Category Archives: General

Metering Nighttime Winter Scenes

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Twilight, Rocky Mountain National Park.

Twilight, Rocky Mountain National Park. Sirius, Canis Major, Orion, Taurus, the Hyades star cluster, and the Pleiades star cluster are all visible in the fading light. Click for a larger version.

You can photograph the night sky year around, but winter brings an added bonus: SNOW! Instead of the black, silhouetted skyline you get most of the year, in winter you have the possibility of including the highly reflective snow. That is why for many photographers winter is their favorite time of year to photograph the night sky.

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Metering Wildlife in the Snow, Part Two

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Cougar

Cougar

Most wildlife are medium to dark in tone, making them a challenge to meter properly in the bright, white tones of winter. If you trust your camera’s auto exposure modes, the odds are good you won’t get the best exposure. If you switch over to manual exposure and make the right decisions, you can get great exposures and better quality photos (more about that later).

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Metering Wildlife in the Snow, Part One

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Elk in the Snow, Rocky Mountain National Park

Elk in the Snow, Horseshoe Park, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado

Metering dark toned wildlife in the snow is a major exposure challenge. It is usually best to avoid large “burned out” areas (washed out, featureless white) in a nature or landscape photograph, but with properly exposed snow, the wildlife can be so dark as to lose all texture. On other hand, metering for the wildlife can burn out the snow.

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Thomas Jefferson Memorial: Taking Pictures From A Moving Car

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Thomas Jefferson Memorial

Thomas Jefferson Memorial photographed from a moving car.

I don’t usually recommend taking pictures from a moving car, but we were coming up to the Jefferson Memorial and I liked the light and the rippled reflection in the water. In the busy DC traffic, asking the driver to stop the car in the street was a recipe for disaster (and there was no place to pull over).  I had to grab this shot on the fly which, from a fast moving car, is harder than you might think.

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Getting Started with High Dynamic Range (HDR) Photography

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Sunset, Gibraltar Island. Combined images.

Sunrise, Gibraltar Island. HDR Image.

Compared to the human eye, digital cameras have a very limited dynamic range. Your digital camera simply can’t capture the range of tones from light to dark that your eyes can see. That is why HDR photography has become so popular with so many photographers, and absolutely essential for some commercial photographers.

Update, November 19, 2017: A revised version of this article is here.

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How Long Will Your Photo Lab Prints Last?

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Estimated Print Life from Wilhelm Imaging Research

Estimated Print Life from Wilhelm Imaging Research

Would you rather pay $3 – $4 for an above average to poor quality 8×10 inch print that will fade in 18 years, 9 years or less, or would you prefer paying $2.00 for a very high quality 8×10 print that will last 50 years?  People pay more money for prints with a short life expectancy all the time. Why? Because they don’t have the right information, and they may have no idea that prints have such widely different life spans.

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Best Digital Cameras of 2014 (Including 2010 – 2013)

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Canon 5DMark III camera. Canon EF 17-40 mm f/4 lens. Really Right Stuiff L-Bracket.

The holiday season is here and I am getting the usual questions about which digital cameras I recommend. The camera lists below will point you to the highest rated models. There is also some information and advice on choosing a camera. The lists will be updated throughout the holiday season as new, highly rated cameras become available.

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GoPro Hero4: Amazing, Small, Inexpensive, HD Video Camera

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GoPro Lineup

New GoPro Lineup

Looking for a small, mountable, “ideal for sports and action”, inexpensive, high definition video and still camera with a waterproof housing and image quality that Lucasfilm (the Star Wars people) calls “amazing”?  This camera will go anywhere and mount just about anywhere. Prices range from $499 to $129, depending on the model (which is a lot less than your typical DSLR with HiDef video).

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Books and Calendars from the Master: Ansel Adams

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Ansel Adams - Half done, Merced River, Winter

Ansel Adams: Half Dome, Merced River, Winter. © Ansel Adams Publishing rights Trust

I have no idea when I was first entranced by the photos of Ansel Adams. There is a wonderful, luminous quality to his work. Small wonder he is America’s best known landscape photographer. Collections of his work would make a worthy addition to any photographer’s library. This is also the time of year that Ansel Adams calendars pop up like snowstorms.

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Beautiful 2015 Calendars

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Just a few of the many beautiful calendars in my Amazon.com photography store.

Just a few of the many beautiful calendars in my Amazon.com photography store.

Each year I choose an extensive selection of beautiful landscape, nature, and astronomy calendars from the finest sources for my photography store (which is powered by Amazon.com). Most of them are in the $10-$14 range. I pick several to hang on my own office walls as a great source of inspiration for the whole year.

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Tripod Head Recommendations: Some of the Best of the Best

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Kirk Enterprises BH-3 Ball Head with Arca-Swiss style quick release

The short list.

3-Way Tripod heads:

Manfrotto 056 3D Junior Head (replaces 3025)
Manfrotto 3025 (older model)
Manfrotto 115 3D Super Junior Head (replaces 3028)
Manfrotto 3028 (older model)
Manfrotto 410 Junior Geared Head

Ball Heads:

Slik Pro Ballhead 800
Kirk Enterprises BH-3
Kirk Enterprises BH-1
Really Right Stuff BH-40
Really Right Stuff BH-55

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Inexpensive ($9 – $117) Gifts for Photographers

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Flash adapter and umbrella for an shoe-mount electronic flash.

Flash adapter and umbrella for an shoe-mount electronic flash.

There are a lot of practical and inexpensive gifts for photographers. Here is a nice list of items from $9 to $117. To make it easy to track them down, most of these items can be found at my photography store (which is powered by Amazon.com with Amazon’s terrific ordering, shipping, guarantee, and service). Most of the items below are in the Photo Goodies section. Prices are current as of this update (Nov. 20, 2014) but prices  do fluctuate.

 

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Mastering Photoshop: Advanced Color Correction, Part One

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If you want to master color in Photoshop, Dan Margulis is the best of the best. He is one of the first three persons to be named as a member of the Photoshop Hall of Fame. And the book to get is Professional Photoshop: The Classic Guide to Color Correction (5th Edition). It is well worth finding on the used market (which you can do via my photography store). What Margulis teaches you to do with color is amazing. The before and after images will make your jaw drop.

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