Aug 23, 2012 | Landscape Photography
It’s the end of August, I always regret when it rolls around. Besides the obvious meaning, the end of summer (and this has been a great summer), it means a couple of other things. One is the fall teaching season is coming up, the means lots meeting a whole bunch of you! That’s one reason I got the new Mac. It also means see fall colors again, such a romantic time to be shooting. The other implication is on the immediate shooting in the Eastern Sierra. We’ve had a couple of days of great clouds, but when it comes to wildlife and landscapes, photography can be really hard to find. And when you do find it, the light might be hard and the feathers and fur pretty warn. You know when I point my lens towards plants, I’m really trying to find something to photograph. In the deep shadows along a creek, found this pattern of nature on one of our evening walks. I liked the pattern, that’s about it. Just a few more weeks and all hell will break out. Lookin forward to it!
Aug 21, 2012 | Landscape Photography
Today turned out to be a great day at the feeders, the baby Douglas Tree Squirrels made their first visit. They are so much fun to watch as they try to figure out their way in the world. There were three of them and after they scurried up the tree and in the feeder, they were instant enemies. Douglas Tree Squirrels don’t like sharing their food source with anybody, that includes siblings. Well, the three of them argued verbally the whole time they ate. They did this with their mouths full no less! And as you see here, they sat with their backs to each other as if that would make their siblings disappear.
My biggest photographic problem was to shoot stills or video! I was sitting on a bar stool behind the D4 and 600f4VR2 with my morning cup of coffee watching and shooting. The activity was deserving of video because of all the action and chatter, but mom was the best show. Since she was perched about 20″ above the feeders, I figured I didn’t have the skill to pan up and down while shooting video so went all stills. Glad I did, got some great stuff of mom. The kids, not so much because they were in the feeder and I just don’t like seeing the feeder in the photo. There is always tomorrow for better of them. You might be wondering why I didn’t use flash. I really don’t like flash on Douglas Tree Squirrels, too many specular highlights in their fur.
And where was mom during all of this? Well, I don’t think she could believe what she was seeing!
Aug 13, 2012 | Landscape Photography
Last week I wondered about doing some remote video shooting. Hadn’t tried it before so started to work out the system. We had cloudy, thunderstorm weather all weekend and I needed to keep my nose to the keyboard to finish my new book. So remote triggering was essential. Setting up on an immature Allen’s Hummer that has taken possession of one of our feeders, I trained the 70-180mc attached to the D4 with Pocket Wizard IIIs as the trigger. The D4 had Custom Setting g4 set to Shutter release so whenever I wanted to start or stop the video, I just depressed the Test button on the Pocket Wizard. This also got me working on some shoots for this coming week with the Kelby Training crew coming in to film my next class.
The taping went pretty smoothly. My only issue was not totally paying attention a loosing track when I pushed the button to start or stop the tapping. I had to go out to the camera a few times and see where I was in the process. After I was all done, I realized I could have hooked up my Ninja2 to a long HDMI cable and monitored the action remotely. What you see here are five segments edited together in Photoshop CS6. Taking the individual segments and editing each down, drop in the Cross Fade, render the video and upload took less than 30min. I have to admit that I am enjoying video a whole lot more now that creating a finished can be so fast and simple. Enjoy!
Aug 3, 2012 | Landscape Photography
The emails are starting to come in asking what I think this fall will be like in the Eastern Sierra. Great fall color depends on lots of moisture and a good cold snap. Too early to predict the cold snap but we know we’re not getting much moisture. We’re having great clouds but they’ve not shed a drop to help. So we’ll have some great pockets of color in locations where this is water, lakes and major streams, but I don’t think we’ll have the huge blankets of color that are so spectacular. I can tell you a Kelby Training class on shooting fall color is due out shortly that we shot last fall. And I’ll be on the east coast and in the Sierra this fall looking for that color. Hope to see ya amongst the trees!
Jul 31, 2012 | Landscape Photography
Back in the day, one of the things to do was photograph a particular scene four times a year to demonstrate the change of seasons. At the time, I lived on California’s Central Coast where there were only two seasons. So I traveled throughout CA on the look out for a location that had four seasons I could travel to and make the shot. I was particularly looking for a great tree that I could focus on which would have that great fall color for one of the seasons. For over a decade, I was obsessed.
And thirty years later, I still don’t have the great scene! This is the closest I’ve come. This lone tree on the edge of Mono Lake has a classic shape, exactly what I was looking for so I started to follow it. The major problem is there is no real spring in the sage and in the fall, there always seems to be a big blow that removes all the leaves before they have an opportunity to turn all orange. When I was in school, we were encouraged to create an Idea File, a file where we would include ideas of photographs on what today folks would say are on their bucket list. This is one that still is in my file and on my list.
Jul 26, 2012 | B&W Photography, Landscape Photography
We are incredible fortunate to live in paradise! As I’ve mentioned probably too many times, summer in the Eastern Sierra is great with our monsoon storms. The clouds just play in the heavens as they float by. For this reason, I’m constantly heading out to the front deck to look up and see what is floating by. My favorite rig is the D4 with 24-70AFS, the format fits perfectly for shooting among the pines in the front. Here’s a series from last evening.
What you have here is the out of the D4 Jpeg and the finished PSD file. In this first image, first step in finishing is ACR using my Landscape preset. In Photoshop, the Apsens in the dead center of the frame were replaced with the Clone Tool with fir as in the rest of the frame. Then the image was run through Silver Efex Pro 2 and finished with Pro Contrast in Nik’s Color Efex 4. The entire finishing process took less than two minutes.
This next image in the series is the one I like the best. Camera gear and finishing all the same except this time, Pro Contrast was replaced with a Levels layer just to pull the blacks down a tad. Oh ya, I removed a couple of tree tops in the lower left corner with Content Aware Healing Brush. Why do I like this one the best? I have that “burning bush” feel to it, really strong graphics. I like that.
I like this last image more as a color than B&W, I think. I like the shape of the cloud but the tree is a little too bulky for me. The camera was all the same. In finishing, the first thing you’ll notice is the limb in the top left missing. That was done with Content Aware Fill. Then the rest of the finishing was done exactly the same as the first image. I hope this series will encourage you to just step out your door, no matter where you live, look up and make a click. Exploring the backyard and simple processing can open up all sorts of creative doors!
