Aug 18, 2017 | Landscape Photography
Our good friend Michael arranged a photo walk while we were in London with the Nikon Users Group. It was a great day, 9 miles along the canals of London. Many don’t even know they exist. Built back in the 1920s to move commerce around the country (there are over 300 miles of canals), today they are home to many as well as a path back through time.
These boats are actually home morred in place for a while until the move to another location, different scenery. Every manner of ingenuity is used in making these boats a home. That includes from tomato gardens to solar panel to sun decks, all in the space of a postage stamp. It was a photographic rich target that just kept on providing amazing possibilities!
Knowing how busy such a locale could be, I went fast in lens selections. Attached to the Df might have been the 24f1.4, 50f1.4 or 105f1.4. All three lenses used to create these images, all shot at f/1.4. Want to thank all 30 folks who joined us, it was simply a marvelous day!!!
Aug 15, 2017 | Landscape Photography
It was simply a gorgeous night to walk the Thames with friends and family! How do you incorporate the delightful temp, the sea air smell, the sounds of people enjoying the outdoors and of course, the view, in a photograph? What you see above is how I went about that challenge. Shooting with the Df / 24f1.4 hand-held, I got up high so I could have them in the foreground but not a dominant silhouette. I then crank the ISO up to 3200 (even though shooting at f/1.4) and shot as the kayakers floated by. I used the lights of the bridge and tower to move the eye through the frame and the folks in the foreground for scale and story. The rest I hope the viewer fills in with their imagination.
Aug 14, 2017 | Landscape Photography
Jolly Ol England has been just that this past week! Not really sure where they get it from, the kids are into history as much as the old man so we’ve been visiting some really cool English Heritage Sites. This was the first because it was one of the oldest. Blackbury Camp is one of the really early “forts” created for defenders using ROCKS they would throw at their enemy. They dug to create a “ditch” in front of the mound they were making from the ditch spoils. Back in the day, which was 4000bc, the location was completely barren of trees. Now the hilltop is a gorgeous forest.
So for me, here’s the deal when it comes to traveling, family and taking pictures. Being a history buff, I wanted shots of the site while at the same time the photos saying what a peaceful, quiet and gorgeous locale out in the middle of England. When a local showed up to walk his dogs and we said hello, he said: “You’re not from around here!” “Not many locals find this place, how did you?” And that’s really the point of the photographs I take while on holiday. They are simple, clean photos of the experience to capture the memory so when I or anyone in the family who was with me looks at the photo, they will remember the afternoon we walked through Blackbury Camp.
Aug 7, 2017 | Landscape Photography
There are many ways to give our one-dimensional landscape photos visual depth. One quick and easy of doing it is by including the sun. Just knowing this though isn’t your salvation because including the sun has its own ying and yang. The first thing to think about is the sun will be the brightest element in the frame. The eye will go to it with missile speed and lock onto it. Now that can be good, that could be bad. The difference between the two is the visual path you create to and from the sun in your frame. This is the hard part because the power of the sun is great but not so great it can’t be used in your favor. That’s the challenge and at the same time how you bring visual depth to your photo. There are two examples here of that happening but in two totally different ways and there are much more, probably infinite the possibilities. Here’s what you gotta watch out for in this process.
The sun poses its own rules when you include it. First is its brightness which will always extend the range of light in your frame beyond its five stops. There are many solutions to this from Split Grad Filter, underexposure, and post to HDR. Next, there is the flare from the sun itself to the sun reflecting off the dirt on your front element/filter. Lastly is any type of airborne interference between the lens and the sun. Getting the starburst is really simple, just close your lens down to its smallest aperture (and avoid looking directly at the sun with your eye). Some lenses create better sunbursts then others and to determine which is the best in your bag, simply go out and shoot a test. The last thing to ponder in this equation is where to put the sun in the frame. Because of its power, once you solve all the rest you can literally place the sun anywhere you want in the frame. The trick to that is placing it where it will pull the eye through the frame over and over again. When you do that you create the visua depth and that’s our goal. We want to move the eye thru the frame!
Aug 1, 2017 | Wildlife Photography
Willow Ptarmigan
captured D5 / 800mm
Well, we call them Jim Bob, the rest of the world calls them Willow Ptarmigan (the Alaska State Bird). When it’s mating season this largish bird simply turns stupid. While not the brightest bird in the flock to start with (some hunt them by simply throwing rocks at them), when there is sex in the air, all thought goes to one thing, attracting a mate. Many years ago we had one basically fly into the window of the van while in pursuit of another male it felt was trespassing on its territory. Every since that moment, we’ve affectionately called them Jim Bob.
Willow Ptarmigan
captured D5 / 800mm
What you see here is their plumage as it changes from their all white winter garb to the brown summer garb. As they molt out their winter white you get the variants you see here. It is amazing how well this chicken size bird can hide behind just one piece of grass even with their plumage not completely swapped out. And when there are females flying about looking for a mate, the males simply turn stupid which for the wildlife photographer is a golden opportunity!
Willow Ptarmigan
captured D5 / 800mm
With their concentration elsewhere, getting up close is just a matter of time. At first, when you approach, they are like many birds and move away. But once you wait them out, perhaps just five or ten minutes, you can slowly move in to get the photograph you desire. I was shooting with the D5 / 800mm which permitted me to eliminate unwanted elements in the background while containing those elements I wanted. The time it took to get from the image at the top to the one at the bottom was about twenty minutes of slowly moving up. There was four of us working this one bird and we took turns moving forward five to eight feet at a time until finally, I was at my MFD of 16 feet from this male (photo below). Once I got my photos, I moved away just as slowly and an hour after we started shooting Jim Bob, we all had moved back to the vehicle and he hadn’t moved a stitch. But them, that’s why we call him affectionately, Jim Bob.
Willow Ptarmigan
captured D5 / 800mm
Jul 12, 2017 | Landscape Photography
Mammoth Flats
captured by D500 / 10-24AFS processed with my “Procontrast”
It’s SO cool to see so much excitement and curiosity about MacPhun’s Luminar! The Windows Beta should be available shortly to all and right now only the Mac version is available for purchase. Knowing Nik was going, I’ve been using Luminar since last October. In that time, I have been working to recreate in Luminar my favorites in Nik which is not really fair to Luminar because, in many ways, it does a better job (for example with the following Procontrast Preset, I can tweek a whole of small details you can’t in Nik and that’s huge!). For example, I’m posting here for the first time my Preset for what I call Procontrast. Procontrast is a Nik Color Efex filter I’ve used since I was part of the team that developed it. It is essential to my workflow! There is no easy or clean way at this time to share my Luminar Presets like I have in the past for Nik recipes. So for right now, watch Scott Kelby’s class on how to make a preset and then you can plug these numbers into it to get Moose’s CURRENT number he likes for Procontrast (I say current cause it will evolve).
Moose’s Procontrast as of 07.12.17
Understand this is a pluggin inside of Photoshop. In my workflow, it replaces Nik (it is not how I process a Raw file). My only complaint with Luminar is that in my workflow working with Smart Objects in Photoshop, it just doesn’t automatically reapply the filter I go in and out of the Smart Object, I have to click Apply which in reality is no biggie! Will I share more? Of course, I have no secrets and once I’m TOTALLY satisfied with my creation and know they will work for others I will post them.
