Photodigitary

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.

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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 »

Digital Exposure of Bright Tones

As we all become more sophisticated and experienced in working with digital, we learn new things or learn things about specific recommendations that revise our thoughts about them. I have been doing a lot of work lately with brighter objects in a scene and this has made me challenge some ideas you often see about digital exposure. This was especially brought home to me during a workshop I was doing last week in the Eastern Sierras.

You may have heard of the expression, “Expose to the right.” This means that you expose to push the histogram to the right. A number of RAW digital gurus recommend this as a standard way of shooting, even to the extent of going past exposure warnings by the camera and overexposing bright areas slightly. The reason for this is that Camera RAW and Lightroom especially will recover detail in such bright areas. By exposing to the right, you do minimize noise in the image. Also, you will hear that what you are seeing in the LCD is a JPEG image and not the actual RAW file (which is true as the RAW file cannot be directly displayed). The implication is that the LCD display is therefore faulty.

After a lot of field work and comparing images, I can’t agree with that advice. I think one should expose as well as possible, neither overexposing nor underexposing bright areas. There is a big problem that occurs in nature photography with even slight overexposure of bright areas — loss of color. It is true that you can recover tonal detail from very bright areas, and that Camera RAW and Lightroom do a very good job of that. However, digital cameras do something unlike our eyes. As exposure is increased, the sensor’s response to color decreases. The chroma or “color-ness” of a color quickly disappears. Test this for yourself by shooting RAW at varied exposures. You will find that color in bright objects starts to disappear before the detail of the object is gone and that color cannot be recovered.

The same thing happens at the low end of the tonal scale. As colored objects are underexposed, the chroma of the colors will also disappear before the detail of the object is gone, and it also cannot be recovered.

This is why you need to get the best exposure possible for the scene. I use the highlight warnings and histogram for exposure in a way that is related to Ansel Adams’ Zone System. I have not really discussed this before because a lot of people don’t know that system. I don’t suggest running out and trying to learn it as that can take some time. Basically, what his System does is look at brightness values in the real world and try to relate them to brightness values that can be recorded on film based on exposure.

I adjust exposure until the highlight warnings just appear, then make a judgement as to whether that is wrong or right for the subject. What is happening is this — I am metering the scene to “place” the brightest areas on the brightest zone, a zone of tonality without detail. If I think that area needs some detail, I back off the exposure to give a half-stop less exposure (if you are shooting RAW, shooting with 1/3 increments, the default of many cameras, is a waste of time and shots). If that area is really unimportant in terms of detail, I can either leave the exposure alone or even give it a slight boost. For tricky scenes, I will check my histogram.

By placing this brightest part of the scene at a bright recorded value, I am also ensuring my dark areas will get optimum exposure as well given the dynamic range of the sensor and camera. If I am not getting good exposure then in the dark areas, I realize that I am going to have to either overexpose bright area and lose color and detail there or use an HDR technique.

So what about the display of JPEG in the LCD? I don’t find that matters. If I follow the procedure just described, I get good detail in my bright areas and that includes good color there. I think this is because of the extra detail in bright areas that comes from the RAW file compared to the JPEG image. If I push the shot so the bright areas really start to have warnings, I may find that I can pull detail out of those areas with RAW processing, but I will not get the best color. It is important to note that I am paying attention to the point at which the warnings appear. Do not assume you have a good exposure if no warnings appear; a badly underexposed photo can occur then.

In shooting with a lot of digital cameras beyond the ones that I own and in seeing work of a lot of students, I note that digital cameras do their best work at capturing color when the color is neither too bright nor too dark, in other words, in the middle of the range. This points out something important to consider when colors of bright areas are really critical — you might expose them at a point where the exposure warning just disappears. That will ensure that the bright areas drop down into better color capture range of the sensor. However, do not underexpose them or your dark areas will suffer (unless you want a dramatic photo with very dark, dark areas, which can be an interesting interpretation of some scenes).

You will run into situations where conditions are very challenging. First is a high contrast scene where exposing the bright areas properly means the dark areas are way underexposed. There is nothing you can do about that with a single exposure. You either have to find a different composition or use HDR. Second is a soft, low contrast scene, such as that seen after sunset. This will give you a histogram that is a small hill that does not fill the whole graph. Be very careful that you do not underexpose such a scene. That will cause processing problems, including noise and increased contrast. Expose so that the histogram spans the middle of the graph area or even slightly to the right.

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

National Parks

As many of you know, the national parks are coming up on 100 years in 2016 and you will begin seeing a lot about the national parks, including Ken Burns new documentary at the end of September (I am really looking forward to watching that). It is true that there were parks established before 1916, but that was the year that Woodrow Wilson signed the legislation to establish our National Parks System. It is a phenomenal system that is a model for the world. There are some challenges to the system that we must also be aware of, but it is still a popular and important part of our national identity.

A friend of mine, Ian Shive, has just come out with his book, The National Parks, Our American Landscape, and I highly recommend you check it out. I have long discussed the need for nature photography to go beyond simply repeating the pretty pictures that we have already seen. There is so much good nature photography available today that when it looks like just another pretty picture that you have seen before, audiences tend to tune out. Ian’s book brings a very fresh look at the national parks. You will see photos that do not look like every other park photo you have seen. This is really a phenomenal book for photographers, nature lovers and anyone who cares for the national parks. You can also see more about Ian at www.waterandsky.com.

Posted in Books, landscape photography, nature photography | Comments Off

Solid low angle shots

With digital photography stimulating a lot of photographers to get out and take pictures, I have been doing some classes to encourage photographers to find new ways of seeing, including my class, Impact in Your Photographs: The Wow Factor at BetterPhoto.com. One of the things I encourage is to look for different angles. I had a fantastic workshop years ago with Will Hopkins who was the last art director at the old LOOK magazine. He said something that has always stuck with me: “The only people who see the world consistently from eye-level and at moderate distance are photographers.”

One way to immediately make your photos stand out from everyone else’s is to try shooting from different angles that are lower and higher than that “eye-level” that is so easy to fall back on. This goes for all sorts of subjects. Go to any photographer’s field event where people are shooting landscapes and notice how nearly all to all of the photographers have their cameras on a tripod at eye-level or close to it. Look at photos of children and notice how so many are shot from the photographer’s eye-level rather than the child’s. And this can go on and on for all sorts of subjects.

I love doing low-angle shots in nature. It gives a totally different perspective than expected. One challenge is how to stabilize the camera. I have used bean bags, which work well, but not for long exposures. I have removed the center column from my tripod to allow it to get closer to the ground, but the legs splay and often show up in wide-angle shots.

I have started using the Vacu-Pod in an interesting way suggested by its developer, Michael Corlew, using its suction on something like a metal plate to allow you to get a solid base for a tripod head and camera. I actually am using a small, 5×7-inch clipboard that I can clip to my bag, then attach the Vacu-Pod. This gives a very solid, low-angle support that you can use on mud (such as the photo seen above), sand (which keeps your camera away from damaging sand) and so forth. I have found I can take as long an exposure as needed with this, plus you can really lock the camera down for such things as HDR (done with the photo seen above). The Vacu-Pod itself is very lightweight and can be carried fairly easily. I put a cord through the hole in the center to make it easy to carry on the outside of my camera bag. You can learn more about this product at www.vacu-pod.com.

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

What Does It Mean To Be Creative?

My son, Adam, passed along a cool website that he really likes, called Accidental Creative. He sent me a link to the “Manifesto” page that I thought was really well thought out. I think it is something that all photographers can gain from, too. Check it out:

http://accidentalcreative.com/manifesto/.

The photo here, for example, is of the common yucca that blooms throughout the chaparral in Southern California. This is not the usual shot of it, yet it is definitely true to who I am. This was shot at sunset. Normally shooting against a sunset would simply give you a silhouette. In this case, I used my flash to fill in the yucca flowering stalk so that it would stand dramatically light against the sunset. Like much of my work, it also shows the yucca in context with a setting (the silhouetted hills).

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