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 »

Nature and Photography

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.

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

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 »

Unique Project for Nature Photographers

I was just contacted by Clay Bolt and Niall Benvie about a very interesting project they have started. I have known Niall, a UK photographer, for a while from some things he had done for us at Outdoor Photographer. I think they have  a very ambitious, yet also very important project. It might be something you might be interested in, too. At the least, check out their website, http://niallbenvie.churchilljohnson.co.uk/blog/?p=4028, for some ideas on a unique approach to photographing the natural world and getting it known.

Here’s what Clay told me:

Meet Your Neighbours is about reconnecting people with the common wildlife in their  communities through the medium of photography. This will be done by giving each subject  the celebrity treatment – photographing it in a backlit white field studio-  then putting this work out in public places such as shopping malls,  hospitals and on the street. The central message is “biodiversity begins at home.” For many, most people, these familiar species are their first, sometimes only contact with wild nature and as such are especially important as sources of inspiration and perspective. Yet they are normally over-looked and undervalued. This is why we photograph them in such a stylised way, where the subject is an individual, a character, rather than merely a member of an eco-system.

We are seeking photographers - especially those beyond the US and Europe -who will partner with their local conservation NGOs in this effort. It doesn’t matter whether they are professional or recreational photographers ; they need only believe in the project’s ethos and have good relations with the conservation community already.

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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 »

What Do Cameras Really Do, Anyway?

I find it curious that so many students feel they have to “confess” to doing perfectly normal “darkroom” work in the computer. So you added contrast and saturation to the image file. Often a photograph needs something like that to correctly interpret a scene.

I think this comes from a misinterpretation of what cameras really do and because people have gotten afraid of being accused of “Photoshopping” their photos. What the camera does not do is create an arbitrarily objective view of the world. The camera creates a very biased look at the world based on the limitations of the sensor, image processing done inside the camera (which is done even with RAW), and very subjective decisions by engineers and designers of the camera. Every camera is a compromise in terms of image capture because it must do a good job with all sorts of photographers, plus sensors have some issues with tonalities and colors, and camera designers know this. It is impossible to create a camera that could capture every scene of every photographer’s vision objectively because conditions are so varied.

All photography is interpretation. Nothing else is actually possible because you cannot put the real world into a picture. You can only capture a representation of it that is defined and limited by what a camera can actually do in capturing a scene. The great LIFE photographer, Andreas Feininger, talked about this many years ago in his photography books published during the 1960s and 1970s. He noted that a photograph is rarely the same size as the real world scene, it has only two dimensions to represent a three-dimensional world, it is limited to one vantage point that cannot be shifted, it includes none of the subjective things that we always react to when we are in the real world such as heat, cold, smells, sounds, and so forth (these actually do influence what we see), and more so that any photograph is always an interpretation of the world.

In fact, he went further and said that an unadjusted photograph is very often any inaccurate interpretation of the world (he called it a lie) because many of its elements are undefined in relationship to this interpretation. I believe this is important if as photographers we are to get images that truthfully and accurately interpret the world for our audiences. We have a responsibility as a photographer to be sure that the image appropriately interprets the world so that our audiences better see and understand our world.

I once had somebody tell me that they didn’t worry about this concerning nature photography because nature is perfect so all they had to do is take a picture of it. It may be true that nature can be perfect, but a photograph of nature is not the same as nature. A photograph of nature can be very imperfect and can even lead us astray from what is really important in the scene. Often we must make some corrections to the original photo as interpreted by the camera so that it more accurately reflects an appropriate interpretation of the scene.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Nature, Photoshop, nature photography | 1 Comment »

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 »

Endangered Nature from a Different Perspective

Nature words are now becoming endangered! An article in National Wildlife magazine reminded me of something I heard on NPR. Nature is disappearing from the Oxford Junior Dictionary! Yes, it is true. In the most recent version, more than 30 nature words are no longer defined, including otter, dandelion, fern, moss, acorn and beaver. New words have been included, including MP3 player, blog, and cut and paste. “Making room for a new lexicon of technology and communications may be a good thing for children,” says Kevin Coyle, NWF vice president for education and training, “provided they are not also denied definitions as basic as that growing on their own lawn.”

Now that makes sense to me. But I think it brings up a larger issue. Nature is, at times, being taken for granted. Oh, sure, everyone knows about global warming and such, but what about the threats to our human nature. Although at times mankind has tried to deny being part of nature, largely, people miss nature when it is not around. Simple things like trees in city streets, office windows looking over gardens or natural areas, birds flying across the skies where we live, all of these things are part of our lives. Even dandelions.

So what does that have to do with photography? A lot, I think. Nature photographers often spend a lot of time and money traveling to spectacular locations and photograph them. Nothing wrong with that. Those locations are an important part of our world.

The problem comes when “everyone else”, all of the public that sees our photography, whether as simple as a framed image in your office or in a book or calendar, all of these people then have a very limited “vocabulary” of nature. It is like the words are gone from their references to nature. If all people see of nature photographs are images from distant locations, then nature is implied and even defined mentally as being at distant locations, too.

We can do more. At my clinic’s pharmacy, a pharmacist displays his photos of local birds — so as people wait in line to check in and wait to pick up their medications, they see something of the nature of the world around them. I am including more of a variety of nature photos in my photo how-to books, photos that do more than show Arches National Park or Yosemite. I include photos from the chaparral, as well as plants and small critters from many locations that highlight things people don’t always see or notice.

Today’s world is increasingly iPodded, video gamed and divorced from contact with nature. Removing words from a dictionary makes it worse. While no photo is a substitute for being outside, a good nature photo can be more than simply decoration. It can encourage people to think about and even explore more of nature.

Posted in Nature, nature photography | 1 Comment »

Workflow Perfection or Excellence?

It is interesting when talking about workflow, that few people discuss the difference between working for excellence and working for perfection. I am guilty of that as well. It is very easy to talk about all of the things a photographer can and “should” do in Lightroom or Photoshop, but not get into the decision making process of why do something in that workflow at all.

Over the years, I have often thought about the difference between striving for excellence and or for perfection. I have struggled with this at times, too, but today, I recognize that striving for excellence is a good goal, while striving for perfection will lead more often to frustration and disappointment. It is impossible to ever be perfect, yet we can reach excellence. There was a well known book called, On Excellence, by John Kenneth Galbraith, years ago that really helped me face this issue. Excellence means you set a high standard and work to achieve that. That is generally possible. Perfection is always an elusive goal because as humans, we can never be perfect.

Perfection as a goal gives another problem — how to deal with choices. If you must be perfect, that means there is always the possibility of a better option than what you are doing. That can drive you crazy. If you strive for excellence, you know what that means and when you make a choice that gets you there, you need do nothing else.

This strongly affects how we deal with workflow. If you strive for excellence, then the choice between 8-bit or 16-bit files is easy — if your image has reached a standard of excellence at 8-bit, why bother with the effort that 16-bit requires? Or color space — if AdobeRGB does the right job for your photo, why worry about other color spaces, no matter what anyone else says?

This affects things like using specific tools in Lightroom or Photoshop. I know that some photographers start thinking that they have to use certain tools because someone said they had to, so they need to do that for some ideal of processing perfection. Yet, if your image has reached a level of excellence for what you want and you never touched the Graduated Filter or Adjustment Brush in Lightroom, then why bother taking the time or effort? If you constantly think you need to do “something else” to your photo (which will always happen if it has to be perfect as you can never reach perfection), then you will constantly fiddle with controls you don’t need. That will mess up your time and effort with your photos in the computer.

For nature photographers, too, I think we might learn a bit from nature on this one. You could argue how perfect nature is. Some people will say it is, but then others will point out “problems”, but both are really perspectives outside of nature itself. Nature doesn’t strive for perfection — look at all of the variation in a given species of plant or animal — perfection implies no variation. Nature does strive for excellence, in a sense, because anything less means you don’t survive. A wolf doesn’t care about hunting with perfection, simply the excellence that brings down the prey or not. A flower doesn’t care about perfection, only about excellence that ensures pollination occurs.

Striving for excellence does not mean that if you achieve it, that you do not look to improve your skills. I am finding, for example, that I am tending to pay more attention to opening up dark tones and the details there in my images than I did either in the traditional darkroom or when I first started working on images in the computer. I think that is improving my shots. I have always striven for excellence, but as I learn new things, I adapt my work to that.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques, Equipment thoughts, Lightroom, Nature, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements | Comments Off

Fire and the Photographer

The big Station fire outside of Los Angeles has gotten a lot of attention from the media, and for good reason. It is a very big fire (still burning) and quite dramatic.

Fires can definitely be scary. They can threaten lives and homes. Fire is also critical to our lives. We need fire for energy. It is fire that creates steam for many electric power plants. It is fire that provides most of our energy. It is fire that we use for grilling those hamburgers on holidays like Labor Day.

And fire is also an important part of many ecosystems. In some places, such as the wiregrass-longleaf pine ecosystems of Northern Florida as seen in this photo, fire is a critical part of that ecosystem. This image shows part of a prescribed fire that clears out the brush that has invaded this plant community and allows the natural ecosystem to thrive.

As nature photographers, we are the eyes of so many people. Most people don’t see all the things we do, and they especially do not study the subjects the way we do. A photo of a subject, whatever it is, is then something to be seen in a whole different way because it is now emphasized and “cut out” of the world for all to see.

Yet it is interesting that you see so little nature photography showing fires or the effects of fires. One reason why mountain lions are protected and not persecuted through their range is that there are many photographs of them. People see these beautiful creatures in pictures even if they are unlikely to ever see one in person. Photographs of fires and effects of fires could also help us see fire as a part of the natural environment, not as simply something destructive.

Smokey the Bear probably hurt us a bit because the U.S. Forest Service was once very aggressive in promoting the idea that forest fires were bad. That agency wanted to protect the forests for lumber, for harvesting. Yet many of these forests now have a build up of fuel that will make fires far worse than they were in the past when they occurred naturally every few years in such places.

Some people confuse the idea of build up of fuel in Western forests with the growth of chaparral in Southern California. That is understandable because few photographers have spent time photographing and celebrating the chaparral. This is a shrub-based ecosystem without big trees (which is one reason a lot of photographers have trouble photographing it). It is also an ecosystem that burns, but normally, not frequently. The plants in it are adapted to fire. Most of the woody plants resprout quickly after a fire. Some seeds actually need fire or smoke to stimulate germination. And many wildflowers will come out and bloom the spring following a fire. Fire is a natural process of the chaparral, and this ecosystem is never “destroyed” (as the media likes to sensationalize it) from a single fire. It can be severely damaged, however, with fires that come too frequently (often from man-made causes).

Still, we see little photography of this regeneration of life after a fire. There is so much opportunity to do this. Fire is part of many, many ecosystems around the country. When a fire occurs in one near you, find out more about its true effects on the ecology of the area and if there might not be some cool photo opps there.

Posted in Nature, nature photography | 1 Comment »