Black & white or color? Your choice…

I am really starting to fall in love with black and white landscapes again. Until I picked up my printer last month, I hadn’t printed black and whites for almost thirty years. Yes, it was in the wet darkroom. Right now, the new way is definitely looking to offer more control than I ever had individually processing sheet film and dodging and burning by hand.

It really is about the control you have over the final product that’s important. That and recognizing the right conditions and pre-visualization.

I know that I “see” in color. What I mean by that is that color is an important part of my composition. As important as shapes are.

The images above are of the Athabasca River in Jasper National Park. I’ve been taking three weeks off for the past few years to spend some time up there hoping to catch autumn/early winter weather. One year it was warmer going into October than it had been all summer. It was like autumn never came. Leaves dried up and dropped. The fall colors hardly materialized. Another year saw a dump of a foot of snow in the second week of September. Of course it was all gone except for in the trees and places shaded from the sun.

This year is no different. I plan on another break for autumn shooting. It might very well be the last year I book holidays for then as I am THAT close to retirement and itching to start another chapter in my life but that’s for another time.

Before I choose to convert an image, I’ll open it in Photoshop and in the channels palette, click on each of the different channels, red, green and blue. There will usually be one channel that looks much better than the others. Reds don’t usually convert well, so if you have a scene with a lot of red in it, chances are that it won’t look too good in black and white. On the other hand, if there is a lot of blue or green then PARTY on!

Too drab to shoot outdoors… go inside

Yesterday, I wrote about the long stretch of poor weather and light that we’ve had around central Alberta for the last few weeks. Not very good for shooting landscapes.

Shortly after I posted that I grabbed my old studio lights and hauled them upstairs to photograph Cooper. I brought up a small soft box and another light with a reflector that I used for the background. On that, I covered it with a sheet of white translucent plastic to diffuse and darken it.

Coop was a little suspicious until my daughter showed him a handful of carrots. He was still freaking out when the flashes popped. A handful of roast chicken got him more focused. LOL

The whole thing from beginning to end took less than five minutes. I learned years ago that when shooting kids or animals, THEY dictate the pace you shoot. Attention spans are very short and once they get cranky the shot is lost.

It’s not landscapes but it is photography.

Happy shooting,

Dan

What does a landscape photographer do when the light/weather is terrible for shooting?

It’s been a while since I’ve taken my gear outside but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been busy. It’s the beginning of the year and one of the necessary but not looked forward to tasks is getting all my receipts in order and tabulating them for my accountant.

There are a whack of images from last year to fine tune before sending them off to the agencies. Now that I finally print my own stuff, I am still browsing through hundreds or maybe thousands of photos I have trying to decide what I would like to print for myself.

Oh yeah, and the puppy. I posted a pic of him a few months ago. He’s now ten months old. A Weimaraner and VERY photogenic. The other day I dragged out my old Speedotrons that I used to use for fashion and food, plugged them in to hear the fans on the flash heads start to whine and then pushed the test button. POOF! They worked and the distinctive smell of ozone when the flashes discharged reminded me of years ago when this was something that I did regularly.

With how beautifully the new printer handles black and whites, I set up the lights to photograph Cooper, that’s his name, for a large print for the living room. The plan is to do an artsy portrait of him, for lack of a better term. If there’s enough interest, I’ll post the final images and how I got them.

After getting spoiled early this winter with abnormally warm weather and having almost all our snow melt, we were hit with more normal -30 Celsius  temperatures and wind which made the windchills at time close to -45 Celsius. The forecast for tomorrow is for clearing skies after a few days of light snow and hopefully I’ll be out for the morning.

I almost, yes, almost decided to make a day drive to the mountains but the weather is still to iffy and I really don’t want to drive for ten hours in a day and come back with gray images.

That reminds me about something that I read this morning. What if you were lucky/unlucky enough to have paid for a photo tour this past week in Alberta. Would you have gotten value for your money? I see how popular these things seem to be and I can only shake my head at either how naive people are or how little they value their money. Booking a few months or weeks ahead of time for a photo tour is a crap shoot.

Landscape photography is about, in this order, the light, the weather and lastly the place. There are probably exceptions but most photo tourists end up shooting less than one hundred meters from the road. Do you really want to pay someone one and a half thousand dollars for the privilege of being taxied around the mountains or desert?

Maybe I have this all wrong. Lots of people from all over the world read this blog. I am sure some have taken these tours. I’d like to hear about their experiences both positive or negative and most importantly, see the photos that they brought home.

Well, back to figuring out my gas expenses and mileage for last year…

Happy shooting,

Dan

iBooks anyone?

I’ve been sitting on the fence designing/writing a landscape how-to book for a long time.  Why the hesitation?

Designing for print, I do and have done for years.  It’s second nature to me. The problem has been exporting it so that it would be compatible in the many different formats available. There have been some solutions but they’ve been either very expensive or clumsy.

Today that has all changed!

With the announcement by Apple of their iBooks Author app, my book/books are closer to becoming real.

To publish free or for a few dollars on the Apple store? I’ve not yet decided that.

I’d appreciate input as to what you’d like to see in a landscape photography book.

Happy shooting,

Dan

Sleight of hand? Deception? Artistic license?

I think that I’ve written before that I am all for what ever it takes technically to get the image that I envision. There are those who say that to do anything other than shoot and process is wrong. It’s an old argument that’s been beat to death. Do what you like. After all, it’s YOUR photography. I know what I like to do and am content to continue on my merry way.

How much manipulation do I do? It all depends upon the conditions. Sometimes just processing the image normally will give me the look that I desire. Other times, a little push in one direction and at other times, a huge amount of manipulation, all to get the kind of mood that I want or envisioned.

How far you push things is a matter of personal taste. The photo above taken a couple of years ago when we had a few pleasant days at -40 Celsius was gently bumped. A little warming overall with the color and that was it. Other times, I do a whack of color matching, burning and dodging and whatever else works.

I’ve long though that keeping how I process and shoot a secret does nobody any good at all. To share is to learn. That’s a big part of why I blog. Sharing with you makes me better.

On the other hand there are those who guard what they do to their photos. Maybe it’s their way of keeping ahead of the “competition”? When I first got back into shooting landscapes a few years back, there was a young American landscape photographer whose work was head and shoulders ahead of his contemporaries. Naively, I emailed him about a photo of his to see if I was right about how he got his sky to look a certain way. I got a response but he talked about everything BUT how he processed that image. That’s fair I thought. No biggy. That’s just him. If he doesn’t see fit to share, I respect that.

Fast forward a few years,  I still love this guy’s work. He has a wonderful artistic eye. His compositions are always spot on and it’s obvious that he spends  a ton of time outdoors. You simply cannot get the weather that he gets by only going out one or two weekends a month.

So what do I see a couple of weeks ago? He photographed a part of the world that I know very well and a place that I am very familiar with. The funny thing was that his morning sky looked like what I am accustomed to seeing from him. His skies have always been done with a bit of a heavy hand. They look like they’ve been filtered but you don’t get the same effect with a filter, you have to process it to get that look. So how much post processing did he do? Here’s where the beauty of the internet comes into play.

A friend of his had photographed the exact same place in Banff and posted it on his own website. The two almost identical scenes were taken within moments of one another and it looked like the camera tripods might have even been touching the perspective was almost identical, as were the clouds.

From the well known photographer, a powerful, dramatic winter sunrise in Banff. From the other, just another morning shot in the mountains.

Comparing the two photos it was obvious where the skies had been manipulated to change the color of the clouds, the distinct purple/red washing into the blue and the snow in the foreground, now it was obvious how much it had been darkened in post processing. So for me, it was interesting because it was almost like seeing before and after images.

Both are good photos. The one is a little too plain for my tastes. The other, good but that darned sky, I can never get used to. But that’s just me.

Happy shooting,

Dan

Photo contests that I WILL NOT enter…

Contests. Everybody is competitive to one degree or another. Bigger. Better. Faster. Stronger. The best!

There are competitions for almost anything and everything that you can think of. Do competitions in photography really prove anything? I doubt it. It’s very much like when I was back in photo school thirty years ago. I had a choice for my photo assignments. I could shoot for myself and hope that my instructor had the same sense of aesthetic as I did or guarantee myself an excellent grade by shooting the way that I KNEW he liked. It worked too. I seldom had below a 90% when I shot to the instructors tastes.

What did that prove? As a photographer, absolutely nothing.

There is no such thing as the best when it comes to photography. All the people in the world telling you that you’re great or that you suck means nothing. It is YOU that must be happy with what you shoot, or so I believe.

Some contests serve a useful purpose for photographers. For example when you see those advertising awards once a year, it’s not really about who is the best, it’s about getting your name out there to potential clients. Contests can be great advertising if you shoot advertising for example and a campaign that you worked on wins awards. It encourages other clients to seek you out.

So you see, I am FOR contests when they favor the photographer. Some contests are nothing more than a money grab or a means to get your photography for free.

How about this? You submit your best photos to me, even though you don’t win anything, they automatically become the property of me. I can use them any way that I see fit. Sound fair? Absolutely not.

Or how about this? Enter my contest, first entry costs thirty dollars, every subsequent entry will cost you only fifteen dollars. BTW, we will also give you, actually you’re really buying it, a subscription to our magazine for a year and even if you don’t win anything, our magazine has the right to publish your picture once in our magazine. BTW, first and only prize is one thousand dollars.

Sounds like quite the deal for the magazine and not so much for the photographer.

Any person with common sense I think could see that this isn’t much of a contest, rather it’s a way for a magazine to get more paid subscriptions so when I see “professional” photographers endorsing such things I get suspicious. Why would they do something like that? Do you think that maybe they’re hoping that a little good will rubs off on them and that they’ll get a few assignments from that magazine? Probably not. It’s just me being overly suspicious I suppose.

Anyway, I am enjoying printing photos on the new printer. I am starting to rebuild the old website and still waiting for the winter that came early and then left.

Happy shooting and keep your money in YOUR pocket,

Dan

The winter that wasn’t and the joys of printing my own photos

It’s been a long time between posts and even longer between taking photos. So much for long term forecasts that predicted higher than average amounts of snow for Alberta. With a high today of 9 Celsius, it looks more like late October than the middle of January. It’s brown outside with spotty patches of snow in the trees. Blecch! However awful it’s been outdoors for taking photos, I’ve been busy indoors.

My website is over two years old and I’ve been playing around re-doing it. I’ve seen a few lovely and not so lovely webdesigns done by professional programmers and designers. How about this for cost? Convert my existing website to be able to sell prints from the site, two thousand dollars. Have my website designed from scratch, prices start at six thousand dollars. I’m not a programmer by any means but over my Christmas holidays a couple of years ago and reading tutorials from the web, I ended up with a website that cost me, here goes, NOTHING.

Before Christmas, I finally took the plunge and picked up a large format photo printer. This thing will print on any media, photo paper, watercolor paper, canvas, etc. I can print as large as 17×22. The largest I have printed so far is 13×19 and the quality is fantastic. This is so much better than how I learned to print in a wet darkroom. The control is incredible.

No longer will I be at the mercy of sending my digital images out and hope that I get back what I wanted. Yippee!

Some photos lend themselves better to black and white rather than color. This was one of them. I’ve been going through all of last years images looking at what will print well as black and white. The printer can do color and I have printed a few to see what the color fidelity was like. Wow! I had shot a scene of prairie wildflowers at sunset and the pinks practically jump off the paper. Believe it or not, I have never had prints of my own hanging at home. That changes as of today. LOL

Hopefully more winter like weather will be on the way soon. Until then…happy shooting,

Dan

My Ten Best Photos of 2011 – Happy New Year!

My ten favorites of 2011? Truthfully, I had forgotten about most of the photos that you see here. My mind is always on the next picture or the one that I am chasing.

I’m not enamored with my photos. I don’t love them and I’m not really attached to them. When I view them after having forgotten that I had taken them I am usually reminiscing about the morning or evening that the photo was taken. It’s kind of like hunting or fishing for a lot of people. The pursuit is the hook that keeps you coming back, not the catch. Having said that, here are ten photos that caught my eye while browsing the ones that I had processed over the previous twelve months.

Above is a sky that could have been a part of a biblical epic. It was breathtaking to witness the clouds hanging over the ripe canola field. After a few days of heavy rain, went out for a quick spin north of town hoping that there would be a break in the weather. There was. It was divine. After a wickedly windy Saturday when the temperatures had dropped to almost -30 Celsius I was up before the sun on Sunday morning hoping that there would either be a fog or an interesting sky since the winds had ceased. What I found instead were these long drifts tailing across the municipal county roads. You gotta get then early because the snow ploughs are soon out. I almost got stuck driving through this one and got a funny stare from a local. It wasn’t until he saw me with my camera that he realized why I was there, axle deep in snow.

This landscape is gone forever. A victim of urban sprawl. For those of you who live in Edmonton, go to 66 Street north of 167 Avenue. This is how the north west corner of the intersection looked this summer.

Today the landscape has been leveled. The natural pond drained. Giant earth movers dredged the pond. The topsoil is completely gone and I expect roads will be put in there in a few months and houses soon. Many of the places I shoot around Edmonton are soon to be gone forever. Unlike our national parks, these naturally beautiful areas have no one to protect them.

I am not in the mountains very often so I don’t usually see the kinds of sunrises and sunsets that I do around the city. This evening was spectacular. I easily have a half dozen “faves” from here. All looking different. Which one to choose?

Finally. I finally got a photo of these round bales that I like. During an early morning drive outside of town the sky started to look unusual. Everything started going red/orange/yellow. Not all sunrises and sunsets are the same color. It was sooooo warm the light that is that the photo you see here had lots and lots of red/yellow taken out to get it to look like this. These bales are iconic, today’s wood grain elevators. Big sales from this one.

I love fog. This is exactly why I prefer to shoot during early morning and a close second late in the evening. The Sturgeon River valley. Instead of looking like the broad valley of a sluggish prairie river and I use the word loosely, it’s more like a slowly moving pond, this struck me as something out of Jurassic Park. Two weeks after this was taken, the landowner went in here and ploughed all the natural grasses and flowers under the ground. Fifteen minutes away from a city of under one million people. Who says you have to travel to faraway places to shoot landscapes. This is probably one of my favorite things about shooting close to home. Half an hour later, I am home, drinking coffee and editing the morning’s pictures.

Memo to myself. Next year get those dandelions early. These dandelions have expired. Here’s what I have observed about them. Around here there is one huge bloom of dandelions during the last week of May and the first week of June. Whole fields can be yellow. And then they’re gone. Throughout the summer the dandelions persist but in bits and bunches. Nothing like the first bloom of the year.

I love giant thunder clouds. My hours the past few summers at work have not been the best for catching the boomers, no pun intended. The master of giant storm clouds in Alberta has got to be Pat Boomer. I have a link to the right. His clouds are awe inspiring. It seems like the Edmonton area was spared? much of the severe weather this past summer with the area around Rocky Mountain House and south getting the best/worst of it. This storm cell was blowing through right about the time the sun was going down. What to do but hop out of the old Toyota, crouch low to the road and shoot.

Weeds. This is what happens when man doesn’t spray herbicides on farmland or in the city. Before the Anthony Henday freeway opened up on the north side of town the right of way experienced this bloom of almost chest deep weeds. It looks like canola but it isn’t. On the right side of the picture at the horizon, there were street lights from an overpass that was out of sight. I cloned out the lights. They looked out of place. Just behind me were a dozen motorhomes and trailers of the workers who were living by the freeway while they were building it. I wasn’t sure if I was going to get shot for walking around their trailers as the sun was setting. Oh yeah, I almost forgot about the terrible mosquitoes. Many frames were ruined because of the swarms that made retouching impossible or impractical. After shooting this I went to MEC and bought a mosquito netting shirt that always stays in the back of the Toyota.

I consider myself lucky when I get a colorful sunrise like this. I could see early on that the morning was going to be special but I couldn’t see anything to use as a foreground for the blazing sky. There is a little dugout pond close to the road that is maybe twenty meters wide at the most. With a very wide lens, 14 mm and bullrushes in the foreground to add interest, voila. Landscape. This is how the colors looked. No filters. Nothing special in post processing. This is mother nature, naturally.

That’s it. I could have just as easily faved a different ten photos.

What interests me most about photography isn’t what I have done, it’s what I am about to do. The new year holds lots of promise. Yeah, there hasn’t been much snow. The winter looks really sucky right now but if it were too easy, I would have gotten bored long ago.

Happy new year to all and thank you for all your visits and comments this past year.

Happy shooting,

Dan

When the magic light doesn’t appear…

I spent a couple of days in the mountains last week. It was great to get out there. It always is but it was brutal for photography.

Really, you are at the mercy of the elements when shooting outdoors. The old saying that you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear is true, at least when it comes to shooting landscapes. You can improve on a bad situation but it’s almost impossible to make it look as good as when the light and weather are perfect.

This past Friday morning I was out before sunrise hopeful that nature would smile upon me and grant me ideal conditions for my photography. I waited and watched as the sun got closer to the horizon. Watching the clouds slowly move by. Waiting for the first hints of pink and magenta to color the clouds. I waited and waited. It didn’t happen.

As sunrises go this one was average. A hint of color. More cool than warm. That’s how it goes. I’m not going to lose any sleep over what nature does. You roll with the flow.

When I got home, I deleted all the obvious rejects in camera. I was left with a progression of shots from forty-five minutes before sunrise to a few minutes after the sun had actually broken the horizon. I looked carefully at the colors and clouds. Not much there. Nothing worth keeping but I did have material for an exercise in Photoshop creativity.

One of the reasons why I dislike using filters for landscapes is because once you filter that effect and it’s recorded digitally, you are stuck with it. Had I used a graduated ND filter, especially a colored one to try to introduce  some drama to the sky the photo would be useless to me.

Photo filters for the most part are sleight of hand. It’s the most ineffective way of faking good light. There are much better ways to do this. The days of the “straight”, “in camera” image are in the past. At least for me. It’s the final image that’s important. The viewer doesn’t want to know if the mountains really looked like that. They want to see a pleasing image.

The top image is straight out of my Raw image processor. One of the presets was used to get it looking “normal”. That’s all that was done.

Below is an HDR, a blend of four RAW images.

It’s the same scene. The same time. A different look.

I used color matching in Photoshop to give me the colors that you see. It only worked because there was a hint of warmth in the sky on the source image. When I chose another warm photo to match the color with, the warm areas in the source picked up the warmth. As you can see, the result is quite dramatic. I could have easily made the sky more orange or pink or red or yellow. That’s the beauty of color matching. Five minutes in Photoshop and I’m done. It’s not like I spent hours working on one image. I don’t have the patience for that.

Let’s take this one step further. Suppose this morning sky would have been blazing with color. Using color matching, I have almost total control over how I want the final scene to look.

Landscape photography is about previsualization. I don’t think it’s about replicating the original. Not unless the original was one of those one out of every hundred days. They do happen but not as often as I’d like.

So the next time you’re browsing your favorite photo website and drooling over those glowing skies and wishing you were as lucky as the photographers that took them, know that most of them have been heavily manipulated.

Happy shooting,

Dan

1600km, Bad Light, Bad Weather & Bad Luck

There haven’t been any posts for a little while because, well, because I haven’t been taking pics. Around Edmonton it’s been gawd awful for photos lately. I can’t remember such a long stretch where it’s been so blah.

Some people say that you can shoot in any kind of weather and light. I say you can’t. Oh you can but if you’re the least bit discriminating and honest with what you’ve brought home you’ll end up deleting it. I know that from personal experience. You see when you take photos where you live, if everything isn’t perfect you don’t have a pretty place to mask the deficiencies of your shooting. I see that a lot with photo tours and workshops. There’s a good reason why they’re usually held in the mountains. Screw up and you’ve still got a picture of a pretty place. Not a great picture but a picture of a pretty place.

Having said that, I was away from work this past week. Unused holiday time to burn. I had been planning a trip to the mountains for a little while and looking forward to getting away.

The original plan was to spend two nights in the mountains, catch a couple of sunrises and a few sunsets and then hoof it home. Plans sometimes change though.

On Wednesday after driving for four and a half hours, some of it in an almost blizzard with blowing snow, I was scouting out the area that I had planned to shoot during the evening. I hadn’t shot here before and wanted to have an idea where to be when the light got better. At two in the afternoon the landscape is brightly lit. Too bright for my tastes. I walked around the area for almost an hour until it happened. SMASH!

I lost my balance and with tripod and camera in hand fell to the ground. No biggy until I looked down. My camera was attached to the tripod, like it was supposed to be. My Nikon 14-24 lens lay a foot away from it and the adapter ring that I use it to connect to my Canon body was split apart. A Canon body and a Nikon lens? As you know I am not one who rants about their equipment or hardly ever writes about it. I’ve been using this combination for over year now. Why the Nikon 14-24? It is simply the best wide angle lens in the world. Hands down. You don’t need any MTF graphs and charts to split hairs when comparing it to my Canon 16-35. It is noticeably sharper and crisper from the center out to the edges.

When packing for the trip I thought momentarily about bringing the Canon 16-35 and decided against it. My Canon body was not damaged. The Nikon lens was perfect but the adapter ring was garbage. It was the weakest link and broke. With two telephoto lenses in the truck it made no sense for me to spend the evening and following morning in the mountains. I got back into the Rav and made the four and a half hour drive home. Nine hours of driving in one day and no pictures to show for it or at least none that I will ever process.

The next morning with the Canon 16-35 in hand I drove out again. The weather was a little better this time. For an hour between Edson and Hinton it was snowing heavily and then it stopped. Heavy clouds I thought to myself. No good. I scouted out another area for the following morning. This time with my camera in my backpack. As evening drew closer, that’s around 4:30 here at this time of year I headed down the icefields parkway. Once by the old Athabasca, I parked myself and hoped that the skies would clear even if just a little bit.

The skies were mainly gray. Shortly after sunset they cleared a bit. Not perfect but above is the result.

Checking into the motel the revised forecast was for clear skies in the morning. CLEAR SKIES!!! That’s as bad as cloudy skies. That’s just how it goes sometimes.

More on the next mornings shoot in a day or so.

I have a little tip to pass on for those who don’t like throwing their money away. For a few years now, the gas stations in the town of Jasper haven’t been posting their gasoline prices. It’s almost as if they all decided that they wouldn’t compete with one another. So, I would fill up with gas in Hinton which is a half hour drive before you get into Jasper. The gas has always been cheaper in Hinton. Sometimes up to ten cents a liter less so I would never gas up in Jasper.

As I was walking from the restaurant I had dinner in I walked by a gas pump to see what the price was. $1.12 a liter. I had filled up in Edmonton for $.99 a liter in Edmonton earlier in the day. Here’s where the tip comes in. I have an app for my iPhone that gives you the prices of gas all around you. It’s called Gasbuddy.  It uses your phone’s gps and shows you the closest stations and what the prices are. I opened the app on my phone and to my surprise found that gas in Hinton was the same price. I had never seen that before. Head into British Columbia and gas was $1.33 a liter. Wow! That’s pricey.

An hour closer to home in Edson the gas was $1.06. Another twenty minutes east it was $1.04 and a little closer to Edmonton it was down to $1.01. On my drive home knowing that the I could make it to the cheapest station with gas in the tank to spare, I drove to the station outside Wabamun and filled up. After all, why spend the extra money if you don’t have to?

I ordered another adapter ring from the states. Hopefully it will be here in a few days and I can go back to using my favorite lens.

Happy shooting,

Dan