Pink and Nature Photography
August 25th, 2010 Rob SheppardWhat does the pop star Pink have to do with nature photography? Check it out at www.natureandphotography.com.
Rob
A Reminder
August 16th, 2010 Rob SheppardRemember that this website is no longer my main blog. I am now mostly using www.natureandphotography.com. I just posted a blog entry about live view on cameras today and why I think that capability is so important.
Ancient Bristlecone Pines
June 30th, 2010 Rob Sheppard
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.
Nature and Photography
June 18th, 2010 Rob Sheppard
Nature and nature photography have long been important to me. My first photos as a kid were of nature. I remember a shot of Gooseberry Falls in Minnesota from junior high. Then there was a very interesting close-up of a syrphid fly — I taped a magnifying glass to my dad’s Argus C3 (an old rangefinder camera with no view through the lens) and then used a ruler taped to the bottom of the camera to focus.
Being editor of Outdoor Photographer magazine gave me the chance to really see what was happening to photography and nature photography. It was pretty interesting to be part of the digital change from film. There were a lot of questions from photographers who did not understand the potential of the change, but now digital has become the dominant media for photography. And for good reason — digital offers so much in quality, versatility and control.
I started photodigitary.com to follow and comment on what was happening in digital photography, with some nature photography thrown in. Not all that long ago, I was one of a minority working with digital and communicating about it through my books and articles, along with the blog. That is no longer true. Everybody talks about digital now!
Now I want to get back to my roots of nature and photography, so I have started a new blog, www.natureandphotography.com. The name, nature and photography, is deliberate. I will be blogging through photos and writing about photography (including digital photography), nature photography and as we can connect to nature through photography. I will be keeping photodigitary.com as a reference site because I use it for classes and workshops to refer people to a lot of information about digital techniques and ideas. My main blog will be at www.natureandphotography.com. I will still do most of what I have done at photodigitary — comments on techniques, showing images with how they were done, comments on gear and so forth. The difference is that www.natureandphotography.com will always have a theme related to nature.
Hope to see you there! The top photo is of barrel cactus and brittlebrush flowers in Joshua Tree National Park.
Magical Place
June 7th, 2010 Rob Sheppard
I often say that my favorite place to photograph is wherever I am and that is true. I love nature everywhere. I can be happy photographing on top of a mountain or photographing the native plants of my garden.
But I do admit a special fondness for Costa Rica. It is an amazing place. It is “exotic” on the one hand when you see wildlife, especially birds and striking insects, that you have only seen in zoos. Yet it is also comfortable on the other hand because this country likes having Americans visit and the scale of the country is human scale. When I first went to Costa Rica, I expected expansive rainforests, yet most of the lower landscape looks more like Wisconsin with a mixture small farms and woodlands! The mountains are a little different story with volcanoes and the cloud forest.
Much of the rainforest has been cut down and turned into a mix of crops and small patches of rainforest. While it is sad to think of what is lost, on the other hand, places like Wisconsin used to be covered with forest, too. It does make the place more comfortable for humans, and the rainforests that are there are quite remarkable with their dense trees, colorful frogs and insects and even monkeys. The edges of farms and rainforests even increase the population of some wildlife, such as toucans (the first time I saw one of these in the wild, I was amazed) and coatimundis (wonderful relatives of raccoons).
Costa Rica is a place any photographer can go to as it is very accessible. And you always return with unusual and striking photos. The rainy season starts there soon, so late summer through fall is not the best time to visit (though it is amazing to be in a warm rain). The rainy season ends in November and I have a trip scheduled through Holbrook Travel to Costa Rica in early December. That’s a time many photographers think they have to put their cameras into hibernation, so this is an opportunity to do more. We go to a great eco-lodge, Selva Verde, that sits in a rainforest and includes covered walkways so we can photograph even if it is raining! If you are interested, check out Holbrook Travel and the trip to Costa Rica.
I am now working on a new blog that will be called Nature and Photography. It will include many of the ideas in this blog, but it will have its orientation always about nature and nature photography. More about this later this week.
Mojave Desert
May 11th, 2010 Rob Sheppard
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.
Environmental Portraits of a Low Kind
April 30th, 2010 Rob Sheppard
The environmental portrait is an important type of photography for people. This is a portrait that also shows the environment where the subject works or plays or otherwise lives. You see it in photojournalism where it is common in sports and business magazines. You see it a lot with portraiture studios where it is a staple.
You don’t see it as much in close-up nature photography. I am not sure why. It might be because photographers are excited about getting close and want to see the subject full on in their viewfinder. Those photos can be great fun and dramatic, but I also like close-ups that show off a bit of the setting and environment around the subject. These are, in a sense, ecological photos because they show connection of the subject to the real world.
This isn’t simply about backing up. Too much “environment” and the subject will be hard to see and discover in the photograph. The subject still has to be clearly seen. With light, color and composition, you can make even a small subject stand out in the scene if you look for this.
I love to use wide-angle lenses up close for this purpose. Some wide-angles focus within inches without any other accessories. For others, you might need an achromatic close-up lens such as the Canon 500D (which I use on my Olympus gear, too — it works on any lens with the right filter size or adapter ring), which works quite well with close-ups.
It also helps to get down low and be at the subject’s level. This means dirty knees, and for me, a tilting or swivel Live View LCD really helps a lot.
Flower Time
April 11th, 2010 Rob Sheppard
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.
Lightroom Workflow
March 11th, 2010 Rob Sheppard
Lightroom is, I believe, the best processing and cataloging program for photographers, bar none. It is made for photographers, it is far easier to learn and use than Photoshop, plus it is faster and more efficient. With Lightroom, you spend your time with your photos, not the program. For nature photographers, especially, Lightroom does not chain you to the computer or make you learn things you don’t really need to know.
Because Lightroom is so important to my workflow (honestly, I could not do the work I do today without it) and because I have seen so many photographers enjoy digital photography more when they have learned it, I have put together a couple of DVDs to help photographers better use Lightroom that are available at www.robsheppardphoto.com.
I have had a lot of requests for doing something on Lightroom workflow, and in putting these together, I have worked to keep them simple, direct and helpful. I have brought together the techniques, the tips, the tricks on these video programs that really do work for nature photographers.
Of course, they work for other photographers, too, but I had to use something for examples, so I chose my love, nature photography. Plus, nature photographers deserve a program that makes their work the star because most Lightroom books and videos are not geared toward the outdoor photographer who loves nature.
There is no fancy packaging to add to the price, just solid information on working with your photos in Lightroom. I have one DVD on Library workflow, the other on the Develop module. One disc is $19.95, two are $29.95, no postage, no handling fees, no extra charges. I have even included the same image files that I use for demonstration so you can follow along if you want.
The videos are based on Lightroom 2, Mac or Windows, and I have included a segment on what is new for Lightroom 3.
Library DVD Content:
- Message, 8 min. – a personal message
- Interface, 12 min. – an overview of the Lightroom interface with some tips on using it
- Import, 28 min. – getting images into Lightroom efficiently and effectively
- Traditional Edit, 24 min. – sorting the good from the bad; tips on editing your photos in the traditional photographic sense of editing
- Keywords & Metadata, 24 min. – working with keywords and metadata
- Collections & Filters, 44 min. – using collections effectively and using filters for searching Library
- New in Lightroom 3, 5 min. – what’s new in Lightroom 3 for Library
Develop DVD Content:
- Develop Message, 12 min. – personal message
- Intro to Workflow, 14 min. – an overview of Develop workflow
- Blacks, Whites, Midtones, 37 minutes – a critical part of the process for me is getting blacks, whites and midtones right from the start; a bit on cropping is included
- Color, 15 min. – tips on working color for correction and enhancement
- Sharpen, 12 min. – the sharpen tools for Lightroom are quite different than Photoshop; here’s a way to work with them
- Local Adjustments, 35 min. – this is what makes Lightroom truly give the tools of the traditional darkroom
- Example & Presets, 28 min. – a full example of using this Lightroom workflow is shown, plus an overview on using presets
- Export Function, 27 min. – here’s how to get images out of Lightroom
- New in Lightroom 3, 9 min. – what’s new in Lightroom 3 for Develop
You can order these videos at www.robsheppardphoto.com.
Flower Photography Workshop
March 9th, 2010 Rob Sheppard
Just a short blog here. If you are interested in flowers right now, and maybe even tired of winter a bit, you might find my workshop at the Light Photographic Workshops of interest. The Magic of Flowers will look at the bold blooms of flowers along the Pacific Coast by Morro Bay, California, and we’ll be photographing flowers from close-ups to landscapes (March 29-April 2).
And here’s a flower tip to consider. Get down low and close with a wide-angle lens for a different look at flowers. This gives a look at the flower in a big landscape, so obviously you need to have a good looking landscape around the flower. It is important to get in really close to the flower, probably as close as your lens will focus. You can also use an achromatic close-up lens (such as the Canon 500D which will work with any brand lens with the right filter rings) to get closer.
