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 11, 2016 | Wildlife Photography
I’m up at Magee Marsh, OH and even with 55 degree temps and the sky spitting at me, the sound of spring is everywhere! Jake had come up here a couple of years back and said, “Dad, you gotta go” and so I’m here. He was so right! Had a marvelous day in this new Shang-ra-la seeing some gorgeous birds sing the blessings of spring. What a day!
What species did I see? Lost track to be honest with you. Spent a heck of a lot of time with Yellow Warblers (top photo) cause even though common in my backyard, these are wearing their spring best and singing up a storm and point blank range. I had really good birds as well like this Prothonotary Warbler which stuck around for quite a while. With these small subjects and travel being restricted to a boardwalk, I went out with the big gun, D5 / 800mm. With the over saturated light, shot with no flash, at zero exposure comp. Only out the ordinary thing I did was raise the ISO to 400. What a great experience … loved it!
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?”
Apr 29, 2016 | Landscape Photography
You’re not looking at a tornado in either photo. Simply put, it was too cold to produce the needed rotation for a funnel to drop down. We went the bed last night full of hope, the models were looking good for at least one tornado in the area. We had spend the day yesterday driving to stage for today and we were in the best spot, mother nature just decided not to play.
The top flow certainly looks like it might be a funnel, but it had no rotation. It was moisture simply getting out of Dodge. It was taken about two hours before the bottom photo. The size of this supercell was really pretty staggering! Finding a place where we could get a clean shot was a challenge and when we finally did, there was nothing to include for scale. But it took us nearly 30min of driving to get out to this vantage point, it was that big! The light colored mass in the lower left is rain and hail, 3″ hail falling back in there. While we chased the cells for hours, we never saw any funnel but sure did see some amazing clouds. mtc.
Apr 27, 2016 | Landscape Photography
This is coming to you from the very bumpy back seat of the van as we scream across KS & OK on our way to TX. Day 2 ended with 428 more miles on the speedometer but no twisters in the can. While the day started with the promise of storms, there were no promises of twisters. In storm chasing terms, the storms were messy. That’s to say that while they had energy, they weren’t organized, no rotation to create the twister.
We had no problem though finding wx, big wx! While we tried to get out to shoot, we would only have a five minute window before the rain would catch us. Not being a very workable solution, we turned to shooting from the van as we chased cell to sell to sell. Shooting with the D5 / 24-70VR, the trick was to hold it close to the window to avoid reflections, look ahead for subjects / obstacles and then fire off at least five frames to get sharp images with the desired foreground. In the few hours of shooting like this, I came up with quite a few images that I like. Well, before I throw up form typing with the notebook under my chin as we drive, I’m going to close this entry. mt.
