often asked if the col­ors in my images are “real” or “what I saw.” And I am never sure if I should respond with a lec­ture on the mechan­ics of human vision, the sen­si­tiv­ity of mod­ern cam­era sen­sors, the vagaries of white bal­ance, dodg­ing and burn­ing, and so on — or just nod and smile my way to another topic. Sim­i­larly, some pho­tog­ra­phers think there is only one proper white bal­ance for any given pho­to­graph, while oth­ers will tell you quite the oppo­site. Michael’s video is not specif­i­cally about these debates, but in talk­ing about the dif­fi­cul­ties of white bal­ance adjust­ment and how to solve them, he offers much food for thought as well as some valu­able prac­ti­cal advice.

Michael, by the way, runs photo work­shops at the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite Val­ley three or four times a year, con­cen­trat­ing on Light­room and Pho­to­shop work­flow, with twice-daily photo out­ings in an unbeat­able loca­tion. I went from tak­ing one of his work­shops to assist­ing him for about two and a half years, so I’m not exactly objec­tive in my views. But that said, I highly rec­om­mend his work­shops; for more infor­ma­tion, visit Michael Frye Pho­tog­ra­phy (opens in a new window).

Posted in Commentary Tagged , , |

Painted Hills, Oregon #1

January 29, 2011 by Robert | Comments Off

Oregon’s Painted Hills are located in one of the scat­tered units of the John Day Fos­sil Beds National Mon­u­ment in the dry, cen­tral part of the state. They are a long way from any­where, and the near­est town, Mitchell, is the epit­ome of life in the slow lane: a bed and break­fast, a sad look­ing cafe, an even sad­der gen­eral store, and peo­ple walk­ing down the mid­dle of a dusty main street that lit­er­ally seemed to lead nowhere. Sit­ting on the porch of the B&B eat­ing lunch from our cooler, the place was charm­ing in a way rarely seen in the US anymore.

I’d seen pho­tographs of the Painted Hills, and given that they are part of a National Mon­u­ment, I had always assumed they were pretty exten­sive. Quite the oppo­site, in fact. Although there are small col­or­ful out­crops here and there, the main area is rather diminu­tive, and because it is so frag­ile, it is fenced off. Or fenced in. In any case, you can walk around much of the perime­ter, but not within the for­ma­tion itself. And that meant, for my work, using the longest lens I had with me.

This was one of my first attempts to use motion-blur on a more expan­sive land­scape. It took me quite a while to find a way to make it work. The prob­lem is that large land­scapes like this one have dom­i­nant lines that con­verge, cross, diverge, go all over the place — so mov­ing the cam­era can blur some parts of the image beyond recog­ni­tion. The trick, for me at any rate, is to make sure that at least one dom­i­nant line, or one ele­ment of the land­scape, is sharp and not blurred. That way, the viewer has some­thing to hold on to, a strong ref­er­ence point within the image. In this case, I wanted those two bright red areas to remain well-defined, and even­tu­ally I found a way to move my cam­era so that they did. In the near future, I’ll be adding more images from this series to my impres­sion­ist land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy Motion|Pictures gallery.

Tech­ni­cal Data:
Body: Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Lens: Canon EF 70-200mm f/4 L USM at 200mm
Expo­sure: ISO 50, f/22, 0.7 second

Posted in Motion|Pictures Tagged , |