May 20, 2020 | Landscape Photography
The skies lit up last night here in Montana with some great lightning. It’s coming on summer and with them, afternoon thunderstorms which mean great light shows. When the skies start barking, I’m often running to the truck with a camera in hand to chase the storm. These days though, it’s a whole lot easier to work with lightning with Miops! This simple, small, and incredibly effective tool permits you to shoot lightning any time of day with any rig with ease. You can even update the firmware via the mobile app (Mobile App is the why to go!). Charged via a USB port, the Miops simply can’t get easier, well, at least the shooting part. I like to grab the Z7 / Z24-70f2.8 / Miops and sped down the road. The real challenge is finding a spot with a great 360 vista because lightning can be in all directions. To be completely honest with you, I saw much better lightning than I captured but I was having so much fun, photography kinda took a back seat. But the good thing for Miops and its mobile app, it kept shooting even if I wasn’t paying all the attention I should to it.
May 13, 2020 | Landscape Photography
Tuolumne Meadow
captured by D3x / 24-70f2.8
With summer heat comes summer afternoon thunderstorms. And with those come great photographic opportunities. Get yourself an app like Dark Skies and tap on the Map function to see how and where the afternoon thunderheads are forming (hit the Play button to see the convection). Then look at a map to find topography that brings the last little bit of drama to a photo and head out. Take a variety of focal lengths from Z14-30 to 180-400VR providing yourself lots of flexibility to work the potential storm. Situate yourself so you are looking either west or west by northwest so you can take advantage of the light. Watch your white balance shooting on Cloudy / 6000k or higher to capture all the subtle shades of red, pink, and orange and underexpose to give them colors punch. Then include something in the frame to give scale making those thunderheads look as powerful as they really are. It’s a great time to get a little wet, a little adventurous, and a lot rewarded chasing clouds!
Apr 17, 2020 | Landscape Photography
Cabin fever, landscape photographers are really feeling it judging from the emails of the past week. Getting out on the road, starting the day with a vast landscape stretching before you and then the celebratory breakfast with friends recounting the wonders seen and memories made. I know of no substitution for this marvelous experience other than the real thing. Good thing it’s not too far off in our future. In the meantime, can you sharpen your landscape photographic skills without leaving your home? I think you can and it starts with stretching your imagination!
I selected two photos I took standing inside and shooting out a window to illustrate my thought. One is with a very wide angle lens, 14mm and the other shot with a long lens, 200mm. The goal, of course, is to tell a visual story about the landscape and that comes from inside you. The challenge comes from taking what YOU see every day and making a photo that others don’t see every day and sharing that experience with them. You might see that tree all the time, how can you share that tree which has come to mean something to you, with others? Does it require just light, clouds, a bird, a swing, what? You might see that incredibly small detail of a weather vane all the time, but what light, depth of focus, what focal brings the viewer of your photo in intimate contact with it? This very simple yet very difficult self-assignment of your home landscape are lessons you can easily use once you get back to that vast landscape you long for. Because, in reality, it all starts with the landscape our the window!
Mar 24, 2020 | Landscape Photography
Palouse Church
captured by Z7 / Z14-30
Every time you put your camera up to your eye, you gotta ask yourself, “What’s the subject?” Without that key element in the photograph, it is really, really, really hard to then arrange the rest of the elements to tell your story. With a photo like this of this lonely church on The Palouse, deciding what’s the subject can be a challenge. You might think it’s the church itself. But then you see the clouds and then you’re vision is brought down around again to the church. What is the subject?
Palouse Church
captured by Z7 / Z14-30
Is it possible the subject isn’t a specific element but all them wrapped up together to express an emotion? If you think an emotion you are invoking can be the subject, then how can you tell its story? Can shooting in color or B&W be a way to arrange the elements to instill that emotion that is the subject of your photograph? I think so, I do that all the time as I think emotion can be a subject. The challange is that some aspects of photography we’re comfortable with take a backstage and an aspect of photography a lot of photographers are very uncomfortable with, emotion, is center stage.
Mar 20, 2020 | Landscape Photography
Weber House
captured by Z7 / Z24-70f2.8
The Palouse has an incredibly rich history that you can see in its people, land, and buildings. They are all very independent, strong and very much part of the fabric of the region. There are hundreds of old barns and homes that dot the vast landscape and I think I’ve stopped and marveled at least at half of them. I continually return to ones I’ve photographed before, check out ones that I would love to photograph but didn’t before and search for new ones. No matter what, every trip to The Palouse is always filled with old treasures.
Old Barn
captured by Z7 / Z24-70f2.8
This trip to The Palouse, I had for the first time the Z and its very fun #17 Charcoal setting in my arsenal. Not B&W, not Sepia, #17 I think of as a “tintype” kind of look. While perhaps a tad older than the structures themselves, this look I think brings a little something extra to the story I want to tell about this part of The Palouse history. You might notice that both are backlit and might be wondering why. That’s because the photo for me isn’t of just a building, but a home that’s home on The Palouse. The land is as much of the story of the buildings as were those who once lived in them. Now in my vivid imagination, I have big backstories to the hows and whys of these buildings that to keep the story short, I sum up as, little house on, The Palouse.
Mar 5, 2020 | B&W Photography, Landscape Photography
Wind River, WY
captured by Z7 / 180-400VR
I’m up in WY working with Rocky Mtn Bighorn Sheep, so why am I posting snow clouds? There are 1200 heads of sheep in these hills but with the tremendous winds that have been blowing for the past week, most are hunkered down and we’ve only had a band of thirty to work with (which has been great!). With their routine of coming down and going back up during the morning hours and the light on the slope, the late afternoon we tend to turn our lenses to the landscape. It’s gorgeous so the challange is not the landscape photograph, but which landscape to focus in on. There are a ton of options. This afternoon, we decided to point our lenses towards the floatin snow … them clouds that were racing by.
Wind River, WY
captured by Z7 / Z24-70f2.8
The clouds would go by at great speed and as they floated by, they were simple, gorgeous puffies. As they came up to the mountain tops, they pilled up and that’s when they began to release their snow. To take in the landscape and speak of that snow load floating by, I went wide at 24mm. To share the release of snow, I went in tight at 400mm. Bringing out the drama in the clouds and the landscape, B&W for me was the obvious choice. And if there was a wind option on the web so as you read this you could feel that fierce wind, I’d have that turned on. Hopefully, it’s coming through the photographs!
