Jul 19, 2016 | Landscape Photography
At 04:00, forty folks were at the door ready to board the bus for our morning shoot. I can’t remember the last time we shared such a gorgeous morning with so many folks! We totally avoided the heat and had as you can see, a memorable sunrise. We were out in the desert outside of Vegas until the light got hard then headed inside for a few hours of digital darkroom time. The folks were real troopers! Hard to stay awake listening to Photoshop lessons when you started the day at 0400, but they hung in. Can’t thank all you folks who joined in enough. You made it a great start to the day and Photoshop World for us!
And just a reminder … those at Photoshop World this week … I have FOUR, new Moose Peterson / Mind Shift Photopacks to giveaway! There will be one at each of my classes, Wildlife, Aviation and Landscape and one at the closing ceremonies. And to find out how you can win one, you’ll have to see the entire classs :-) I hope YOU get to take one home!
Jul 7, 2016 | Landscape Photography
We’d just finished flying, had dodge in and out of clouds about 30min out but landed to clear skies. The sun was slowly going down but sunset is after 10:30pm so speed is relative. One of our favorite past times from our locale is watching the skies. Ya, there are a bunch of planes in the air, a Piper PA-11 & Cub, A Taylor Craft and Aeronca, but its against the clouds that makes watching them so entertaining. Off to the west they are slowly building, but behind us we really can’t see from where we’re sitting. We get up to watch the activity flyin about when we see the top of a tower growing behind us. It’s massive!
I was so comfortable sitting there. Sharon said “let’s walk up the hill” which, well … I was so comfortable. I got up and we started to make the walk up the hill when I saw the cloud had grown even larger. So i went back down to the car and grabbed the D5 / 14-24AFS and started back up the hill. The PA-11 was still out flying (Jake getting in a hour of flight training) as we headed up, the cloud getting bigger and bigger. Finally we crested the hill to see the site you see here. The cloud was freakin massive! The PA-11 is in front of it in both these photos but you can’t see it, the cloud is that big! Now comes the photographic issue, show where it is amongst the gorgeous fields of the vast North Dakota landscape or, show just how big it is? I only had the one lens so I shot at 14mm and then at 36mm (HSC). I love the two images but wondered is another lens would bring a different story. We boogied back down the hill and jumped in the truck but too late, by the time we got back, the cloud had released its energy and was just a dot on the horizon. I’m still wondering which would be the most powerful of an image, size or place?
Jun 20, 2016 | Landscape Photography
Light is everything, everything in a landscape photograph. All too often though, the moment we happen upon a landscape we like, the light just isn’t there. But because we are there and all the efforts it took to be there, we click away anyways. It’s really not that different from that hail Marry pass. But unlike the hail Marry, we have options and the biggest option we have in our playbook is time!
This is a simple illustration of my point. The side of this old miners cabin when we first walked up is what you see in the top image. The light was a little contrasty but more importantly, not very expressive. But I was there so I took that click. I had no real thoughts about the image other than it was a “I was here” photo. In my book, about the worse kind of photo. But we stayed just five more minutes prevuing the scene. Then the light radically changed, it had character and therefore, gave the side of the cabin and more importantly, the window life. And that’s all it took, just five minutes. So when looking for the one thing, technique, gear, idea that might improve your photography, remember the best improvement comes with, time.
May 24, 2016 | Landscape Photography
When the heavens put on a show, it’s one of the great events that can disappear as fast as it appears. Bringing that fleeting moment of majesty to life is the challenge because of in large part of its scale. When the tops of those clouds are 30,000′ or higher, how do you say “freakin huge” in the small medium of our camera? And if you have a storm as part of that story, bringing that power of nature to life just adds to the mix of complexity. There are lots and lots of ways to start to communicate this starting at the bottom and working your way to the top!
You gotta have some scale in the photo, something that permits the eye to quickly saw, “dang, that’s big!” Photographers understand this but tend to put too much landscape in the bottom of the frame. At the same time, often the landscape is not as interesting as the heavens themselves. The sliver is even more important in these cases so it doesn’t detract from the majesty above. Now the top photo, the landscape sliver was too evenly lit so I added “topography” as I show in my class. So when those heavens open up and take your stare up, bringing it all into the viewfinder and give the eye an anchor with just a sliver.
May 5, 2016 | Landscape Photography
click to see large pano
One of the great aspects of storm chasing is seeing parts of our amazing country you otherwise wouldn’t see. The Caverns of Sonora is a great example of what I mean. It is the coolest cavern I’ve toured but didn’t know it even existed! The sad thing is that now I know about it, I probably wouldn’t travel just to see it but on a road trip, it’s a must do stop! There are tons of great treasures like this you see while your storm chasing that make the chase just that much sweeter!
You go down if I remember correctly nearly 200 vertical feet on the tour. That’s a lot of stairs cause you gotta come back up them to get out. At first, the cavern isn’t all that impressive and then all of a sudden you turn a corner and the magic appears, room after room after room! The natural beauty, the sculptures created by water and minerals is staggering! The lighting is provided by the lights for the trail which is done pretty well for our purposes (I shot in AWB the whole time) The one challenge in photographing the caverns is providing a sense of scale. You can’t touch nothin nor put anything in the frame like a coin to give you any sense of scale. I went down with just the D5 / 14-24AFS and shot the whole time at ISO 3200 and either f/2.8 or f/4. The top pano was the best way I could think of to give you a sense of scale as each individual photo of the pano was taken at 24mm so when you add that all three up, you get a sense of the physical size of this one room in the caverns. So two lessons come from this, the first is, this country has treasures everywhere and the second lesson, we need to take the time to smell the roses to treasure them all!
May 4, 2016 | Landscape Photography
The sun and the moon suck photographers in like moths to a flame. There are lots of reasons for this, all very valid. Often though, that memorizing glowing ball tends to fog the mind and the final image, well, just isn’t as memorizing as the real McCoy. Has that ever happened to you? It happens to many and they wonder why. The answer might be simpler than you might think. It could be simply you included items in the scene that were not needed. Now this might not be the case all the time, but here’s an example from a shoot on top of Mt Scott to illustrate my point.
Shooting long (D5 / 300PF) the subject was pretty clear cut, the sun. But often we’re told we need to have something else in the frame. This might be true if the photo of the sun sucks. Why might it suck? Often it’s because the way the light and color are distributed in the frame. When you’re shooting over a scene full of humidity though, the dispersal of light and color is pretty darn cool. I was shooting with a friend who, like many, had been sucked into the sun and had incorporated a number of elements into the frame because they were “interesting.” The top frame uses one of the element they had found. Like this post, I posed the question and had them move over and took the bottom photo. They looked on their LCD and said, “That’s gorgeous!” So next time you have one of those magical spheres in the viewfinder, ask yourself the simple question, “Can’t it be alone?”
