Jun 28, 2012 | Landscape Photography
The Great Hall at the Nat’l Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum is simply amazing! The huge murals, one in each corner are simply spectacular! This one of lower Yellowstone Falls is one I would love to have in my house, if it was the size of s football field. After asking a museum volunteer if I could shoot in the room and being told it was OK (a big function was going on), I started thinking. I wanted to show that size in the photo, how do you do that? Gotta have something for scale and there is nothing better than a person. Going to the other side of the room, I shot with the 50f1.4AFS to keep lines as straight as possible. Then I had Sharon stand as you see her with a gesture saying one thing about viewing these gorgeous paintings.
Then we had Chris stand as you see him here with a totally different body gesture making a totally different statement. I really like them both, each saying differently about the impact these paintings can have on an individual. The photos taken with the D800 at ISO 1600 are simple clicks right out of the camera. I stood there looking at this mural for a long time, could stand there looking at them for a whole lot longer. I strongly urge you to go there, stand, and take them in for a long time as well!
Jun 28, 2012 | Landscape Photography
If you are a lover of light, if you want to improve your landscape photography, it you want to be transported back to a different time, you must go to the Nat’l Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, OK. My good bud Kevin took us there while we were in Wichita and I’m so glad he did! This is a marvelous place we spent four hours touring, taking in our heritage and the art celebrating it!
Being partly a art museum, there are places where you can’t take pictures and that’s the way it should be. You should take hours just looking at the landscapes and the way they paint the light falling on it. Some of my favorite paintings are hanging on these walls, the originals that you can just stand there and take in. There are oils, watercolors, pencil, bronze, just a marvelous collection to get lost in. Then there is the western native American art section which is spectacular (you see here). Then you wonder into the western movie section, history section and on and on. It’s just marvelous!
Then there is the western town they’ve built inside for you to explore. You see here a ISO 1600, 5 frame HDR from the D800. The town is lit as if midnight and being display lighting, HDR was called for (no tripod, handheld). This is a museum for the senses that you just have to get to, I can’t recommend it enough! Oh yeah…shot with the 50f1.4AFS at ISO 1600 the whole time, love that lens!
Jun 7, 2012 | Landscape Photography
How do you express scale in a photograph? I could include a dime, what we do in wildlife photography but I just have this feeling you might not even see it. That’s when I start messing with your mind as I think about it, story telling is a nicer and more common way to think about it. The subject, what you’ve always have to establish in your photograph, in this case are the clouds releasing their snow on the Mono Hills (actually extinct volcanoes). To make the clouds appear much bigger than they really are, I included those peaks far of in the distance.
The bigger the peaks seem, the bigger the storm so that’s what I focus in on. Both images were taken with the D4 and 70-200VR2 (using the D4 Landscape Profile which I’m really liken) with only two slight changes between the two photos. The top image was taken from the ground at 120mm with the cloud not fully casting a cloud on the foreground. The bottom image was taken standing on a bench at 155mm four minutes later when the foreground was in shade.
We’re talking real subtle changes in taking the two images but to me there is a big visual difference between the two images. In the top photo, those two peaks appear more like they really are in life, kinda small. The bottom frame, those two peaks look much bigger then they really are. That in combination with shooting just a tad tighter makes the clouds, the subject, appear much more menacing and that’s the story telling. Both images were finished the same in ACR and then Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4 > Detail Enhancer on just the clouds. So the moral of all of this is take the extra second and use those simple put important elements to give your landscape scale and the visual impact will be much greater!
Jun 6, 2012 | Landscape Photography
That’s all that’s needed to communicate in a landscape photo you’ve got big clouds. Here’s an example. This is Mono Lake a couple of weeks ago when a storm blew through. The clouds are the subject and I want to say they fill the sky. The slope around Mono Lake to the south has a real slant to it and with the light falling the way it was, it is really dark. The lake itself though is a silver sliver. These are color photographs, not B&W. So I prefer the bottom image with just a sliver of lake and then the slope supporting the rest of the photo. I’ve got some more examples of what I’m talking about I’ll post later.
May 31, 2012 | Landscape Photography
I’ve been up to my eyeballs with office work, yuck, so treated myself to some time off finishing images from this past weekend at Mono Lake. I wanted to finish the images to enhance the storm more so went into OnOne Software new Perfect Suite 6.1 for some fun. This really have done a really nice job with this update with more filters, layers and opacity on the preview. Being able to add filters together doesn’t hurt either! So what we have here, the top image I used Daily Vitamin, a filter I’m getting to really like. The next image is a combination of Magic Ocean (50%) and Texture Booster. The bottom image is simply Magic City. All of them are finished off with Borders > Black Key Frame.
One of the hardest things about landscape photography I think is learning the post so when you go click, you already know what you can do and how your want to finish an image in post. On those really great shoots, everything falls into place so you don’t have to do a single thing to finish the photograph. Often, especially when you only have one shot at an image, you have to finish some aspect of the photo. Knowing the possibilities of post give you a broader vision when you go click. If you’ve not tried OneOne Perfect Suite 6.1, download it and try it free for 30days. But here’s the warning, once you try it, you’ll buy it. Have fun with your photography and you will be rewarded!
May 29, 2012 | Landscape Photography
This past weekend was our first Mono Lake Weekend and the luck was with us! We had a freak winter storm come through the Sierra on Memorial Weekend leaving not only snow on the ground but great clouds floating past. To say Mono Lake has been photographed a few times is an understatement. The goal is to make the uncommon of the common and when you have nasty weather, you have an opportunity to do just that. If nothing else with such weather, you sure not going to be bored! Typical Moose style, we were at the lake at 04:30 to greet the day. It was a mighty dark and gray day at the beginning with a wind putting the waves to work on Mono Lake. With that mix, early morning, clouds and wind, I dialed in some settings into the camera. On the hope we’d have some sun for color at sunrise, I set the WB to Cloudy. With the dramatic clouds, I put the 18AF on the D4 and with the wind, I closed the lens down to f/22 and ISO to L1 for the slowest possibly shutter speed. The sun never appeared so the Cloudy WB was a bust. The 18AF definitely brought a drama to the dynamics of the scene and the slow shutter speed captured a flow to the lake’s surface that I like.
With everything working so well except for WB, processing was pretty clear cut. One thing I do in processing a file is follow the same logic that I made the photo by. The subject was the storm, a rather all encompassing subject but has certain elements heightening it. Opening the file in ACR, the first thing I did was remove the blue color cast caused by no sun. Simply grabbed the White Balance tool in ACR and clicked on a white. Then while in ACR, I used the Graduated tool to bring the drama in the clouds to the forefront so the eye is pushed down in the frame. Then in PS CS-6 I ran Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4 > Tonal Contrast and Detail Extractor. It was cold, it was windy, it was windy and it was spectacular!
