Photodigitary

Ancient Bristlecone Pines

One of my favorite places to photograph and just to be is the Ancient Bristlecone Forest near Big Pine in California. That is an absolutely amazing place that sits high in the White Mountains just east of the Sierra Nevadas. Here you will find trees that are not hundreds of years old, but thousands. They were growing before the Roman Empire! They live in a challenging environment, so they grow very slowly. Yet, even if parts of the trees die, very often, there is some part that keeps on going. They make for really fascinating subject matter for a photographer and are well worth the trip.

This is a perfect time of year to visit. The snow is gone from the bristlecone groves. Don’t think that is a trivial thing! I was there last week and part of the road was still blocked by snow. Small wildflowers are beginning to bloom in amongst the rocks between the bristlecone, too. The challenge is that there is nothing close by where you can get a motel room, though there is a nice campground on the way up to the bristlecones. I stayed in Independence at a great bed and breakfast place called the Winnemudah Hotel.

You can see more about the bristlecones on my new website, www.natureandphotography.com.

Posted in Nature, landscape photography, nature photography | 1 Comment »

Mojave Desert

Last week I spent some time photographing in the Mojave Desert with a friend, Chuck Summers. We were mostly at the Mojave National Preserve in Southern California (a National Preserve is like a National Park but open to certain things such as hunting).

I have often gone through the Mojave when driving to Las Vegas or Utah from Los Angeles. The Mojave is a place with big spaces, mountains, cactus, dry lakes, cactus and a lot of desert. I had often said I found it intimidating — the spaces are large and the landscape seems threatening, so dry, so hot.

Chuck and I were in the desert at a great time — warm but not unbearable, cool at night, and filled with flowers. So many of the plants were blooming. I had seen cactus blooming in gardens and pots, but never in the wild, and we found lots of them. This is a terrific time to photograph.

One thing about the Preserve is that it is very big. There are good two-lane roads through it, but they go on for miles. And there are so few people that visit this place that you hardly see anyone on the roads. This place will easily give you more of a wilderness experience than most national parks without taking any long hikes away from the road.

The challenge is in finding a place to stay. Baker is close and has lots of restaurants, but few motels. We stayed in one that was okay, but about the best you could say is that it was clean. There is a nice looking campground in the center of the park and one by the amazing Kelso dunes that looked okay. If I stayed in a motel or hotel, I would probably check out Primm, NV, which is not far on the north end.

If you like landscape photography, the Preserve is filled with stunning scenes, but the distances are so far between them that they cannot be easily covered in a few days. So I definitely plan to get back to the Preserve. At this time of year, it is great for flowers and cactuses. We found great numbers of cactus blooming up by the Hole-In-The-Wall area. The Preserve also has what is said to be the densest Joshua tree forest anywhere and it goes for miles and miles.

After this trip, I have a much better appreciation for the desert and for the Mojave Desert. It is not so inviting as you wiz by on the Interstate, but if you get out into the park, you discover a truly remarkable location. There are visitor centers in Kelso, in the middle of the park, and in Barstow, and the folks there are wonderful and extremely helpful.

Posted in Nature, landscape photography, nature photography | 2 Comments »

Flower Time

I love this time of year with all of the flowers. One reason we moved from Minnesota to California was because of the long spring. In Minnesota, it is very short — green leaves are out around May first and summer starts by mid-June. I am basing this on flowers and spring growth. In Southern California, that same time starts about the end of January and ends in mid-June.

I was up in Los Osos doing a workshop with the great folks at Light Photographic Workshops two weeks ago. We were doing flowers and landscapes and the flowers definitely cooperated. Here are some images with some brief notes about them from that week.

The opening shot is of a blue dick flower. A lot of people don’t appreciate the high quality you can get with an achromatic close-up lens. This was shot at a telephoto zoom setting with my Canon G11 and an achromatic close-up lens (this one from Century Optics, though Canon makes some good ones, too). Blue flowers don’t always record as blue, which was true here, so I had to correct the color in the computer (hue adjustment in Photoshop or Lightroom).

Lupines on a hill at dusk after a storm. There  is no camera that can capture the full range of brightness in a scene like this even though we can see it fine. HDR doesn’t work because it was windy and the flowers were blowing, plus HDR affects the whole image. I shot two exposures, one for the sky and one for the lupines. I processed them in Lightroom then combined the exposures in Photoshop to get an image more accurate to the scene. I then added some traditional “burning in” (darkening) to the edges and bottom for more drama.

Telephotos for close ups give a really nice look with limited depth of field and a change in perspective. This makes the background a pleasing color and tonality.

I also like wide-angles up close. This gives the flower a context and environment. It places it into a specific ecosystem. The trick is to deal with the extended space and depth of field that can make the composition too busy. In this case, the low early light and the sky makes the monkey flowers stand out.

Here’s a good case for a tilting LCD. I had climbed a hill with the group where some bush lupines were. I decided to travel light with only my G11. I got this high angle by holding the camera over my head and framing with the tilting LCD.

In June, I will be leading a workshop on the landscapes and flowers of the Eastern Sierras. Late June offers some wonderful wildflowers in the mountains there. I will be working the area from Lone Pine, California, to Yosemite. GAPW June Eastern Sierras.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques, Lightroom, Photoshop, landscape photography, nature photography | 1 Comment »

Cropping Photos

The question often comes up in workshops and classes. When should one crop? Is one allowed to crop? (Yes, that question does come up. Some instructors evidently are rather severe about cropping).

I believe that ideally, you should be looking for the best possible composition as you shoot. You should always be trying to have as complete a photo as possible captured when you take the picture. I don’t have any problems with cropping as long as one is not using that as a substitute for seeing the scene well in the first place.

The problem with cropping is that you can only crop what you have recorded with your camera. You cannot get a new and better composition of the whole scene because what you have recorded is not the whole scene, only part. So cropping can only give something less than what was available on location and cannot expand your options.

Another problem with cropping is that you lose image quality. I hear an interesting thing all the time — photographers who like the multi-multi-megapixel cameras because they can crop the image and still have high image quality. There are problems with that. It definitely means one is trying to substitute cropping for seeing the scene well in the first place. Sure, one can crop, but the real question becomes what did that photographer miss in the first place that means he or she has to crop now … and crop out of a limited view of the subject and scene (because what is in the photo is all you have).

It is possible to compose a full image right from the start, and that goes for anyone. If you start relying on cropping to finish your photos, then you are not getting your best images when the subject is actually in front of your camera. The way to use the whole image area is to really look at it and really see it. Years ago, I taught myself to scan the edges of the image every time I took a photo. This included photojournalistic work I was doing at the time and was hammered into me by one of my mentors. He allowed no excuses for a moving and changing subject. Now, with digital cameras, you can always check your LCD playback to see what you are getting and make adjustments to your compositional choices.

That said, you should always present your best version of your photograph. If that means cropping the photo, then crop the photo. We all get stuff along the edges of the image at times that we did not see, whether that is because of wind or dark conditions or just shooting too fast. So cropping is important to get rid of the junk. But regardless of the situation, you don’t need to say you cropped your photo. Your viewers don’t care, or at least, they should be so interested in your photograph that they don’t care.

The photo of Bridal Veil Fall in Yosemite National Park at the top of this blog entry is uncropped. That is exactly what I saw and captured with the camera. The photo of the snow plant below is cropped on the right side. I was shooting with the live LCD and the dark straps of my camera backpack blended in with the dark background — I did not see them hanging out along the right side of the photo. But I saw them when I opened the photo on the computer. I loved the shot, but the straps had to go, so they were cropped out.

By the way, I find Lightroom is a wonderful tool for cropping because it is non-destructive and you can change your crop as much as you want. A tip for experimenting with cropping is to make a virtual copy (or copies) of your photo and do crops on it so you can compare the results with the original.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques, Lightroom, Photoshop, landscape photography | 3 Comments »

Beyond Boring

I am not sure of all of the deep psychological reasons but there is no question that I get bored by certain types of photos, even my own. But I think I am not alone. The public will often get bored of seeing the same old types of nature photos, even if the photos are pretty shots. Such images then become just a part of the ever present visual “noise” that assaults us every day, stuff that we start getting immune to. That’s not a good place for our photographs.

I have to tell a story. Years ago, I worked for a production group that did photography and video production. We were owned by a large company. A friend in the group and I did PR portraits for the company. I enjoyed doing it as it kept me in contact with lots of interesting people in the company. However, I tended to get bored by the same sort of photos. Now honestly, PR photos should have a standard look and should not change. But I got bored and would change the light. Not enough to really affect the portraits, but enough that the images were not consistent. But that was me.

I am still that way. I get restless when I am in a location that I have photographed before or I have seen photographs from that area before. That, unfortunately because of my work at Outdoor Photographer over the years, means just about everywhere!

But that is not such a bad thing. It forces me to look for images that go beyond the typical photos of the area, to find images that are special to me and take me new places with the location. In today’s world of constant bombardment of visuals, that really allows my photos to be a bit different, to stand out. That also means that I tend to avoid the standard “beauty” shots of locations, which is not always good, because sometimes I would like them. Still, I prefer to find new ways of looking at a location. It is more satisfying to me.

You might not be as extreme as I am in this area, but I would suggest that sometimes it is worth sitting down at a location and just looking before you start taking pictures. I often do that. Find out what is really there visually and how you relate to it, not simply how you can capture another pretty picture of the location that will be forgotten quickly.

The two photos seen here are from the Eastern Sierras of California (where I have a workshop scheduled this June with the GAPW). The first is in the Alabama Hills looking toward Mt. Whitney. The second is in the Ancient Bristlecone Forest by Big Pine.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, landscape photography, nature photography | Comments Off

Photographing Projects Near You

When I was editor of Outdoor Photographer magazine, it amazed me how often folks would write in with suggestions for articles about places far away from their homes. And as I have done classes at BetterPhoto.com, I am still surprised at how often people say that they don’t live in areas where there are good opportunities for nature photography. I have also found that in workshops, a lot of people want to know where is the best place to go.

I know this may seem a little flip, but it is the truth: my favorite place to photograph is wherever I am. I have been to locations in nearly every state and a few foreign locations, too. I have yet to find any place where there is not some sort of interesting and good opportunities for nature photography. The photo at the top of this entry is from Castro Crest in the Santa Monica Mountains. This is less than an hour away from me. Now lest you think I am in some amazing location, I live in the Los Angeles area and nearly half of the time to get to this location is through LA freeways. In addition, this location is within 10 miles of millions of people. Yet whenever I have been to this spot, I have never seen another photographer other than friends who came with me.

I suppose that the old saying, “The grass is greener on the other side of the fence”, didn’t become popular because people always appreciated where they were. A dear friend of mine has some wonderful opportunities to photograph stunning scenes of nature near his house, yet he is always searching for another place to photograph far away from home. Now there are wonderful places that are worth the travel. I am glad I get to go to a lot of interesting places around the country. But I can’t do that all the time. Yet nature and photography are too important to me to wait until my next “big trip.”

I have found so many locations around LA that I enjoy visiting for nature photography. But one thing that has become very important to me is a personal project — photographing the chaparral of Southern California, especially in the Santa Monica Mountains (which, it seems, is not well known anywhere, even in LA — “Santa Monica has mountains” — no, they don’t, but there are mountains to the north and west that have this name). I have mentioned a bit about this before. The chaparral is a wonderful ecosystem once you get to know it. It is a very important part of the natural history of Southern California, covering nearly 15% of the non-built land. It is not so dramatic as Yosemite, it doesn’t have the big trees of Sequoia, it has no bold waterfalls or big rivers. But it is close (it is throughout Southern California), interesting and worth getting to know. Admittedly, the Santa Monica Mountains do have mountains (up to about 3,000 feet), but without tall trees and not a lot of water, these soft-green mountains are often ignored by folks.

Everywhere there are areas like this, areas that you can “adopt” as your own. As you really get to know that area, you will learn more about your camera technique, you will discover cool things about the nature of your region, you can photograph throughout the year, and you can even build up a body of significant work that you cannot get in any other way. For me, the chaparral project started as a way to better know and understand a natural system in my state. Now it has truly become a love affair. That is a big deal, actually, because I grew up in the East and Midwest where thick forests were the native ecosystems that I loved most. Not that I will ever forget the forests, but I do love the chaparral now, too. As Stephen Stills wrote in a song popularized by the Rolling Stones, “And if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.”

Here are more chaparral photos.

Posted in Nature, Workshops and Classes, landscape photography, nature photography | 1 Comment »

Composition and Focal Point

I have often been asked if a photo has to have a focal point in its composition. Ask this question at a camera club and you will surely get a lively discussion. It is actually not an easy question to answer because … it depends!

Good composition is about creating an image that is clear and directly connects with the viewer (unless you are doing obscure fine art photography, which is a whole different discussion). That can happen with one focal point or many. Frequently, landscapes have either multiple focal points or none that stand out. The key is to create some sort of underlying structure to the image that shows clear relationships among the elements of the photograph. That simply means that the photograph is clearly understandable as to what it is about.

One composition might be muddled and unclear with multiple interesting points of interest, while another might be perfect. One composition might be muddled and unclear with one focal point (because of a distracting light or background that has no focal points, though), while another might be perfect. The key is not to think “rules” — i.e., does it or does it not have a focal point, but instead to look at the photograph and see what it is really about. And then, is that clear. Photos often get muddled because the photographer did not made a clear decision as to what the photograph is about. This can happen even with a single, clear-cut subject when there is something else in the photo that the photographer wanted to include but did not integrate it into the composition or with the subject.

If you were to look at the work by Eliot Porter, the great nature photographer of the middle of the 20th century, you would find that very few of his photos had a single, clear-cut subject. However, everything in each of his photos belonged there and there were always clear relationships among the pictorial elements within the composition. Relationships are key.

Sometimes what is more important than a focal point are these relationships. They cause the viewer’s eye to move around the photograph (which also happens with a single focal point — there are still relationships). A viewer’s eye should move around the photo, but not to competing picture elements, but to related picture elements. That is important. Research has shown that when a viewer’s eye moves throughout an image, the viewer will stay with that photo more and get more from it. That does not mean an eye moving from unrelated things that compete with each other. Then the viewer gets annoyed and moves on. That also tends to happen with centered compositions using a single focal point. What happens then is that the viewer sees what the photo is all about in a single glance, is done with it, and wants to move on.

The first photo is from a class I worked with last spring on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. The last photo is from the chaparral in the Santa Monica Mountains outside of Los Angeles (it is also HDR — no camera can handle that tonal range).

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques, landscape photography, nature photography | 1 Comment »

What are the rules, anyway?

This past fall, I had a great group of photographers with me on a GAPW workshop in the Eastern Sierras (I will have one on the wildflowers of the Eastern Sierras next June). One morning we went to Mono Lake a little before dawn. Some of the group went right down to the water, some did not. I hung out with some photographing tufas not down by the water. The sun came up and there was beautiful light on the tufa formations. Then I decided to walk down to the lake and see how the rest of the group was doing.

On my way there, a whole mess of people were leaving, heading back to their cars. One person says, “You’re too late. The light is all gone. The good photos are over.”

Now let’s think about this for a moment. The light was still low and creating some wonderful shadows, and creating some excellent textured light on the tufa. The man who spoke, who seemed to reflect the whole group, was that there was only one possible way of photographing at Mono Lake and the tufas. I heard later from one of my students that there were a whole horde of folks all lined up facing the same direction, the sun rose, they finished shooting and all left.

I found this rather sad (as did my group who merrily continued shooting). Yes, light and color are affected by sunrise and conditions do change. And yes, it is possible to get to a light that is unattractive on a landscape. However, the latter had not happened. What seemed to be happening is that these folks were photographing according to some unwritten rules about how to photograph Mono Lake. Which is probably one reason why I found a lot of Mono Lake photography pretty, but also without a lot of originality. How often do we need to see the same sort of pre-dawn colored tufa? Or their silhouettes against the sunrise?

Whenever you do anything of a creative nature, whether that is photography, writing or somethings else, there are no absolute rules to guide you. Sure, there are things you must know about the craft of photography, etc. You need to know how to get a sharp photo, for example, or how to expose properly. But beyond that, “rules” tend to be more ideas that someone else wants you to do either because they have a limited sense of right or wrong or they are scared they are wrong if no one else follows what they are doing.

This can be very restrictive to a photographer’s growth, a photographer at any level, from beginner to expert. It is very true that as you try new things, you can feel a bit insecure about them. So when someone comes by with the “rules”, it is easy to quit doing what is true and right for you, just because it seems to be “against the rules.”

The photo above is not the typical shot of Mono Lake and I like it because of that. Before I ever visited Mono Lake, I thought that the tufa were so common that you saw them all over. Wrong! They are only in a few select areas. This photo shows Mono Lake and some tufa in early light, light that shows the lake and the setting well, and shows largely an open lake (which is truer to the location than many shots of only the tufa). To make the lake look stronger in the composition, I had to make the tufa look less dominant. Because they are tall, they cut through the lake and into the sky from normal camera heights. I put my camera on my tripod, set the self-timer, pressed the shutter and hoisted the camera on the tripod high over my head. I had to do a few shots to get it right. And to do this, you often need to shoot manually. But it does give a different view of the lake and its tufa, giving a perspective of what the place is really like. I like the strong, early light after sunrise here.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques, Uncategorized, Workshops and Classes, landscape photography, nature photography | Comments Off

Snow

In many areas of the country, snow is now becoming part of the winter landscape. Even in “sunny” California, we are getting snow up in the mountains. Snow can be a wonderful addition to a scene and can create some beautiful images.

Snow can be hard to deal with for exposure because it is white. Generally, you need to give at least one stop more exposure than the meter says. Now that will vary. If you are shooting snow that is mostly in the shade, but there are some sunlit highlights, then you want to expose for the highlights and not for the snow at all. Watch your histogram — you want to be sure that there is not a big gap on the right side, but also, no clipping of whites on that side either. It is very easy to underexpose snow badly which will crush the dark tones all together and make it very difficult to bring out a good tonal range in the image. However, it is also easy to overexpose small areas of snow in a larger scene of dark tones so that you lose detail and texture in that snow. Watch your highlight warnings and be careful of clipping of the whites on the right side of the histogram (clipping looks like a cliff at that side rather than a mountain slope that comes back to the bottom line of the histogram just before reaching the right side).

You will probably find your snow looks best shot with any of the daylight white balances. This is tricky because no matter what you do, you can get blue snow and that can be absolutely correct. If the sun is out, then shadows will be reflecting the usually very blue sky of winter. If you overcorrect for that blue, then the highlight areas can look too yellow or too amber. I find that a cloudy setting works well, sun or clouds, with snow, but this is going to depend, to a degree, on the camera model. With a scene mostly in shade, you may do okay with shade white balance, but you may find that that does not completely remove the blue, especially if you are shooting at altitude. You may have to go to your Kelvin settings (if the camera has them) and set something upwards of 9000K. You might also find it helpful to do a custom white balance (which can be done on clean snow as it is a good neutral tone).

And finally, sometimes snow just looks right with blue in it. This is especially true at dawn and dusk.

Posted in Digital camera techniques, landscape photography, nature photography | Comments Off

Brown Photography

This is a time of year that many photographers put away their cameras. Landscapes look brown and drab nearly everywhere. There is little that is filled with color.

I can understand the disappointment in natural scenes for photography at this time of year. Yet, for some reason, I have always enjoyed photographing now. Even back when I lived in Minnesota, I loved getting out and photographing beyond the typical fall season, and before winter. Partly this is due to the seasonal conditions. I like the color temperatures and I enjoy the low light from a low sun. Plus, I often have the location to myself. Even at locations that are packed at other times of the year, I find that there is a gentle solitude that I quite like as I explore both with my eyes and my camera.

One of the biggest challenges at this time is brown. Brown can just be so very unattractive in a photograph. I think there are several things that can help you deal with brown:

1. Browns look terrible when overexposed, so be careful of that.
2. Light can make or break browns. Low light that skims across a brown so that its texture is revealed is a good way to work with light and browns.
3. Backlight is excellent with browns and can even make them glow.
4. Flat light that has no shadows or dimension is usually very difficult to work with for browns.
5. Look for different browns. Red-browns look very different than tan browns and you can use color differences in browns to create very rich images. Dull gray-browns are difficult to photograph so they look good.
6. Look for any contrasts. A dark tree trunk can anchor a composition, while backlit seed heads can create a glow to the image.
7. With landscapes, use the blue sky as a pictorial element (not simply sky) that contrasts with the browns.

Close ups are often quite good in the fall. So many seeds look quite interesting up close, offering stunning photo opps, and there are lots of seeds in the fall.

Posted in Nature, landscape photography, nature photography | 3 Comments »