Dream Tomorrow, Live Today, Cherish Yesterday

One of those days

Canon 5D Mark II, 15mm F/2.8 Fisheye, f/9.0, 1/250, iso 100

My wife and I recently took a day off to have lunch out and just go for a drive up in the snow. No specific destination.  Brought my camera gear, of course. It was really a beaut day. "Chamber of Commerce" weather as they say. 

I took about 50 shots. I was pretty excited, the scenery was really nice. I was trying for "snow forms." Nice organic contours, maybe just a few plants, that kind of thing. 

When I got home and viewed them in Lightroom however, nothing really appealed that much to me. I tried hard to like some of them, but none of them were calling to me.  So I let it go for a week or so.

This morning I looked through them again, and this one seemed to have some promise. It's another situation where I'm kind of ambivalent and don't know if the image will resonate with anyone or not.

We had driven around Donner Lake, and were back as far as you can go. I had great cell coverage so I decided to call The Cheerleader to see how he was doing. We had a nice but brief chat. While talking with him I noticed this stand of trees off to the side of the road.  After we ended the call, I thought this seemed like a fisheye opportunity, so I mounted that lens and just walked down the road.

In Lightroom I began with a preset called Cinema Cold that definitely punched it up a bit. I made a few other adjustments, cloned out some power lines, and there we are.  I picked the title because it's one of those days when I'm unsure about my image.  I didn't think about The Cheerleader angle until I was already into post processing, so I suppose that is what is actually behind the selection of this image of all the others I took that day.

Oh. I also used the LR GND (Graduated Neutral Density) adjustment on this shot, that's what brought out the blue sky.  Since Toni asked about this the other day, let's have a brief tutorial on the continue page, shall we?

Friday Funnies - How to get up early

First Light

Most of us serious photographers know that the best light is early in the morning or late in the evening. We have all kinds of tricks to work around this, but there's no escaping the basic fact.  And it can sure be hard to be in position when the sun comes up, am I right?

That means getting up practically in the middle of the night, getting the clothes and gear, doing all we gotta do, probably driving to a location.  What about the coffee? Gotta do that.

In fact, the image above was a "second day attempt" because on the first day we tried it, my daughter and I missed the sunrise by like 10 minutes.  I think we left the condo (in Mammoth Lakes CA back in 2002) at 5 am, and we needed to leave at like 4:45 am.

So after this frustration, I fixed all of that. Watch the instructional video below to see how I did it:

Photographer Alarm Clock

Now I have NO PROBLEM getting out of bed. And, everyone else in the house is awake to wish me good luck on my morning photo adventure. I really do appreciate that and I know they like the chance to see me off.  Since putting together this alarm clock, I find that coffee is even optional on some days. Once I did wet the bed when it went off though, so do be careful.

Tune back in tomorrow, and I'll show you one of the pictures we took that morning, that is hanging on quite a few walls now, including in Sydney Australia.  Also, on Friday's, of course, the comment button below is completely free of charge! So comment away!

Learning Photography

While there are no doubt some "natural image makers" who are just born with the knack, I think most of us have to work hard learning to create compelling images. There is a big difference between taking a picture vs creating a compelling image.

Beginners often want to know what kind of camera you have, what ISO are you shooting, that kind of thing. Those that have spent time practicing know that your brain is the most important piece of photographic gear!  You have to train your mind in this art.

Over the years, I would say my best source of information is the web.  Photographer's sites, and sites where people share and critique photos such as www.photo.net and  www.fredmiranda.com have been very helpful to me.  On sites like these, you'll always find people with more skills than you, and you can get inspired and learn from their images.

After the web (and of course besides getting out shooting!), I find photography books to be quite helpful.  I probably have 50 or so photographic books.

I recently came across Creative Nature and Outdoor Photography by fellow Northern California photographer Brenda Tharp (www.brendatharp.com).   Here is a link to the book on Amazon. For me, a great photography book has images on nearly every page - excellent ones.  Many books are trying to help out people of all levels ("get a sturdy tripod!"), I prefer those that focus on images, learning how to see and challenging me.  If the pages move me to say "I want to go make an image like that!" then I know it's a good book for me.

Brenda's book takes you through the properties of light.  Might sound simple, but mastery of light is what all photography is about.  It has quality, color, direction, intensity.  Beyond light, composition is another vital element of great images. The book covers perspective, scale, dominance of elements, proportion, rhythm and more.

What separates her book from many others is that each concept or technique is shown with several excellent images representing the concept.  Between the words and the images, its clear what she means by "Expressing the Mood" and other subtle concepts. 

Here are a few images from Brenda's book and website:

 

Lines and Color



Expressing the Mood


Capturing Gesture

Most aspects of nature photography (and a fair amount on people as well) are covered, including several I haven't thought of or seen before.  There's a great section on evaluating your progress as well.

The challenge, my friends, is learning to see, being creative and continually working on each of the skills required to discover, compose and render compelling images.  As this book is helping me, I highly recommend it to help you get there too.