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

It’s easy to imitate… difficult to create

Things continue to be slow in central Alberta. Piles of ice and dirt line the rural roads of the farmland around me. It aint pretty. Every year there is a slow time, a time when I don’t bother getting out to take photos. Barring a blizzard or a trip to the mountains to catch the last of winter, my camera gear sits until the middle of May.

There are a few ongoing projects that I’m working on to keep me busy until things go green. In the mean time I’ve been scouring the web. I find it inspirational when I come upon a photographer who does something different or better than the rest of the pack. Photographers like those seem few and far between.  When I find one I am quick to bookmark him/her and frequently check out their website. Take a peak at Alex Noriega if you get a chance. He’s got a beautiful eye for composition and processing.

Having worked in the arts for over thirty years, creativity is something that I admire. It is creativity above all else that sets the leaders apart from the followers. It might not be important to you to NOT look like everyone else but I think that it should.

Whether you have commercial or creative aspirations with your photography it is important to set yourself apart from the crowd.

Have you ever seen the clips on the news where some artist was pumping out high quality forgeries or copies of masters and pawning them off to unsuspecting buyers? Have you ever wondered why someone who is so talented to be able to copy the Mona Lisa stroke for stroke doesn’t create original art of their own? It’s because copying anything, an idea or a technique is the easiest part of the arts. The most difficult part is the conception and finally the execution of that idea.

How does that relate to the Alberta landscape? All you have to do is go to any popular photo sharing website and type in the words Banff or Jasper. I guarantee you that the first dozen pages will have more photos taken from the same half a dozen spots than not. From looking at those pages you would guess that there aren’t any other beautiful places in the parks. That is so wrong.

It’s a source of both amusement and amazement that someone who drives twelve hours to Banff manages only to photograph Mount Rundle or Moraine Lake or the ice bubbles on Abraham Lake. Really? That’s what happens. There’s very little creativity involved in that. Plant yourself on the shores of Vermillion Lake and wait for the sun to rise. Do some really heavy Photoshopping and what do you get? Another of a gazillion of the same photos from the same place during the same time of day.

There’s a good reason for that. To many shooters their artistic success is directly related to the number of follows or likes they get on 500px or 1x or wherever it is they post. It’s an ego boost. It’s all about playing it safe.

I know this from shooting fashion. Give me a world class model and I will look like a world class photographer. Give me someone to photograph off the street and I have to work hard to get anything near as glamorous. The part that most of todays popular web photographers don’t get is that they’re not growing by taking the easy way out. Twenty years from now they’ll be the same photographers that they are now. Stuck in a rut of trying to please others when really, fame is fleeting and unimportant.

Happy shooting,

Dan

Before the sun rises

Winter here in central Alberta started off being one of the best I can remember for landscape photography. We were treated to a few weeks of very special weather. Lots of freshly fallen snow. Hoar frost that seemingly lasted forever. Mornings of thick fog with the low angle of the sun extending the shooting time to almost noon. It was great.

Then came December. Kind of okay. January. Blecch! January was almost a whole month of gray, white sky days. The snow was looking old. The frost had long since left the trees. The Alberta prairie looked featureless.

Here we are in mid-February and winter looks like it might be winding down. I know better than to think that this is the end of the white, fluffy stuff. We’ve had too many Marches where there have been blizzards dumping oodles of snow and creating serpentine drifts across the prairie.

I still have plenty of photos to process from the good days. Giving yourself some distance from your photography is always a good thing. It’s easy to look at something that you have just photographed or processed and NOT see the photo for what it really is. Our memory of taking the picture strongly influences how we see it. Ever notice how your favorite photo looks different to you two or three years later? It usually doesn’t look so good? That’s what I’m talking about.

The photos that I keep coming back to lately are the photos taken about half an hour before the sun has risen above the horizon. It’s an almost magical time. The light is softer. More things are hidden than are revealed. The light is quieter if that makes sense.

Mornings are arriving earlier by the day. During the shortest days of the year the sun was rising around 8:45 a.m. That would allow me to get up when I pleased and still be up for sunrise. Today the sun rises almost an hour earlier and a month from now another hour earlier.

Pretty soon we’ll be heading into the longest days of the year which means being up around 4:0oo a.m. to get the same kind of light. Then I won’t be photographing whites and blues but instead greens. Spring is around the corner and so are the early sunrises

Happy shooting,

Dan

Shooting the landscape or let’s play follow the leader

I think that I photographed my first landscape when I was in my late teens. That would have been in the late sixties or early seventies.

Of course there was no internet to see what kind of photos were being taken at the time. My choices were limited to coffee table books or magazines. Being a teenager I didn’t have much in the way of disposable income so I spent plenty of time in the library poring through both.

The most difficult thing in the arts is not the execution of what you do but rather the conception or the creative process. It is easier for a technically proficient painter to copy the Mona Lisa than it is for them to create it. And that is also how it goes for landscape photography.

Not every egg that a salmon spawns produces an adult. The creative process is like that. You grow creatively through both your failures and your successes. Over the years I have probably edited thousands of other photographers photos to be used in layouts. I chuckle when I read the term professional because it conjures up images of every shot being a keeper. That is the farthest thing from the truth. Before the days of auto focus and auto exposure cameras it was unbelievable how many images were technically bad. Today’s cameras have made photography that much easier in technical terms. What all the microchips and sensors cannot do is make you a better artist.

We still have to learn that the old fashioned way through trial and error. A photographer just starting out will usually see a photo that they like and make a conscious effort to copy it. I think that is the easiest and quickest way for most of u. It’s kind of like taking batting practice. You keep swinging at the ball in practice getting your timing down until you have enough muscle memory to start playing the game.

That’s how you get your training wheels. Do that enough times and you should be good enough to ride the bike without anyone or anything holding you up. When you’ve reached that point is when the fun really begins. It’s time to spread your wings and express your creativity in your photos. Or is it?

I see an ugly trend on some of the photo sharing websites. Many long time photographers, established photographers are playing the game of monkey see monkey do. There are more followers than leaders. More technicians than artists.

Many, many years ago, I bought myself a 17 mm lens for my slr. I loved the look that it gave my landscapes. One weekend I was out ice fishing. It was early in the winter. We had enough cold temperatures to freeze the local lakes but very little snow had fallen. What snow that was on the ground had been blown into the bushes and off the lake. What was left on the lake were all kinds of incredible shapes and bubbles in the ice. The transparent ice held thousands of cracks. I put the fishing on hold, grabbed my camera and spent the morning with my face pointing downward.

Until a year ago I had seen very few ice photos like this on the internet then this winter like a bad cold they started appearing everywhere I happened to go or so it seemed. WTF? It wasn’t as if all of these people accidentally started seeing the same way, no, it was that they all started copying one another. There’s nothing wrong with copying someone else but I think that when you pick up your camera your intention is to create.

Remember what I wrote about the Mona Lisa? Banff National Park is a large national park. Besides it being right on the trans Canada highway, why is it that so many photographers will drive hundreds and thousand of kilometers and end up photographing Mount Rundle and Vermillion Lakes? There are more beautiful and unique spots in Banff. Maybe this is just my nature, needing to be different. Since I started visiting Banff as a toddler and now as a fellow in his late fifties, I have never once taken a photo of Mount Rundle. There always seemed to be a better place to go.

The copy catting is good up to a point. If your goal is to produce photos like everyone else by all means find your favorite photographer and mark down on the map where they have taken their pics and get out there. Pay for a photo tour or a workshop and I can practically guarantee that you’ll come away as a better copy cat than an artist.

I understand that not everyone feels the way that I do. I have not felt the need to conform in fact part of me is rebellious. Tell me that I cannot do something and that will probably motivate me to do it so when I am shooting landscapes a part of me, a large part of me does not want to be a part of the mainstream.

Right? Wrong? I dunno. Only you can decide how far you want to take your creativity. Play it safe or live on the wild side. If you’re not taking photos for the adulation and “likes” of your fellow internet photographers the choice is easy.

Happy shooting,

Dan

Living in a winter wonderland

I went out earlier this morning in the hope that it would be a repeat of or something close to yesterday. It wasn’t. No fog was to be seen. The magnificent hoar frost that adorned everything yesterday morning was gone.

So I drove and drove. I got out once to shoot a morning horizon that will probably be deleted and never be seen by anyone. That’s how it sometimes goes.

It was a great morning again for wildlife. I had a whitetail deer hop in front of my vehicle and minutes later came upon a cow moose and two of her young standing in the middle of a frozen swamp chewing on willows. And then there was the red fox standing in the middle of a snow covered field, ears pointed forward, coiled and ready to pounce on whatever it heard beneath the snow. It was a great morning to be outdoors.

I sometime feel like I am the only one who notices these things so close to our city. I know that not to be true but as the vehicles pass by me on their way to work or the city, it’s easy to forget that everyday life sometimes gets in the way of appreciating the beauty of the seasons.

Happy shooting,

Dan

ps. The above shot is not from today but one of the many, many winter shots I took the day before.

Winter, the best season?

What an incredible morning it was. After a bleak January where I only went out once to shoot landscapes, today made up for that.

I was out the door an hour before sunrise which today was 8:12 a.m. I really prefer the shorter days. Already they are getting noticeably longer. It’s great to be able to get up normally and still be able to shoot the sunrise.

I never saw the sunrise this morning. At first it looked like it might make a showing. Half an hour before sunrise above the low lying fog I could see stratus clouds starting to turn magenta and purple. Usually a good sign. Twenty minutes later I was in fog so thick that I could hardly see the road in front of me. A few hours later I was seriously afraid for my life as I waited to cross a highway to get back home. The fog was so heavy and the traffic still moving dangerously fast. When the road seemed clear and it was safe to proceed an fast moving semi would blast out of the fog and cross my intended path. What to do? I rolled down both drivers and passenger windows, turned off the vent fan and turned the radio off. I could hear the vehicles long before I could see them.

I watched and listened for five minutes before I determined when it was safe to cross. An hour later I came across a Peace Officer for the county. As I told him about my adventure he informed me that there was a major accident and the highway was closed where I crossed. I missed that accident by half an hour.

I only saw the sun just before noon. A thick covering of hoar frost was covering everything. It was like being a child and going to Disney World for the first time. I was in awe at how beautiful the previously bleak landscape looked.

I shot so much that I took a break to stop by the side of the road where the fog had temporarily lifted to watch a young of the year moose eating willow twigs not twenty meters from me while her mother nervously watched  from the other side of the road over a hundred meters away. I drove off to let mom and daughter re-unite.

It’s mornings like this that have me believe that winter is easily my favorite season to photograph. From bleak to magical in less than a day. Incredible!

Happy shooting,

Dan

ps. This was among the last things that I photographed. The fog was lifting and the blue sky above starting to make an appearance. By the time I headed home it was easy driving.

The beauty of the long Canadian winter night

Cloudless skies. I was watching the forecast for cloudless skies. For me that is strange. I am usually looking for early foggy mornings with a smattering of clouds across the sky.

I’ve been eager to try something different. The weather here has been terrible for landscapes for the last few weeks. I was out once in January and here it is the fifth of February, my second trip to take photos this year.

This was my first serious try at night time photography. I recently discovered Royce Bair’s excellent astro-landscape photo blog which provided a large dose of inspiration and information.

I learned for example that not any night is good for shooting the night sky. Once you are far enough away from the bright lights of the city, the light of the moon can easily over power many of the stars you might otherwise see. Monday night there was no moon above the horizon until after midnight. By that time I was at home asleep.

The photo above is not a single exposure. I made a few exposures with a little bit of twilight on the horizon to get the orange/yellow that you see and then another exposure two hours after sun down. The two exposures were blended together in Photoshop and with much tweaking this is the result.

Probably the most difficult part of the whole process was sitting and waiting for the sky to become dark. During that time I had numerous vehicles drive by. I’m sure they were all suspicious of the strange vehicle sitting in the dark.

Standing alone in the middle of the prairie at night was breathtaking. The sky seemed alive with light. So many more stars than I am used to seeing.

This is my clumsy first attempt. If you really want to be dazzled, check out Royce’s blog. It is truly inspiration.

Happy shooting,

Dan