Nature Light Photo

Panorama – Painted Hills in John Day Fossil Bed NM

Painted Hills in John Day Fossil Bed NM, OR

I spent three days exploring the John Day Fossil Bed National Monument and really tried to capture the feeling of the area in a singe shot. I couldn’t without using a panorama.

I think it captures the hills and expanse of the area in one image. I used five images and Ps CS3 to stitch the images together. I think I could have done a better job with the blending in the sky.

The image was taken with a Nikon D70 and a Nikkor 18-70 3.5-4.5 lens. The EXIF data is unavailable.

Work Smart, Workflow

I’ve been hearing a lot about workflow in the last few months. I’ve been to meetings/get togethers where it was topic of the night. I’ve had discussions about it with fellow photographers. And I’ve read about it on blogs and heard about it on podcasts. Workflow is a big deal in photography.

The purpose of a workflow is to simplify your life, save time, and do things in a manner that allows you to work in an efficient manner. By repeating the same routine over and over, you eliminate the unneeded steps and you decrease the chance of leaving out important steps.

Everyone has their own workflow. It evolves, and continues to evolve, over time as each person determines what their needs are and what they want to do with their photography. In the beginning, I think most people are all over the place, trying new things, incorporating different ideas, and throwing out inefficient steps. Eventually, they get down to a solid workflow.

What follows is my workflow. I don’t recommend it to everyone because we have different goals and needs, but I think a lot of it is valid for most workflows and most people.

My workflow starts before I even click the shutter. I check the camera settings for white balance, ISO, metering mode, program, focus settings, etc. This is also where I determine whether I am going to shoot in RAW or JPEG. I shoot RAW 99% of the time, but if I am doing a shoot where I am going to take a LOT of pictures and I don’t plan on processing them, I shoot is JPEG. For instance, if I am shooting theater or a graduation, I will shoot in JPEG so that I can download the images and get them right onto my SmugMug site.

As I fill up my cards, I put them in my Think Tank Pixel Pocket Rocket. Blank cards are in each section so that the white side is showing and as I use them, I replace them so that the red side is out. White for empty, red for full.

After I have shot the images, create a folder on my hard drive for each shoot. I am less concerned with the date and more with the subject, so my naming system is something like “Yosemite 11.05.18″ Yosemite would be the subject shot in 2011 on May 18th. I put the date in that format so if I have more than one Yosemite folder, they are in chronological order. (You have to put the zero in front of the five for the month.)

I then copy the images from each card to the specified folder. I do this by selecting all images, copying them, and then pasting them into the folder. This may take a little while if I have multiple cards, but I’m not in a rush. Once they have been uploaded to the hard drive, I return them to the Pixel Pocket Rocket with the red side out, but turned sideways to show me that they have been copied, but the card hasn’t been formatted.

That usually ends the first day.

On the second day, I import them into Lightroom and key word them. My keywording is done all in Lr also. My key words include the photographer, the year and month, the place, and then specific information about the subject of each image.

Once the images have been uploaded, imported, and keyworded, I begin to cull the images. I edit in, not out. By this I mean that I pick the ones I like, my top images and flag them. I don’t worry about the ones I don’t like, they get no action or energy put into their direction. I look for sharpness and focus, subject, composition, and just general appeal. If I like the image, I hit the “P” key to flag it. I can cull 1,000 images in about 30 minutes. Left hand is on the “P” and “U” keys (pick and unpick) and the right hand is on the arrow keys to move back and forth between the images.

On the third day, I start working with my images, manipulating them so that they reflect my vision of the image when I took it. I work with them in the following order: cropping, white balance, exposure, highlights, fill light, shadows, details (cloning, dust spot removal, dodge and burn, etc.), and finally variance and clarity. If the image is a panorama or HDR, then I run it through the appropriate program before starting with the above.

Finally, I select the image I want and upload them to Flickr and/or my SmugMug site.

Yes, this takes three days, but not the entire day. It averages about an hour each time except for the final image manipulation which can take quiet some time depending on how many images I am working on.

I find that by breaking up the workflow as I do, it allows me to look at each image a couple of times and sometimes what I thought I liked, I don’t; further culling the images down.

If I have a shoot that I have to get out for any particular reason, I am capable of doing the above in one night. But it is a long night.

Again, that’s my workflow and it evolved so that I could spend more time shooting and less time sitting in the dark staring at the computer. Yes, that can be fun, but I don’t want it to be the center of my photography.

Pre-Sunrise South Tufa Panorama at Mono Lake

Honestly, I have not discovered a better place to be at sunrise than the south tufas at Mono Lake, CA. The light is magical. The formations are inspiring. And the location is remote, yet accessible. I am sure that there are places that are better, but I haven’t discovered them yet.

Because of the situation, it is easy to get a good shot, but difficult to get one that brings you the whole scene. This shot does that. It isn’t a true panorama in the sense that it was taken with a wide angle lens and cropped, but it is still in the panorama format and it shows the birds, both in flight and on the ground.

I took this before the sun was over the horizon, but the birds were still active. I was trying to give a sense of the movement of the birds and used a long shutter speed to blur their movement. Those wispy blurs above the tufas are the birds in flight. By using a long shutter speed and my tripod, the moving birds are blurred, but the rest of the scene is still sharp.  In Lightroom, I tried to bring out the details of the tufas, but leave the dark atmosphere of the time of day present by using fill light to lighten up the tufas just a bit.

The shot was taken with my Nikon D300 and a 18-70 3.5-4.5 lens at 31mm. The camera was set at and ISO of 200 and a relatively slow shutter speed of 1/5 of a second to blur the birds, but the aperture was small (f11) in order to increase the depth of field as much as possible.

Tufa Panorama

You can see more images from Mono Lake by visiting my Mono Lake gallery.

Please feel free to leave a comment and tell me what you think.

Panoramas

After spending the weekend at the Morro Bay Photo Expo and listening to George Lepp, I have decided to really embrace some of his ideas. One of his ideas was to produce panoramas.

A panorama is a series of pictures put together that produces an end product that is longer (or taller) than can be produced with a regular camera.

Below are a three examples of how a panorama can be used to show a scene.

The first was taken at Zabriski Point in Death Valley. I got there about 45 minutes before sunrise and there were already a bunch of photographers there waiting. I thought the scene would make an interesting image, so I set up my tripod and did a quick  series of images that brought both the expansive view and the crowd into perspective. Simply shooting and cropping the image would never have been able to produce the quality of image that is here. (The irony is that it produced such a large file size that I can’t upload it to Smugmug.  Oops!)

Zabriski Point Panorama

The second was taken at the Painted Hills Unit of The John Day Fossil Bed National Monument. There are many images that show the hills, but none that I have seen that show the entire vista like this one.

Painted Hills Panorama

The last was taken late last week on the way to school. On a clear day, you can see the San Gabriel Mountains. On this day, the sunrise was had a nice affect on the mountains so I pulled over on a small rise on the way to work and, again, shot a series of shots. Ok, the light post in the middle kind of takes away from the image, but you get the idea about how a panorama can be done on the spur of the moment.

Van Buren Panorama

Please feel free to leave a comment and tell me what you think.

Fossil Falls, CA

I took a trip last weekend to the Eastern Sierra Nevada to shoot the fall colors. My first night was spent in the Fossil Falls campground on 395, just south of Olancha.

Fossil Falls is a lave flow that used to have a river flowing through it. The result is some beautiful, worn lava formations that can be very photogenic.

The only issue with shooting there is that there are huge dynamic range possiblities or problems. The black lava against the blue sky or against clouds can create some metering concerns. Most of the problems, if you have exposed correctly, can be taken care of in post processing by recovering the highlights or adding some fill light.

Fossil Falls Lava Flows

Fossil Falls

Fossil Falls with the Sierra Nevada in the Background

Lee Vining Trees

During my last trip to the Mono Lake area, I stayed at the Mono Vista RV park. No, I don’t own an RV, but I needed a

shower and they have good campsites and warm showers.

While there relaxing, I looked up and saw these trees. At first I didn’t think anything about them, but then I started thinking that there was a nice texture there, but I didn’t know how to capture it so that it would show the feeling I had while there.

Then I remembered that I have been working on trying to see more images in black and white. BAM! How to frame and shoot it became clear.

Here is the result.

Lee Vining Trees

Giving Back: A Very Special Night 2010

It was 4:30. The text message said that the district prom was going to be at Ramona High School at 6:30. A friend was asking me to come and shoot an event for free. Did I mind? NO!! and I was rewarded with an evening of  being awestruck by the joy and energy these special kids have.

They danced, laughed, and they had fun. For a few hours their lives were “normal” and I loved being a part of it. No, I didn’t regret or have any misgivings about spending my Saturday night shooting this event. Especially after listening to Jeremy Cowart at Escalate Live last week where he stressed using your photography to give back and do something good in your community.

The prom being held in a high school gym didn’t help the photography. Dark and bad lighting. The answer seemed simple to me, grab the SB900 and the 50 f1.4 and shoot away. I also used the Hanson Fong Skin Glow Reversible Bounce Card which was recommended by Hal Schmitt at Light Photographic Workshops. Honestly, at $42 it is the best light modifier I have purchased.

I looked at the night as an experiment and learning opportunity in using speedlights. Remember, when using flash, the shutter speed controls the background exposure and the aperture combined with the flash intensity controls the exposure of the subject. Wanting to separate the subject from the background, I shot most of the images at a shutter speed of 250-300 and an aperture of 2-2.8. I put the flash on manual and shot most of the time at 1/8-1/4.

If I wanted the background darker, I increase the shutter speed. If I wanted the subject brighter, I usually increased the power of the flash by a 1/3 of a stop or so.

I think the technique worked fairly well, but needs a bit of refinement. After I looked at the images in Lightroom, I found that those setting tended to leave the subjects just a little darker than I wanted, but all of the images could be fixed with a little exposure control in the develop module of Lightroom.

Here are some of the images from the night.

Balloons outside the prom

Posing for the camera

Ramona's King and Queen

Poly's King and Queen have their first dance.

King's King and Queen

Honestly, it was a rewarding experience. I hope you have the opportunity to give and experience such an event.

Please feel free to comment or offer suggestions.

Death Valley Redux – Pt. 5 – Macro Photography

Starting off with a quick re-cap: I went to Death Valley last week to try to get some images and try some new techniques. I tried HDR, panorama shots, and, finally, macro photography.

In this case it wasn’t really macro as much as very close up. The subjects were wildflowers that were blooming on the valley floor. I used my Nikkor 105 f/2.8 VR, which is an amazing macro lense and super sharp. It also does a great job of softening the background and getting the subject super sharp.

There is a certain technique to capturing sharp images. First, the use of a tripod is mandatory. A macro lens is like a telephoto lens, they amplify the smallest movement of the camera. I even use a remote shutter release to prevent movement of the camera when releasing the shutter. Second, timing the shot right so that the subject matter is staying still. This is difficult when shooting flowers in the desert wind. Third, selecting the correct aperture. If the lens is wide open a shutter speed can be selected that freezes the movement of the subject, but creates a VERY shallow depth of field resulting in an image that only has one small part in focus. Too small of an aperture and everything is in focus, but the subject is likely to move during the exposure.

One other problem I had was the harsh light. I was shooting in the middle of the day when the sun is at it’s highest. In order to soften the light and eliminate the dark shadows, I used a diffuser. By putting the diffuser just out of the frame of the picture, I was able to create a giant softbox that evens out the light for the entire image.

Here are some of the images I took using the diffuser. You can see all of my Death Valley images by clicking here.

As usual, please feel free to leave a comment or ask a question. I encourage it.

Death Valley Redux – Pt. 4 – Panorama Pictures

As I said in my first part of this series, I went to Death Valley for some great images and to try some new techniques. I tried HDR and the use of a wide angle lens, but that’s another post. I also tried lots of panorama images.

The idea of a panorama is fairly straight forward. Capture more in an image than the camera lens can see. In other words, make any lens wide angle.

The execution is also fairly simple. Start taking your panorama by setting up your camera to capture one side of the image, usually the left, and take pictures until you get to the other side, usually the right. The only thing you really need to worry about is making sure that you overlap the images by about 1/3 of the frame. Ok, there is more to it than that, but for the basics, that covers it.

What you end up with is a series of images that don’t look like much. In Lightroom, export the selected images into Photoshop by clicking in the Photo>Edit In>Merge to Panorama in Photoshop. Photoshop will run a series of actions that will blend the images into one panoramic image. Save it back into Lightroom and you are done.

Below are two image of one of the joshua tree forests in Death valley that I merged into one small panorama.

You can see how the image on the left side doesn’t quite cover the same area as the image on the right side, but when you put them together, you get the entire field of view.

Above is just two images put together into a panorama so that you can see how it works. You can actually stitch together MANY images to make a huge panorama. The process works the same, but you select more images to stitch together.

If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to leave them below.

Death Valley Redux – Pt. 2 – HDR

On this trip I spent one evening out on the Badwater salt flats. It’s a fascinating place. The valley floor is actually a slurry/slush of highly concentrated salt water. Its solid and easy to walk on, but it creates a thick, almost cement like, crust on everything it touches. It coats your boots, your equipment, and your clothes. If it touches the ground, it has salt on it.

I met a fellow photographer on the salt flats, Don Geyer of Mountain Scenes Photography. He was using graduated filters to capture the dynamic range that the situation presented. I asked him why he didn’t use HDR and he replied that he couldn’t get the image to look natural. He doesn’t like the weird, other world looking images that most people bring to mind when they think of HDR.

I use Photomatix Pro to process my HDR images out of Lightroom. I actually use the default settings as a starting point and then I might tweak the Strength, Color Saturation, Luminosity, Microcontrast, Smoothing in the main menu and the White Point, Black Point, and Gamma in the Tone Setting menu. If you click the help button on the bottom of the menu you will get a description of what each slider does.

You can always get that Grunge look by clicking on the preset button at the bottom of the menu.

For those of you who don’t quite understand HDR, here are seven images. The first five are the original images each taken one stop apart. The next one is the normal looking HDR; where those five are combined to bring the light range within what the human eye can see. The last one is the grunge type of HDR that a lot of people bring to mind when HDR images are mentioned, but is NOT what the look I am looking for in my HDR images.

Please leave a comment or questions you may have.