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.
Leonard Nimoy
We all knew Leonard Nimoy as an actor, but in the art world he was also known as an accomplished photographer. He will be missed.
His best known photography exhibition, “Shekhina”, has been highly praised (links below). The exhibit has also been controversial due to the nude imagery so be advised before you click the link to read further down the page.
Kristina, color corrected image.
Shooting in the shade on a clear sunny day can cause color temperature problems. If you want your colors to be true to life, you need to correct for the color shift.
The filming of Modern Family with iPhones and other Apple devices.
Tonight’s episode (February 25, 2015) of Modern Family was filmed almost entirely using Apple devices. The news media are calling it the “iPhone Episode”. It was bound to happen sooner or later. An entire episode of House M.D. (season 6 finale, “Help Me”) was filmed with a Canon 5D Mark II DSLR. Parts of dozens of movies (link below) have been filmed with DSLRs. Sooner or later someone was going to film a TV episode with a smart phone.
Nature Photography Collage
Photography Workshop
“CAPTURING NATURE’S WONDERS”
with Jim Doty, Jr.
September 25-27, 2015 – Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado.
Update, Feb. 28, 2015: We now have 8 people coming to the Colorado workshop. If you want one of the 2 remaining spots, contact the registrar ASAP (contact info at the first link).
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.
Snow Hummocks, Merced River
Just like metering daytime winter scenes, the key to metering evening winter scenes is knowing what to meter and deciding how much exposure compensation to use.
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.
Michael Fulks, the publisher of Apogee Photo Magazine, wrote at an excellent review of Digital Photography Exposure for Dummies and gave the text an A++, the magazine’s highest rating. The review follows.
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.
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.
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.
Painting by Norman Rockwell.
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.
Photography DVDs
Photography DVDs can inspire your photography, give you new ideas, and teach you new skills and techniques. These are my favorites.
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).
Part of my DVD photo storage library.
Don’t lose your digital photos to disc-rot or a hard drive crash. Choose the best archival storage options.
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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.
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.
