Finding beauty in the simple things

Geez, can the weatherman not get anything right lately? Forecasts have been all over the place today. It was supposed to snow this morning followed by rain in the afternoon.

Where was I in all this inclement weather? I was laying on the deck,  earbuds planted and listening to the Game of Thrones audiobook. IN THE SUN!

No shooting today. I was up at 6:00 a.m. looking at the forecast and then checking out the provinces highway website to see what was to be seen on their highway webcams. It was gray, gray and more gray. Not worth getting out for.

Some photographer/writers will tell you that you can shoot in any weather. In theory you can but in theory pigs can fly.

The land around Edmonton, where I live is unremarkable farm land. Flat with a smattering of scrubby looking poplars and willows. No stately elms of oaks live here. Not in rural Alberta. So what to photograph?

The answer. Anything. There is a joy to be had in finding beauty in the everyday. Things that you would never consider can be for a moment the most beautiful thing on the planet. It doesn’t happen just where I live, it happens everywhere.

The muddy, brown and wet days are just around the corner unless I head to Jasper or Banff. Maybe… I have a few ideas that have been brewing.

Happy shooting,

Dan

Shooting from the ditch

Over the years I’ve become accustomed to the stares that I get as people drive by me while I’m shooting landscapes. Suspicion is probably the first reaction to seeing a grown adult parked by the side of the road when it’s semi dark out. Curiosity is probably next once they realize that I’ve got camera and tripod in hand and not a gun. And as they pass by me they are almost always looking in the direction that the camera is pointed.

You wouldn’t look twice at someone with a camera parked by the Trans Canada highway. For sure they would be taking pictures. Almost everyone would be taking pictures there.

A thought immediately comes to mind. Why be the same as almost everyone else? What makes your view of where we live valuable is not how similar you perceive things but how uniquely you do. It is that uniqueness that sets you apart from the crowd. For better or worse more eyes will see and remember you precisely because you are different. Right now there are a thousand XXXX XXXXX wannabes posting photos on the internet. It’s getting to the point where on some photography forums the majority of photos are starting to look the same. Put all the shooters into a blender and the result is a homogenized view of the world.

I recently sat in on a Google+ video chat. Six unique, remarkable photographers were displaying a couple of photos each and telling a little bit about them. Normally this kind of stuff bores me to tears. I found this interesting. Although they were all basically shooting the same thing, nightscapes, each had a unique vision. That is precisely what I find interesting.

I like the mountains and national parks as much as the next person. What I like even more are the ditches where I get a unique view of the world.

Happy shooting,

Dan

ps. A little about the picture. After a night of heavy fog, every branch and tree was covered with a thick coating of hoar frost. Weather is one of the under looked elements, no pun intended that make your images special. The fog had receded and was on the far horizon making the air hazy, almost like using a soft focus filter.

The colors are not from any special filter but were introduced into the image using a feature of Photoshop, “color matching”. Using it, I have an almost infinite number of colors, shades and tones that are available to me. For instance, I could have made this redder and more yellow or harsher or softer. Like I said, an almost infinite number of ways this could have looked as a final.

This is also and HDR. I used only two of the five exposures that were available to me. Sometimes I use more, sometimes only one exposure if all the detail is in that one frame.

BTW, the post processing took me about ten minutes from start to finish and again this could have looked a thousand different ways. TIP: learn your favorite photo editing program inside out. I’ve been lucky enough to be using Photoshop at work since 1992 I think and I still only know a little of what it can do. The learning curve is steep but well worth the time you put into it.

Below is the RAW, unretouched, only downsized for display as a jpg.

The joys of an Alberta spring

Wow! I was only out for an hour this morning. Spring is officially here but you’d never know it.

We’ve had some interesting weather over the past week and a half. Two huge snow falls followed by cold and then warm weather. This morning when I got up the temperature outside of Edmonton was -20 Celsius. That is -4 Fahrenheit for those who haven’t gone metric yet. With it warming up close to freezing during the day and getting cold at night with little or no wind there have been a few good hoar frosts and areas of morning fog.

To put a little perspective on how much snow we had this winter/spring, the tree at the top of this post is only the top 1/4 of the tree. I am standing on a pile of snow pushed aside by the road plows that might be about ten feet tall. It was as hard as concrete. With temperatures for the weekend forecast for well above freezing most of this hill will be gone in ten days or so.

A large part of central Alberta was reporting heavy fog today with some places reporting zero visibility. I never saw fog that heavy but it didn’t matter. With just the right amount of haze to diffuse the atmosphere and Goldilocks clouds, who could ask for more?

Spring time in Alberta. Isn’t it great?

Happy shooting,

Dan

ps. I don’t usually explain much about the technical aspect of my shooting but here goes a little bit for those that are new here. No filters. That’s right, none. There is a popular misconception that filters are needed. They’re not. Maybe if we were shooting transparency film but not for digital photography. Maybe a polarizer or a ten stop neutral density filter for blurring things, otherwise save your money. This is an HDR. I expose five frames, here I used three of them. I needed the extra latitude to maintain highlight detail without losing shadows. HDRs if done right are indistinguishable from a single exposure. It’s laughable what even professional agencies think HDRs are. A stock agency that I know wants the photographer to state if the image is an HDR. Huh? I could send them a hundred and they would never know otherwise. There is still a prejudice against HDRs as if it is cheating or something. Whatever.

Photographing Frenchman’s Creek

Many years ago I was an avid flyfisherman. I made my own fly rod or rather assembled it from separate pieces that I bought. I had a suitcase like wooden case with a fly tying vice, a myriad of feathers, hackles and furs from all manner of living creature to tie my own flies. It wasn’t good enough to go to the Fishing Hole to buy something that I could make better, to make my flies or lures the way that I wanted them to look.

I also read all manner of books and magazines. This was before the internet so information wasn’t as easily attainable as it is today. It was difficult to find anything written about local fishing holes here in Alberta. Most magazines were American and featured of course American waters. Once in a while I’d read about the Bow River, a world renowned trout fishery but that was it.

There was a fellow who used to write for the Red Deer Advocate. He was a lawyer by profession I think and he was also a flyfisherman and writer. I eagerly awaited his column each Thursday in the paper. He would have tales of monstrous brown trout that were within an hour or two drive from Red Deer. He would never name the creek or river or if he did the place was always called Frenchman’s Creek. Everywhere he seemed to go was Frenchman’s Creek. Of course he would travel to different creeks and rivers but he would never name them.

There was a wisdom to what he did. After writing about a great day on the creek with a wonderful hatch of Green Drakes or whatever was emerging from the creek it was guaranteed that if he actually named the place there would be a stampede. Not good for conservation. Not good for peace and quiet if you wanted a quiet day out. I loved what he did.

By never naming exactly where he had fished he encouraged his readers to go out and explore. Exploration is part of the adventure of fishing or photography.

Just a thought for today.

Get out and explore!

Happy shooting or fishing,

Dan

It’s just human nature, we never appreciate what we have or why is the grass is always greener somewhere else?

I often feel like I am shouting into the wind. I have often told my kids as they were growing up, if you feel that way you can be sure many others do too.

Is it envy or jealousy or what is it that is inside of us that makes us seem to covet what others have?

After taking the dog for his one hour walk this morning I made a stop at the mailbox before heading inside. The usual bill, flyers, etc. filled our mail slot. In amongst the usual was a magazine that I usually look forward to. The spring edition of the Photo News magazine had arrived. It’s published once during each of the four seasons. Being the first day of spring good fortune would have it that the Spring issue had arrived.

I have subscribed (it’s free) to this magazine for many years. It’s changed over the years becoming better, fewer articles on equipment and more on Canadian photographers and places. It’s also one of the better designed photo magazines with heavy emphasis on large photos and great reproduction.

I eagerly walked the last hundred meters to get home, grab a fresh hot cup of coffee and pore over the latest issue. Throwing the magazine on the kitchen table what greets my eyes but the words “Iceland Adventure” and below it “Polar Panoramas”. Huh? Wasn’t this a Canadian photo magazine? Oh sure, the photographers/writers were Canadian but God knows you can open up any photo magazine from around the world today and see photos of those places. Iceland especially. That place beautiful as it is has become a photo cliche, a cherry pickers delight. There’s nothing wrong with that but it leaves me wondering, what about Canada?

We have such a large, beautiful and diverse country and yet we are desperate to show places outside our border? One day for example someone will discover Labrador. I’ve seen a few stunning photos of that place. Why can’t we see more of places like that? Or how about the Tombstone mountains up north? That place is a dead ringer for the granite spires of Patagonia, the same with the Bugaboos in BC.

The more photo magazines that I see the more disenchanted I become with the publishing industry. Pumping out the same articles over and over and over again. Am I the only one who has noticed that? Oh wait, maybe not. Print publishing is on the down hill slide around the world and it isn’t just because of the internet. When editors take the easy way out and don’t do the hard work or show imagination the product suffers.

BTW, it was a great walk!

Happy shooting,

Dan

Your vision of the landscape

Take one hundred photographers, send them out on the same day to the same place and you will probably have one hundred different photographs. That’s the beauty of photography.

For many, the objective is to copy what someone else has done. Kind of like putting together a crossword puzzle, little imagination is required. Photography becomes a mechanical and not a creative process. That’s one thing that’s wrong with what is supposed to be an extension of your creativity. We become too concerned with fitting in instead of using our imaginations.

We dream. We imagine. I know that even my dog dreams. I often see him laying on the couch, eyes twitching, legs thrashing to and fro like he is running and sometimes making a suckling motion with his mouth, like he was a little puppy. If my dog can dream why can more of us do that? Instead we plunk down our fifty dollars to listen to someone tell you how you too can take photos like them. Is it just me that finds that boring and counter productive to using my imagination?

Get outside today or tomorrow if you can and use your imagination. Force yourself to look at where you live differently than how you usually do. Get low and shoot up. Look down at your feet. Find a viewpoint and turn around to see what is behind you. Do anything you can to be different. Break the rules of photography that you know. Then go home, put your camera away for a few days and then re-visit your new photos. Is there anything that surprises you by how differently it looks? Did you find something that interests you? Maybe something that you can build upon to make your own, unique artistic statement?

The photo above is the result of one of those experiments. It’s no exotic, faraway place. It’s a snow drift. A snow drift by the side of the road. In Alberta there are tens of thousands of kilometers of these things right now. I guarantee you that this isn’t the best looking one either. It just happened to be the one that I stopped by.

You can do this with trees or hills or clouds or whatever interests you. Do it. I always used to tell my kids that any mistake that you learn from is a mistake worth making. It’s like that in photography. The only way that you will know what does and doesn’t work for you is to experiment.

My goal is not to have my photos look like someone elses. My goal is to get out, experiment, have fun and be creative. Creativity is like a muscle. It atrophies if you don’t use it and if you do use it well, enjoy!

Happy shooting,

Dan

Taking baby steps or this is how I learn

This is the time of the year that my thoughts usually turn away from photography and temporarily onto other things. The snow is very dirty right now. It’s a conglomerate of ice, dust, dirt and sand. Nothing like the delicate, frosty flakes that we get early in the winter.

Spring? On the prairies the grasses start to green during the first week of May and the trees in the sun heated north sides of valleys might start to leaf by mid May. It isn’t until the second week of June that things start to look lush. Well, as lush as you can get on the prairie.

Instead of looking at the ground and the horizon, lately, I’ve been looking up during the night. After photographing the old Brush Hills Church a few weeks ago my curiosity was piqued. If you are interested in anything, your favorite search engine can be your best friend so I queried “astrophotography” and my journey began. And it is a journey.

I know how to take photos. I’ve been doing it for a living on and off for over thirty years. Some things remain the same whether you are photographing people or still life. Composition, aesthetics, etc. are all the same no matter what the subject. Where it differs is in how to take the photograph and how to process it. For me the easiest thing in the world is to get someone or something in the studio, get the lights the way I want and it all comes together. In the studio the photographer has control of almost everything. Almost, because when working with people you are a partner in the shoot not the captain of the ship. Some people can’t or won’t smile. Some people aren’t very photogenic but they’re all problems that are easily solved.

I am always learning. When I’m shooting landscapes, everyday presents a different situation. There is always something different happening or something new to try. Progress is not measured in huge differences but instead in subtleties.

Last night I was outdoors trying to learn more about shooting nightscapes. Before I went out, I Googled that subject to view and read as much as I could on the subject. Of course I found many “professional” hobbyists willing to have me pay for their tutorials or take their online courses. I really am coming to dislike those who would rather not share what they know unless there is a dollar value attached to it. There is plenty to read out there and read I did.

The night sky and the stars are not always the same. From hour to hour or season to season the sky changes. Some of the stars that we see in the winter are not visible to us in the summer. I was interested in the Milky Way. Where it is in the night sky depends on the hour and the day. Where you live is also important to where it is seen. Last night just after sunset it was in the north west sky. Early this morning just before the sun rise it was over the south eastern horizon. It arcs across the northern sky before setting in the east.  I used a free program called Stellarium to show me where it would be. You can put in the time of the day or year and your location and it will display the appropriate night sky. It’s available for Mac or pc.

If the moon is above the horizon I found out from reading, that the dimmer stars will be diminished or disappear. Last night there was no moon visible. Shooting near the bright lights of the city will interfere with seeing the dimmer stars. Last night it worked for me to drive north of the city where I could see the milky way and not be shooting toward the bright lights of Edmonton.

It’s difficult to focus on anything when it’s dark out. A little trick that I read about was to use the live view feature on my camera, zoom it all the way in and point it to a bright star, light on the distant horizon or a planet and focus. You know what? It works. My stars turned out crisp.

Oh yeah, crisp stars? Well if your shutter speed is too long you will start to get star trails or arcs of light. Google the rule of 600 to find the best shutter speed for focal length of lens that you are using. The shorter the lens, the longer the shutter speed you can use.

Exposure? I also Googled that to get a starting point. That is a work in progress. Finding the best combination of high ISO and low noise to get the least grainy but sharpest images.  That I am still figuring out. Last night I used ISO 6400 and F2 at 8 seconds. I could have used F1.4 but chose to stop the lens down a bit for a little better quality. That too is an experiment right now.

And then there comes the processing. My RAW image looks nothing like the final. I am still trying to figure my way through processing night skies. After using Photoshop at work for over twenty years I am finding new ways to use that program that I hadn’t before.

The result above is not a work of art but a work in progress. It is a matter of taking little steps and learning something new every time out. Once I think that I have the mechanical part down where I don’t have to think about it then I’ll start on getting creative. It’s a whole new world for me to photograph and I look forward to that journey.

Standing still is never a good thing. Twenty years from now if I am still alive and taking photos I hope to still be learning. There’s nothing as annoying as a know it all and right now I feel like I know very little. It’s a great feeling.

Happy shooting,

Dan