Vermilion Lakes Sunset, new (top) and old (bottom) ACR “process versions”. Click on the photo to see a larger image.
Adobe’s newest “process version” for Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) provides better image processing for your RAW camera files. Photos you have processed with an older process version can look even better with the new version. For your images to look their very best you need to have the latest process version.
Each year in the spring, Stivers School for the Arts in Dayton Ohio has an annual fund raising auction to support the photography department. Students at the school exhibit their work at the auction, plus a group of professional fine art photographers from around the world are invited to donate work for the auction. That is how I came to be involved. This was my first year.
This gallery contains 32 photos.
Last Light on El Capitan, Yosemite National Park
In addition to all of the usual photographic challenges, winter provides some extra complications, especially in terms of metering. So I began my series of articles on winter photography. This year I revised three prior articles and added six new ones. They will help you meet the unique challenges of winter photography. So read the articles, get out there, have fun, and create some stunning images!
Denali Sunrise from Reflection Pond
The Sunny f16 rule is really useful on bright sunny days in the spring, summer, and fall, but you can’t rely on it in winter. It will often lead you astray. There are much more accurate ways to meter in the winter.
Storm Clouds Rolling In. (Click to see a larger version.)
Storm clouds rolling in over Hallett Peak and Flattop Mountain. Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado.
Photo Data: Canon 7D. Canon EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 120 mm. 1/200 sec, f/11, ISO 100.
Cascade, Barry, and Coxe Glaciers, Prince William Sound, Alaska
Exposure compensation is one of the most important keys to good exposures, great images, and the best colors your digital camera is capable of producing. Knowing your camera’s snow exposure latitude is one of the keys to using exposure compensation in a winter scene. It is different for every camera model. You won’t find it in your camera’s manual but it is easy to determine with a simple test.
Horses at sunset, western Michigan
I spent a day in western Michigan scouting field trip locations for a photography workshop. With the day almost over, I was driving south on M-40 near Allegan when the clouds began to part and some beautiful light began to develop to the west.
Bryce Canyon After An Overnight Snowstorm
Cold and snow can cause a lot of damage to your camera gear. A few simple steps could save you hundreds of dollars in repair bills.
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.
Comet Lovejoy cropped from a march larger image. Click to see a larger version.
If you have never photographed a comet before, this is a great chance to practice. All you need is a camera with long shutter speeds, a reasonably fast wide angle lens, and a tripod. Most any recent model DSLR will do, plus a few high end point-and-shoot (all in one) cameras.
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).
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.
Kristina in the Snow
The white snow in a winter scene can and often does fool a camera meter into underexposing a portrait, so here are the steps to take to get the right exposure. I throw in a few portrait suggestions too.
Sarah, Professional Fitness Trainer
Your camera is in love with middle gray. The quicker you learn how to deal with this infatuation, the better your photos will look, including all of your color photos.
Mount Hunter from a Bush Plane. Denali National Park. Alaska.
Metering for scenes with a lot of snow can be tricky since the bright snow fools the camera meter. I see a lot of winter photos with gray snow, which means the camera meter did exactly what it was designed to do and the camera owner didn’t know how to use exposure compensation. The solution is quite simple provided you know what to do.
Kristina, IMDb
One of my portraits headlines Kristina’s bio and resume pages at IMDb and six of my portraits are featured in her IMDb portfolio.
Kristin
When it is cold and breezy with the windchill in the 20s, do you stay inside by a warm fire? Of course not, not if you are a photographer. You go outside and do portraits. As long as you dress warmly in layers, you will be just fine.
Photo Data: Canon 5D Mark III. Canon EF24-105mm f/4L IS USM lens at 35 mm. 1/1000 sec, f/8, ISO 400.
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.
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.
My Favorite Photography Magazines
There are a ton of photography magazines out there and it seems like there are new ones every time I go to my favorite newsstand. But some are clearly better, more accurate, more useful, and with better images. The magazines that follow are, from my point of view, the best of the best photo magazines.
Margarita
It is all about the eyes, the eyelashes, and the shadows from the eyelashes. The studio flash units had to be set up very precisely to create these shadows.
Vermilion Lakes, Banff National Park
Vermilion Lakes (a string of three side by side lakes) just outside of the town of Banff, Alberta is a great landscape location. On this particular day the light was beautiful. Evergreens are usually quite dark in a photograph but the low side-lit angle of the sunlight was trans-illuminating the evergreens so they glowed a bright green. The lightly dimpled lake was just calm enough to give me a nice, slightly blurred reflection.
The best of the best cameras, accessories, photo books and more.
It’s the time of year that the number of photo questions I receive increases dramatically. Most of them have to do with the upcoming holiday season and gift giving questions: “What should I get for . . . .”
So once again I am revising my list of articles recommending the best photo gear, books, DVDs, software, calendars, online photo labs, and a whole lot more. As I rewrite each article I will update the links below. You can check the date at the top of each article. This is the most recent update to the list (Nov. 10, 2014).
The Milky Way, Moraine Park, RMNP
Although there is some sky glow from the cities along Colorado’s front range, you can still get some nice photos of the Milky Way from Rocky Mountain National Park.
Night Sky, Rocky Mountain National Park
This photo was taken just before the workshop photo in my last post with the same camera settings. The only difference is I left out the photographers in the foreground. I wanted to include more sky so I went with a low horizon of mountains and trees.
Photo Field Trip, RMNP. (Click to see a larger image.)
You don’t have to put your camera away just because the sun sets and the stars come out. Stay outside and have fun. Put your camera on a tripod (if it isn’t already), set your shutter on B (for bulb) and take long exposures of the night sky. Be sure to include some of the landscape.
Photo Field Trip, Rocky Mountain National Park
The last light of sunset has faded and we are waiting for the stars to come out. During the long 30 second exposure (based on a meter reading of the sky) I wandered around a fired a hand held flash at the photographers.
Photo Field Trip, Rocky Mountain National Park
Catching the last light of sunset. Workshop field trip in Rocky Mountain National Park.
