I’m going back to school. Well, kinda.
On a whim I signed up for a photo workshop that’s going to help me shoot landscapes. That’s what the advert said. Who knows? Maybe I’ll grab a few photos on the way there?
It’s a few hours from where I live. The weather doesn’t look great right now but that’s one of the selling points of the workshop.
Stay tuned.
Things are almost but not quite yet to call it late spring or early summer photography around Edmonton. Slowly but surely things are getting green. The further north you are from the equator, the later summer arrives.
I take the dog for a five mile walk every morning. Part of our walk is on the outskirts of Edmonton. It’s only during the last few days that the buds on trees have started to swell. Some are just beginning to open to reveal their new flush of leaves.
Today was windy. It blew and blew. For most of the day there wasn’t a cloud to be seen. About forty minutes before sunrise I thought that I’d take a quick tour of the surrounding countryside to see how things looked. I wasn’t hopeful of bringing anything back to process. It looked that bright and barren.
Content to go home empty handed, I turned the Rav around and made my way back. I was about to pass a turnoff to a dead end in the road just before the freeway when I remembered that the city had used an empty lot there to dump snow during the winter when the snow clearing crews are out. It is often wet and muddy there for the whole summer. There were a few clouds close to the horizon that I thought might make an interesting reflection, if I could get close to some open water before the sun set. Pulling over near the snow dump I could see that the gate was open to the muddy lot. I grabbed the camera, hopped across the water filled ditch and was soon at the water’s edge.
There was a funny looking weed on the shore that looked interesting. It was green while almost everything else around it was still brown. I popped off a few variations of this just for the heck of it and in five minutes I was home.
Half an hour later, I am pressing the Publish button for this blog.
It’s a joy to be able to take photos close to home. It’s still much too early to make the trek to Jasper or Banff. Things are at the “in between” time. It doesn’t look like winter and it sure doesn’t look like summer.
So City of Edmonton, I thank you for dumping snow from our streets so close to where I live. I bet you never figured that it might make a landscape one day. LOL
Happy shooting,
Dan
I’ve been away from WordPress for almost a month. I haven’t gone out to shoot any landscapes in that time either and yet my photography has improved.
One of the greatest gifts that amateur photographers have that professional ones don’t is the ability to take time off and recharge their creative batteries. I’ve been involved with professional photographers in one way or another for over thirty years. Without exception EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM at one time or another lost that creative spark that kept them fresh and one step ahead of their fellow shooters. It’s difficult to remain excited and enthusiastic when you do the same thing day after day and year after year.
I say that from experience. When I was shooting editorial and before that when I was doing advertising still life, the last thing that I wanted to see on my time off was another camera. Don’t believe me? Look at popular photo sharing websites like 500px or Flickr. Almost without exception the very best work being done today is being done by amateurs.
We all start out with grand ideas of how we’re going to set our mark in the photo world but then something happens. It’s called earning a living. Most landscape shooters cannot make any kind of decent money shooting just landscapes so they do what they see others doing, classes, seminars, workshops, etc. and they discover that there’s more money to be made doing that than taking photos. That’s when they stop being artists and instead become entrepreneurs.
I don’t have to look far to see the results of that. Instead of seeing fresh, great new work I see buy this, buy that, sign up for our workshop and be entered into a draw. Blah. Blah. Blah. Those photographers lost their edge a long time ago. It’s sad and what’s sadder is seeing amateurs spending their hard earned money to learn something that they could easily do themselves.
I’ve written before about how I believe the stock photo business model will change the same way that the internet changed the music business. Again the nice people at Getty Images keep sending me invites on Flickr asking me if I’d like them to represent my photos. With them taking 80% of the sales commission you know what the answer will be.
When shooting landscapes, I really shoot for myself. I have never tried to be the most popular or the most viewed on the photo sharing websites. Creativity really is more about what happens inside your head not what others might think of your photos. As a result I think, I hope, my photos are a little bit different from the rest of the crowd. Being the most popular means nothing or rather it shouldn’t.
I was approached by the art director of an advertising agency in London a while back. She had seen my work on a photo sharing website. The agency was looking for images for an international print campaign that will run later this summer. That meant selling them exclusive rights to the image. They pay extra to be sure that no one else can use the photo. If you’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a print campaign, it doesn’t look good if the exact same photo is being used elsewhere. When you give up rights to an image the cost of it becomes higher. Much higher. If that picture would have been brokered through the Getty Images/Flickr arrangement that I mentioned earlier that would have meant many thousands of dollars out of my pocket.
I would rather sell a few photos a year this way than make a hundred smaller sales through an agency. It’s a gamble. Because I am now retired and I do this for my own personal pleasure, there isn’t the pressure to produce. That’s why I can take a month away from shooting and not sweat it.
Since the new year I’ve been contacted more frequently by agencies around the world, mostly Canada and the U.S. Two of the larger sales again direct and not through a stock photo agency were for an annual report cover and a new product brand launch across North America. Money is there to be made. It’s a matter of finding your niche and capitalizing.
The internet is really the photographers best friend. It’s been too brown outside and the weather too blah to do anything with the camera. I came upon a different way of shooting landscapes a month ago. When I first saw this photographers new work I was blown away. I hadn’t seen anything quite like it. Then I started Googling similar photos and the floodgates opened. Have I been living in a cave I thought to myself? I’m going to be giving this a try over the next few months. When I figure out how to do it, I’ll post it and explain how it’s done. Which brings me to another pet peeve.
Information should be free. The kind of shooting I was talking about is very technical. There are lots of steps in processing and shooting to get a satisfactory result. In trying to find out how it was done, the photographer was gracious enough to explain it but only if you’d Paypal him $20 per video. Thanks but no thanks. Why do people do that? They tease you to their website, offer a short intro and then they have their hands out. Information should be free. Creativity can’t be bought.
The weather
It’s slowly getting green around Edmonton. The trees should be leafed out in a couple of weeks. Yesterday evening I saw my first lightning flash of the year and my first really impressive mammatus clouds. Guess why I didn’t post any photos of that? Yup, no camera. LOL Soon. Very soon! 
I am itching to get out there again crawling around in the morning dew, watching a foggy sunrise or seeing a giant storm cloud rolling across the prairie. Are you listening Pat?
Happy shooting,
Dan
I don’t live in the most photographed part of Canada. From horizon to horizon the land looks pretty much the same. Flat. Uninteresting. Boring. No elegant oaks or elms. No rolling hills. No waterfalls, mountains or glaciers. It’s flat, prairie farm land.
I’ve never seen that as a disadvantage. It’s quite the opposite in fact. Shooting where I live has made me a better photographer. I like analogies because they often times make a concept more understandable so here goes with my analogy.
I shot fashion for almost fifteen years. During that time I photographed everyone from youngsters in front of the camera for the first time earning a pay cheque to models on the tail ends of their careers who had graced the covers of fashion magazines around the world. If you were fortunate enough to get one of the experienced, old timers and by that I mean models in their late twenties, you could almost close your eyes, depress the shutter and let the motor drive go as fast as it could while the talent in front of the camera did everything. I’d look like the most accomplished fashion shooter in the world. Now switch that model with someone just starting out. They don’t know how to pose or which angle is their best. Expressions don’t come easy without coaxing it out of them. You could do your best and sometimes the results looked very ordinary.
I was the same photographer but got two completely different results. It’s the same way with shooting landscapes. Shooting on the prairies I have to earn every photograph that I get. Not many come without all the stars and planets aligning. I believe that has made me a better photographer, a better artist.
So how do you make the ordinary look extraordinary? The photo accompanying the blog has all the answers in it.
The subject matter is oh so ordinary. Taken from the side of the road just a few minutes outside of Edmonton, this is typical Alberta prairie land. It’s late autumn and all the grasses and brush of the year has gone dormant. By themselves, these branches and grasses would have no shape or texture. A thick covering of frost gives them a magical appearance but that’s just the start.
The sun is low in the sky. By itself that isn’t enough. I’ve photographed enough clear morning skies and heavily overcast ones. It takes a special kind of cloud cover to photograph well. Kind of Goldilocks like. Not too heavy and not too light but just right.
Throw in just the right amount of fog to diffuse the morning light, create a glow and hide the horizon from the camera.
Put all of these elements together and boring becomes special. It’s so simple and so obvious.
What I think confuses beginning photographers is distinguishing between a photograph of a pretty place and taking a good picture in a boring place. It’s easy to not see past the pretty scenery and realize that you’ve got a really boring photo of a nice place. Have you learned anything by shooting the pretty place? You tell me.
The most difficult part of this easy solution is finding the times that all the right things happen for you. It does take perseverance. Great shots don’t happen everyday and you can only force things in post processing so far before the result looks phoney.
A few minutes after I took this, I pointed the car home and got ready for work. Oh yeah, that was before I retired.
Happy shooting,
Dan
Some people swear by ‘em. I swear at ‘em. Filters have their place in photography. In landscape photography, at least how I do it, they have NO place.
When I got back into shooting landscapes after an almost thirty year absence, I plunked down a few hundred dollars for a set of graduated filters, both neutral density and colored. The more I used them, the more I found that they were ruining my photos. I experimented with them from summer to winter. By the middle of winter they had a permanent place in the glove compartment of my vehicle, never to be taken out.
If you read the testimonials of “photographers” over at a blogvertisement for a popular brand of filters in the states you’d mistakenly believe that you can shoot in any conditions and come away with spectacular images. Take a close look at the very same images that many of the photographers there are boasting about and you’ll see many reasons why you don’t want to have them in your camera bag.
Everything I shoot outdoors I bracket. I stopped metering ages ago. If you plan your brackets properly, one of the exposures that you take will be on the button. There is almost always the problem though of lost highlight or shadow detail. That’s supposed to be one of the saving graces of graduated neutral density filters. It might be if you shoot the ocean and have nothing breaking above the horizon. Here on the flat Alberta prairie there is always something that pops up. In the pic at the top it’s the fence post. Try and capture this scene in one exposure by using a graduated neutral density filter and what happens ALL the time is that the sky will darken but it will darken the top of the post too and that looks unnatural. All those beautiful mountain shots that I see on the blogvertorial have portions of mountains that the graduated ND filter has over darkened. Sure the skies look great but the mountains don’t.
Above are the three bracketed exposures that went into making my final image. Each one of them by themselves has important image detail. There is no way that a single exposure could capture the great range from highlight to shadow. This is where HDR comes in.
After having tried almost every HDR program out there I settled on one program that does it all for me. The only problem that I have with it is that the presets as they come with the program are AWFUL! If you use them, you’ll probably end up hating HDR because almost all of the presets have an awful, garish, haloish look to them. The secret in using this program is to go to the strength slider while tonemapping and pulling them to the left until the tones look more normal.
When I have a finished photo the last thing that I want is for someone to be thinking, oh that’s an HDR or I know how he did that. Instead, I want the final image to stand on it’s own and have the viewer think, hey, that’s a lovely place.
BTW, speaking of lovely places, I walk my dog every day near where this was taken. Right now there is a ditch almost forty feet deep where sewer pipes are being laid and where the horizon is on the top photo is a pile of clay a couple of city blocks long and as tall as two houses. This was taken on the outskirts of Edmonton. That’s why you see the yellow weeds in the photo. A farmer would have used a herbicide to kill them. The hill that is covered with the weeds is actually a pile of clay from when local construction trucks were dumping fill here. I wrote yesterday that you needn’t travel the world to get nice shots. This one was taken three city blocks north of where I live in a city of almost one million people.
Keep your money in your pockets when it comes to special effects filters for landscape photography. If you really have to have a set of high quality Lee filters, let me sell you mine. LOL
Happy shooting,
Dan
It goes without saying that when we have something that we are passionate about we want to do more of it or do it better. Shooting landscapes is no different.
Sooner or later all of us plateau. Our photos start looking the same. They’re bland and boring. Why?
Often times it’s because we get into a rut of how we see and how we do things. We frame the same. Compose the same. Shoot the same subject matter. Like struggling in deep mud, we try really hard without going anywhere. You can remedy that.
I usually shoot close to home. After a time, things get boring. I see the same scenery and shoot the same places. I see great shots of the rockies or the Pacific northwest. Should I go there to change things up? Hardly!
I love the challenge of shooting seemingly normal and boring places and making them mine. There is no mystery to how I do it and it isn’t difficult. Let me share with you how I get my inspiration, my ideas and my motivation. I never want to stand still. Being creative is moving forward.
The internet is one of the greatest resources a beginner and an old, long in the tooth photographer can have.
There are many photographers much better than I and I seek them out. Their work inspires me.
Maybe I’m not shooting some exotic waterfall in Iceland or a glaciers in Antarctica like they are but that’s no reason that I can’t aspire to create beauty in my small corner of the world.
Truly, most of the magical landscapes that you see on the internet don’t exist the way that they are portrayed. Oh sure, all the elements, the trees and the frost and the snow and the mountains and whatever else you see exist somewhere on earth but they don’t look like that or at least not for 99.9% of the day.
Those magical places existed in the mind of the photographer and they brought their vision to the screen.
My most favorite of all landscape photographers manipulates his images heavily. Very seldom are they ever straight shots. With him spending over three hundred days of the year outdoors and shooting, he still needs to add color to skies, darken them, etc. It’s one morning or evening in a few dozen that occur where no additional processing is needed to deliver the vision. By studying other’s photos you can also gain insight into how they process their landscapes. You take a little from this person, a little from that person and put it together in your own unique way. It’s like finding a great chile recipe and by modifying it, making it both better and making it yours.
Seek out who you consider to be the very best landscape photographers today and pore through their websites. Bookmark them and revisit them every few months. Some of the better websites are 500px.com and Flickr. There’s millions of photos on Flickr so if you go there instead of just browsing willy nilly, do a search for landscape groups. When you get to one, browse the galleries. Click on the photographs that catch your eye. Look at their gallery. It doesn’t stop there. Go to their profile and look at their favorites, that is, favorite photos from other photographers. Those places are usually gold mines for hundreds and thousands of excellent images.
It’s by browsing these hundreds and thousands of photos that you like that you’ll broaden your artistic sensibilities. Things will start to click with you. Rule of thirds. Eye going to the light area of the photo, etc. You don’t need to know those rules but by being exposed hundreds of times to them they will start to resonate with you. You’ll find that when you compose images in your viewfinder that what you’ve seen will influence how you frame your photos. By seeing all the different ways good light presents itself in a landscape you’ll be more open to when you can and can’t shoot.
With the advent of digital photography it’s now affordable to expose two hundred frames, cull out the bad ones and keep the one or two or three that have potential. You have to shoot and shoot and shoot some more. You then have to ruthlessly edit your images. I never keep everything I shoot. Oft times, half of what I shoot in the morning is deleted in the camera before I even start my way home and then I edit again when the images are on the computer, deleting the images that have either bad light or bad composition.
You are always learning when you’re shooting. Always. I hope to keep improving to the point that my work in a few years looks completely different than it does now.
I don’t believe that you need to take art lessons or classes. We’re not talking nuclear physics here. We’re talking about organizing things in a viewfinder and recognizing it when you’ve got it. It’s definitely not rocket science.
Happy shooting,
Dan
Before I write anything else, thank you for being such a good sport about my April Fool’s blog yesterday. Until I see a way of giving photographer’s value for their money, I have no intention of offering workshops of any kind. The larger groups that I see advertised might be great as a source of income for the host “photographer” but as an actual tool for learning? Nope. I smell cash cow and golden goose all the way.
I’ve been adding photos to my website over the last few weeks. While working a full time job, having family responsibilities and squeezing shooting in there somewhere, the website was neglected. I’ve still not redesigned it. I’ve played with a few different versions of it on my hard drive. When I come up with something that I like, I’ll rework the whole thing.
It’s fun going through the old stuff. Because I only process a few photos from an outing there are always lots that are different enough to process. Processing is a huge part of my visualization. Unless you’re spending over three hundred days of the year outside with your camera, you’re not likely to get everything right so that no post processing is needed.
Looking at a few years worth of work it’s easy to get a better perspective on what you’ve done. One of the things that stood out in my mind was a similarity or continuity through everything that I liked. The same goes for what I didn’t like.
It’s impossible to preach to someone or lecture them on what or how they should be shooting landscapes because we might all like the same thing.
The kinds of photos that I did like were taken when the the sun was either low on the horizon or below it. That low light helps to give a feeling, a place and a time.
The pics taken when the sun was higher ended up looking like a record of a place that I had been.
Obviously for some photographers the important thing is to capture a beautiful place. It’s just that simple. Take a trip to some drop dead, gorgeous place and voila!, instant masterpiece. If it were only that easy.
A great landscape is all about evoking a mood or a feeling. You’re never going to get that if you’re shooting without thinking and looking. When you go to Vermillion Lakes or Abraham Lake you want your photographs to look DIFFERENT from everyone else’s. Don’t you? I do.
Happy shooting,
Dan
