Archive for the ‘landscape’ Category
Thursday, September 2nd, 2010
Cherry Mountain and the distant Presidential Range as seen from Pondicherry National Wildlife Refuge in New Hampshire's White Mountains.
I am currently spending a few days in New Hampshire's White Mountains thanks to a couple of speaking engagements. The White Mountains are the place where I became hooked on nature photography 20 years ago. Marcy and I had just moved to Boston and for some reason we decided to give hiking a try even though it wasn't something either one of us grew up with. I still remember our first two hikes like they were yesterday – an easy valley walk into Zealand Falls followed the next day by an above-treeline adventure on Mount Jefferson. To say these hikes changed our lives is a bit of an understatement. At the time, we lived and worked in the city, Marcy in human resources and me in computer programming. Going to live music clubs and Fenway Park were our usual forms of entertainment, but after glimpsing the vast Pemgiwasset Wilderness and the world of glacial cirques and alpine wildflowers so close to home, we quickly converted to weekend backpackers and peak baggers. Within a year, I met Galen Rowell at a book signing and I suddenly knew I had a new calling in life. It took another decade to hone my skills and shake the chains of the programming cubicle, but it was worth the wait.
"The Whites" were easily my biggest inspiration when I became a photographer and most of my favorite images from my first ten years of shooting come from there. At first, my main goal was to make the best "calendar" style images I could, but as I learned of the history of the region I became more interested in conservation. In the second half of the 19th century, the White Mountains became one of the premier tourist destinations in America, as the region became known through the paintings of Hudson River School painters like Thomas Cole and writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ironically, by the early 20th century, the Whites were also the scene of some of the most unsustainable logging practices in the country. Through the efforts of groups led by the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, the Weeks Act was passed in 1911, establishing the national forest system east of the Mississippi and then the White Mountain National Forest. Our book, White Mountain Wilderness, tells the story of the "rewilding" of the region that followed.
My experiences in the White Mountains led to my decision to focus my photography efforts on conservation in New England, and I have since worked on close to 100 land conservation projects in the region since I left that cubicle job. Ironically, that means the bulk of my time is spent in places other then the White Mountains, as these projects primarily involve unprotected private lands outside of the Whites, so it is great to have times like this weekend to get a few moments to shoot familiar landscapes like the opening shot in this post from Pondicherry National Wildlife Refuge. While nature photographers as a group like to explore and shoot in new and exotic landscapes, I find it is equally important to have favorite places you can revisit time and time again. This gives you the opportunity to see a place in different lighting conditions and seasons, and as you get to know a place you inevitably start to see the place in new ways. I also find that going back to the same place over and over results in a more relaxed approach. Last Friday night at Pondicherry (a place I've shot probably a dozen times), I felt no pressure to produce because I already have plenty of Pondicherry images in my files. This freed me from the need to produce a bunch of images that describe every inch of the place and instead I could focus on just looking for one or two nice images if the light worked out. (It also allowed me to not regret missing some photo ops while I sat for an hour hoping the black bear I saw ahead on the trail would return – he didn't.)
Big Cherry Pond, Pondicherry National Wildlife Refugre in New Hampshire's White Mountains.
I find that shooting in familiar places is a necessary diversion from other work and the best place to practice new techniques that you can then use during those trips to new places or when on assignment. Nailing down technique when there's no pressure can make or break a photo shoot in a new location when you have limited time. Soon, I'm heading to the Lake Sunapee region of New Hampshire for a one day assignment on a property I've never been to before. Having tricks in my bag that I know how to execute ahead of time gives me the confidence that I'll do a decent job as long as the weather cooperates.
Until next time…
-Jerry
Find out more about Jerry at his website, and follow him on Twitter at @jerrymonkman
Tags: Conservation, EcoPhotography, jerry monkman, Photo Trips, the Creative Side
Posted in Articles, landscape, viewpoint | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010
Editors note: We are proud to welcome Royce Howland to the OPG blog! Hailing from Calgary, Alberta, Royce is a consultant in the IT industry and is an accomplished wildlife and landscape photographer. Look for more articles from Royce soon in the areas of HDR and the digital darkroom. You can learn more about Royce and view his spectacular images at his website: Vivid Aspect Photography.
A joke about being self-employed goes like this — "Thank God it’s Friday! Only two more working days until Monday." Another one was pointed out to me by a friend — "Being self-employed, you get to work half-days. And you even get to choose which 12 hours you work!" Ha ha, only serious. As somebody with a non-photography day job and doing photography on the side, I don't always get to spend my time the way I would choose. Two serious pursuits to fit into each week, each with challenging and necessary ways to spend a lot of time… well, there are only so many hours. It's easy to get bogged down in the work of it all. But it's also important to preserve some time to focus on creativity.
On a recent weekend, I had a ton of work to accomplish and was busily chipping away at it as one of a series of powerful storm systems blew through Calgary. After taking a break to visit family on Sunday evening, on the drive home my wife and I watched huge cloud formations surrounding the city. I was tired, it was getting late, I still had more work to do, and so I figured I’d lost yet another chance to photograph some incredible stormy weather. But when we got home, I decided to set my work aside and try to do some image making given the opportunity created by the weather.
I grabbed my camera, threw some gear in the car, and drove east towards Shepard as fast as I reasonably could. I was chasing what looked like a super cell, trying to get to a useful location out in the prairie farm areas east of the big city, where I could find some kind of view. Unfortunately, the storm cell was fleeing away from me to the southeast at a pretty fast rate, and into a zone where I could see it was losing the light. Suddenly, as I wove my way through some back roads, I came across a field of canola in full bloom on the north side of the road. It was the only crop I saw this far developed, and due north of it was one of the other thunderheads that was putting on its own show of strength. Yee-haw!
There were no foreground objects of interest, but who cares — a field and big sky is the essential prairie setting. I screeched to a halt, grabbed the tripod and camera, and ran across the road in the growing gloom to set up and make a few exposures. Yes! I knew I was capturing something good. I felt energized again, gaining the strength to swat at the trillions of mosquitoes that descended upon me, out for blood. I even maintained the presence of mind to consider composition possibilities, and framed both vertical and horizontal orientations that would be useful for different layouts. This cloud formation was the only one of all in view to maintain light right up to the end. My gamble had paid off. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good, but what I have learned is that if I'm persistent I can also make my own luck.
When I could tolerate the vicious mozzie attacks no more, I packed up and headed home. My total time for storm chasing ended up being only about two hours; not a bad diversion! Another couple of hours of work still awaited me that night… and of course now I had the new task of developing my storm images, too. But hey, cowboy up — it’s only sleep.
Visit Royce’s web site at http://www.vividaspectphoto.com/.
Tags: #ad_1, Royce Howland, storm chasing, storms, time
Posted in Articles, commentary, landscape, viewpoint | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
Grand Tetons, HDR Stitched Panorama – ©2010 Juan A. Pons (click to enlarge)
I am not much of a landscape photographer, I tend to concentrate more on wildlife, but sometimes the landscape is so majestic, as it is in the Grand Tetons, that it is hard to make a bad image. I made this image (MAKE SURE to click on it to enlarge it) last week during my Spring Yellowstone & Grand Tetons photo workshop. We had some pretty uncooperative weather the first few days we where there, but we had a few occasions during those rainy days where we had a pretty clear view of the mountains.
That morning, I took the opportunity to make a large HDR & stitched panorama. This image was made by taking 18 individual frames. Here is a quick rundown of the process to making an image such as this.
- First you need a sturdy tripod and a good tripod head
- Level the base of your tripod as best as you can (having a bubble level on the tripod helps)
- Level your camera as best as you can (use a bubble level on your cameras hot shoe)
- For this panorama I kept my camera horizontally, but sometimes it makes sense to set the camera in a vertical orientation, and a good “L” bracket is a must for this.
- Pan your camera from left to right while looking thru the viewfinder to make sure your camera is level.
- While panning also make sure you are capturing all of the elements of the landscape you plan on including. In the image above, I had to make sure I had a wide enough lens to capture the top of the mountain and the foreground.
- Set your camera on manual mode and manual focus.
- Point your camera to the most important or prominent part of the landscape.
- Focus and set your exposure appropriately.
- Take a picture of your hand or create some other kind of marker to make it easier to spot your HDR and/or panoramas when you download your images.
- Set the HDR bracket on your camera. In this case I used a 3 image bracket, -2, 0, +2 to capture the brightest part of the image as well as some of the darker parts.
- Swing your camera all the way to the left (or to the right, it’s up to you).
- Using a remote control or the timer on your camera take the first bracket set.
- Swing your camera right (or left) while overlapping at least 1/3 of the image. What works for me is to peer thru my viewfinder, while fixating on an element of the landscape that is about 1/3 into the image from the right of the frame, then swing my camera right until that element is about 1/3 from the left of the frame.
- Continue doing this until you you reach the end of your panorama.
Now you’ve completed half of the work, next up you need to process those images. In the case of the image above of the Grand Tetons, I ended up with a panorama that was 6 images wide, and since I created a 3 image bracket for each I ended up with a total of 18 images that I needed to work with. Keep in mind that the more images you create, the longer the processing is going to take and the more memory you will need on your computer to work with the image. Just to give you an idea, my final image file, after HDR, stitching and cropping came out to a 50MegaPixel image, at about 1GB in size!!!
Here is a basic workflow for creating the final HDR, stitched image:
- Select the most important or prominent bracket set from all the images you took.
- Bring those images into Photomatix and work the settings in Photomatix to create the look you want. There is no ONE right set of settings here; They will certainly vary depending on the subject, the bracket set, and your taste. In my case I prefer a more realistic look.
- Once you have worked the settings in Photomatix to make the image the way you like it, save those settings as a “preset,” make sure to name it something that you’ll recall back in a few minutes.
- Now go back into Photomatix and under the “Automate” menu select “Batch Processing…”
- Here you want to provide Photomatix with all the files you took for this HDR stitched panorama, in my case all 18 images. Also you need to tell Photomatix how many images you had in each bracket set, again in my case 3, and then tell it which preset to use; the one you created in the step above.
- Let Photomatix process all your images and when finished, the result will be one HDR processed image for each one of your bracket sets.
We are not done quite yet. Now you need to stitch the images together. In my case I use Photoshop to do the stitching but there are other excellent tools that also do a great job.
So bring those HDR images (in my case 6 of them) into your stitching program and let it go thru the images and merge them together into one image.
Now you are ready to do some of your final processing on the image. First make sure your horizon is level, crop the image as necessary or use the new content aware fill in Photoshop CS5 to fill in those empty spaces, and make all your contrast, color and sharpening adjustments you normally would do. Remember at this point you are dealing with a BIG file so make sure your computer is up to the task.
That is it! I hope you found this quick tutorial on HDR stitched panoramas useful. As always if you have any specific questions, feel free to post them in the comments below.
If you don’t own Photomatix and are interested in getting a copy, you can get a 15% discount when purchasing Photomatix, simply make sure to use this code upon checkout: “OPG15” to receive the discount.
Here are a few other articles on DPE on both HDR and Stitched panoramas that I thought you might find useful.
Keep up with Juan on The Digital Photo Experience and learn about Juan's workshops at Wild Nature Tours.
Tags: Juan Pons, panorama, Photo Tips, stitch
Posted in Articles, HDR, Workshops, landscape | No Comments »
Monday, June 21st, 2010
Reposted with permission from the Induro blog.
Professionally, one of my most important pieces of equipment is my tripod. It took me several years before I started using a tripod for all my photography and it was one of the biggest ‘ah-ha’ moments I’ve had since becoming a photographer nearly twenty years ago. In those twenty years I’ve had more than my share of tripods. Early on, I never fully appreciated the importance of quality when it came to tripods, and subsequently went through more than my share of tripods. I tell a story of a tripod I broke before I ever got it out of the car to use. Over time, my trials have taught me the importance of a quality tripod. It is literally the foundation for all good landscape photography.
©Brian Rueb
I recently conducted a workshop and shoot in the Columbia River Gorge of Oregon. This type of environment throws everything at you, and there is no better way to test the durability of a tripod. Water, mud, rugged terrain—this area has it all. I’m using an Induro Carbon Fiber 213 and BHD2 Ballhead. The first thing I appreciate when photographing in an environment like this is the weight. My whole tripod weighs less than 5 pounds. When you’re walking mile upon mile up steep trails, and down slippery mossy rock slopes, the last thing you want is extra weight. Most new cameras weigh enough as it is.
©Brian Rueb
Induro tripods also come with durable foot pegs that work perfectly in extreme environments such as this. Whether in the mud, on slick rock surfaces, or in rare instances on flat ground, the tripod worked like a charm, and held firm. Most tripod pegs aren’t removable, and it’s a constant struggle to make sure you’re screwing out the pegs properly, and the pegs just don’t have a rugged feel to them. The Induro pegs are hearty, to be sure. One photographer in my group commented, “Looks like you could kill a bear with those things.” They’re tough and they work, although I haven’t had to use them on any bears yet.
©Brian Rueb
My style of photography involves immersing myself and my gear in rivers, streams, and the ocean. The 213 worked great! Even when the current of the creek was racing, I had great stability for my camera. One instance that comes to mind was a long hike I made into a remote section of the Gorge where the best way to capture the image I had in mind was from in the middle of the creek. I spent roughly 45 minutes with the tripod in the water
©Brian Rueb
I was very pleased with how well the legs continued to open and close even after being submerged. This doesn’t mean tripods still don’t need to be properly wiped and dried when the day is done, but it worked brilliantly through that morning, as well as the duration of the trip. For this trip I hiked over 20 miles and saw eleven different waterfalls, which required me getting in the water to photograph most of them.
©Brian Rueb
I put my gear through a lot, and I really expect a lot out of it. The 213 performed at a high level throughout. A shoot like this puts a tripod through a tremendous amount of work. The last thing any photographer wants is to worry more about gear than creating images. My Induro never left me feeling let down, or worried when making my shots. I just hope I don’t run into any bears.
Brian Rueb is a professional landscape and wildlife photographer living in Northern California. When he is not in the field or spending time with his family, he teaches infield workshops with the Aperture Academy, and this summer will spend 65-days photographing the beauty of Iceland, where he will confidently put his Induro Tripod through extreme conditions of every kind, and, most likely, not have to kill a bear. You can follow his journey here.
See Induro tripods and other products in the OPG store here.
Tags: Brian Rueb, induro, landscape photography, Outdoor Photography
Posted in Articles, Featured Products, landscape, tripods | No Comments »
Thursday, June 10th, 2010
A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I traveled to a location that I've always wanted to photograph . . . Yosemite. I must tell you, it did not disappoint. We stayed in a little B&B called " Yosemite Blue Butterfly Inn". It's located in El Portal, just a few minutes outside the west entrance of the park. The proprietors, Liz and Ron, are a wonderful couple that really go out of their way to make you feel at home. I highly recommend this B&B if you're traveling without kids and want a nice, relaxing place to stay. Our first full day there was on a Saturday. My wife and I decided to use that day to drive around (our rental car and the shuttle) and get a feel for the layout of the park. I wanted to know how long it took to get from certain locations to another. Later, this would help me get to where I wanted to be, when I wanted to be there. We're always chasing that light you know.
Here is a sample set of the shots I brought back from Yosemite:
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| Cathedral Rocks |
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| Tunnel View: El Capitan is on the left and Bridalveil Falls is on the right |
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| El Capitan as seen from Valley View |
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| Upper Yosemite Falls |
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| Small rapids east of the Pohono Bridge |
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| This is an Anna's Hummingbird I photographed while having breakfast at the B&B |
There is no shortage of opportunities for photographs in the park. When getting around, I'd recommend that you don't just stick to using the shuttle. While convenient in the valley, the shuttle's range will not take you to many of the park's wonders. That will require a car and/or hiking. I spent a week there and only scratched the surface. I can already see many more trips there in the future.
I hope you enjoyed these images–maybe they inspired you to visit Yosemite!
–Scott
Tags: landscape, national parks, Scott Flaherty, Yosemite
Posted in Articles, landscape, vision | No Comments »
Monday, June 7th, 2010
Near the Appalachian Trail in Maine.
I spent two days backpacking on the Appalachian Trail in May. It was my first time spending a night in the backcountry this year, and it felt great to be out. The smell of balsam fir was intense along this section of trail, conjuring all kinds of great memories of hikes past. I was working on a project that has great potential.
Paper birches next to stream.
I spent day one in a light drizzle, which provided great diffuse light for photos like this one of paper birches next to a stream. To keep my gear dry, I used that most advanced piece of equipment known as an umbrella. I use various camera and lens covers in the rain, but I still find that I prefer to use an umbrella clamped to my my tripod. The only other accessory I used for this shot was a polarizer, which I consider to be required for shooting forest scenes like this in order to really bring out the colors of the forest.
Camping on the Appalachian Trail in Maine.
Luckily, day 2 was sunny and breezy so my clothes and camping gear dried out pretty quickly. I used a Lensbaby for the above shot. I’ve always found it challenging to shoot camp scenes in fresh ways, and the Lensbaby was a fun way to mix it up a bit. While my socks dried out in an hour or two, they were soaked again pretty quickly as the trail that day was covered in about two and half feet of wet snow above 3700 feet. It’s melting fast though and the trail below the snow line was a running freshet for about half a mile.
Near the Appalachian Trail in Maine.
This boggy area was filled with fresh moose sign. I spent about five hours hanging out and waiting for moose with no luck though. I could also see the bog from much of that day’s hike, but no moose sighting. Maybe there weren’t enough flies yet to drive the moose out into the open. Still it was a cool place to hang out, knowing that they were around somewhere. After the hike, I drove to Bar Harbor to shoot a photo tips video for the Appalachian Mountain Club.
Until next time…
-Jerry
Find out more about Jerry at his website, and follow him on Twitter at @jerrymonkman
Tags: adventure, appalachian trail, backpacking, camping, conservation photography, EcoPhotography, hiking, jerry monkman, maine, Nature Photography, Photo Trips, photography
Posted in Articles, landscape, vision | No Comments »
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Storm Chasing On a Time Budget
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010Editors note: We are proud to welcome Royce Howland to the OPG blog! Hailing from Calgary, Alberta, Royce is a consultant in the IT industry and is an accomplished wildlife and landscape photographer. Look for more articles from Royce soon in the areas of HDR and the digital darkroom. You can learn more about Royce and view his spectacular images at his website: Vivid Aspect Photography.
A joke about being self-employed goes like this — "Thank God it’s Friday! Only two more working days until Monday." Another one was pointed out to me by a friend — "Being self-employed, you get to work half-days. And you even get to choose which 12 hours you work!" Ha ha, only serious. As somebody with a non-photography day job and doing photography on the side, I don't always get to spend my time the way I would choose. Two serious pursuits to fit into each week, each with challenging and necessary ways to spend a lot of time… well, there are only so many hours. It's easy to get bogged down in the work of it all. But it's also important to preserve some time to focus on creativity.
On a recent weekend, I had a ton of work to accomplish and was busily chipping away at it as one of a series of powerful storm systems blew through Calgary. After taking a break to visit family on Sunday evening, on the drive home my wife and I watched huge cloud formations surrounding the city. I was tired, it was getting late, I still had more work to do, and so I figured I’d lost yet another chance to photograph some incredible stormy weather. But when we got home, I decided to set my work aside and try to do some image making given the opportunity created by the weather.
I grabbed my camera, threw some gear in the car, and drove east towards Shepard as fast as I reasonably could. I was chasing what looked like a super cell, trying to get to a useful location out in the prairie farm areas east of the big city, where I could find some kind of view. Unfortunately, the storm cell was fleeing away from me to the southeast at a pretty fast rate, and into a zone where I could see it was losing the light. Suddenly, as I wove my way through some back roads, I came across a field of canola in full bloom on the north side of the road. It was the only crop I saw this far developed, and due north of it was one of the other thunderheads that was putting on its own show of strength. Yee-haw!
There were no foreground objects of interest, but who cares — a field and big sky is the essential prairie setting. I screeched to a halt, grabbed the tripod and camera, and ran across the road in the growing gloom to set up and make a few exposures. Yes! I knew I was capturing something good. I felt energized again, gaining the strength to swat at the trillions of mosquitoes that descended upon me, out for blood. I even maintained the presence of mind to consider composition possibilities, and framed both vertical and horizontal orientations that would be useful for different layouts. This cloud formation was the only one of all in view to maintain light right up to the end. My gamble had paid off. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good, but what I have learned is that if I'm persistent I can also make my own luck.
When I could tolerate the vicious mozzie attacks no more, I packed up and headed home. My total time for storm chasing ended up being only about two hours; not a bad diversion! Another couple of hours of work still awaited me that night… and of course now I had the new task of developing my storm images, too. But hey, cowboy up — it’s only sleep.
Visit Royce’s web site at http://www.vividaspectphoto.com/.
Tags: #ad_1, Royce Howland, storm chasing, storms, time
Posted in Articles, commentary, landscape, viewpoint | No Comments »