Day one of the Mt.Rainier workshop that I am co-leading with DPE podcast co-host Juan Pons was spectacular. Here are a few of my shots - and a few tips.
Above: Expose for the highlights. Move the histogram to the right - but make sure you don't have spike on the right. Also, get up super early to capture the sunrise. You can rest when you are dead. :-)
Above: Use slow shutter speeds to blur moving water. Start with a 1 second exposure and then try 2, 3 and 4 second exposures.
Above: Compose with different lenses. Here I used a Canon 14mm lens on my Canon 5 D Mark II to capture an extremely wide-angle view of the this beautiful waterfall. The lens is actually "seeing" ahead and down at the same time.
Above: Look for texture. The moss surrounding this waterfall adds a nice texture to the flowing water.
"Hurricane Hal," formerly known as Bull Schmitt from the Light Photographic Workshops, is here in Croton on Hudson, New York shooting with me - because Hurricane Irene washed out his B&H seminar.
Today we photographed waterfalls - large and small. Here are a few tips, from Hurricane Hal and me, for capturing the beauty of flowing water.
• Use a tripod - to steady your camera during long exposures. • Shoot at 1 second or more to blur moving water. • Pack a ND (Neutral Density) filter, which will let you shoot at slow shutter speeds in bright light. • A polarizing filter can also reduce the amount of light entering the lens. • Use your camera's self-timer or a cable release to avoid camera shake during a long exposure. • Check your histogram to check your exposure. • Bring a lens cloth to keep your lens clean. • Use Live View to check your scene - composition, focus and exposure. Zoom in for precise focus.
Hurricane Hal and I hope to see you at the California Photo Fest in October in California.
After a busy break, Chris from OPG is back on the DPE podcast as the "Gear Guru". He'll be featuring a group of gear each podcast, and discussing that gear with Juan.
Both Rick and Juan love answering your questions. No question is too basic or too advanced, so if you have questions you would like answered, please send them on in and they’ll get to it pretty soon. You can send your questions via email to or click on the “Contact us” button on the top of the http://dpexperience.com website.
The DPE podcast is sponsored by the amazing folks at SmugMug. Make sure to check them out and if you sign up by following this link, you get an awesome 20% off your first year! How cool is that!
This is Episode number 34 of the Digital Photo Experience Podcast with Rick Sammon & Juan Pons.
Make sure to subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here: DPExperience Podcast on iTunes so you don’t miss a single episode.
Listen to the podcast here: [audio:http://dpexperience.com/podcast/Episodes/DPE-20110501.mp3]
I first met Chris Klapheke, founder/owner/operator of Outdoor Photo Gear, during a workshop I was co-leading in December 2008, in Bosque del Apache, New Mexico. We met during the event that Chris eloquently describes below, and exquisitely illustrates above.
I was new to the area, but Chris had been there several times before.
Day one of the workshop: Not only was I freezing, but I needed some help with finding the best shooting locations. Chris took me under his wing, so to speak, and helped me, and all the members of the group, get some knockout images.
Chris is a humble dude. You never hear him brag about his photographs, yet he is one of the best outdoor photographers I know. Recently, I asked him to jot down a caption for the image you see here. Well, Chris is the kind of guy who goes above and beyond in everything he does (most recently when it comes to customer service at Outdoor Photo Gear). Below is the “caption” that Chris sent me.
• • •
My alarm clock went off at 4:30 am in the Super 8 motel in Socorro, New Mexico. A sleepy little town about an hour south of Albuquerque, Socorro is the gateway town to the Bosque del Apache national wildlife refuge.
At 4:30 in the morning in Socorro in December, it’s darn cold. Fumbling awake, I checked the temperature: 12 below zero. Great. No, wait a minute—Great! Yesterday was a nice warm day in Bosque, with plenty of sun. That means, with this brutally cold morning, that any water that was shallow enough to warm up would be emitting a rare substance in the desert winter—steam.
When you get a nice warm day and a shivering cold morning, you can have steam rising from some of the ponds in Bosque. And when you get that steam and a clear sunrise, you have a chance to capture one of the “holy grail” shots from Bosque —birds in a golden mist of light.
Bosque del Apache has an avian cycle that repeats itself daily during the winter. Tens of thousands of Snow Geese and Sandhill Cranes spend the winter in Bosque. Each night, all those birds seek out water as a resting place for the night, where they are safe from predators such as the coyote. In the morning, through some hidden communication, the birds will start taking off out of the lakes and ponds. If you’re lucky, they will all take off at once, in what is called a “blastoff”. The sky becomes so thick with birds that sometimes the sky is nearly blocked out. It’s noisy, and you better wear a hat.
To experience this blastoff, and to get some fantastic images, photographers start setting up and jockeying for position in the cold dark. Depending on the wind and the light conditions, photographers scramble for the best views. You can glance down the road and it looks like the Olympics or a Space Shuttle launch—hundreds of long lenses pointed in the same direction.
But that’s not the shot I was after. Soliciting a few hardy members of our workshop, we were going to gamble. In trying for the golden mist shot, you are far away from the action of the refuge blastoff. Many conditions have to fall in place: a warm previous day, a cold cold morning, a clear sunrise, and of course, birds have to be in your chosen pond. You either get the shot, or you come away with a big fat nothing.
To have a chance at this shot, we would have to get off the road and crunch across frozen swampy grass to get close enough to a small pond. Leaving the road is strictly forbidden in the refuge. So, we scraped our windows, cracked open our chemical hand warmers, grabbed some coffee and headed in the dark to a pond along the road just outside the park.
Pulling off at the exit for the pond, we knew two of our four conditions—the warm day and the cold morning. Now we had to check the other two conditions in the pitch dark. Looking up, we could see the Milky Way spill across the sky. Good. A clear sunrise. As to the birds, it was too dark to see them. So we stood still and listened. We could hear their honks and grunts. The birds were there. All the conditions were in place, so if the birds hung around for sunrise, we’d have about a 60 second window, when the sunrise was just right, to try for the shot.
With hikers’ headlamps on, we carried our gear across the frozen ground toward the pond. We did not want to get too close, for fear of spooking the birds. Enough other things could do that, like coyote, leaving us with nice steam and no subjects. We used a compass to point where the sun would rise. Then we waited in silence (except for chattering teeth) for the sun to rise.
As the eastern sky lightened, our main concern was for the birds to stay put. They like to fly off at sunrise, and we needed them to stay long enough for the sun to pour over the hills and rushes to light the steam coming from the water.
The steam slowly gained color. In looking at my images in sequence, you can see:
Black gray gray gray gold gold GOLD! gold gray gray gray, all in a small amount of time.
Happily, the birds stayed, and the sun lit up the steam like flames. We snapped like maniacs. And only a minute later, it was over. Lots of LCD checks confirmed that we indeed had some good chances. We headed back to the hotel, freezing on the outside, but excited and warm on the inside.
Here's a link to this week's DPE Podcast, full of bird photography tips and other great info:
In this episode of the DPE podcast Rick interviews Chris MacAskill, co-founder of SmugMug, Juan & Rick interview Chris Klapheke, owner of Outdoor Photo Gear, and between the two interviews Rick and Juan answer your questions.
To get the enhanced version of the podcast with images and chapter markers, subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here: DPExperience Podcast on iTunes
Our pal Rick Sammon recently spoke at Google on Digital Photography. Now you can enjoy one of the industry's most entertaining speakers right on your own computer, and learn a few things in the process!
For more information on Rick, his images, his blog and his workshops, click here: Link
Rick and Juan where teaching at the awesome Maui Photo Festival a few weeks back and we took a bit of time to record this quick and easy tip on creating great portrait shots in harsh light situations.
This post started out as just an observation: people all around the world paint their faces. In Brazil (bottom left), the Tarino Indians paint their faces so that when they go into the rain forest, the spirits recognize them and protect them, and help them with their hunt.
My point of that post was going to be that people are basically the same all over the planet – and that experiencing different cultures is a fascinating, rewarding and wonderful learning experience.
In looking at the photographs, however, I remembered that they all had something else in common: catch light in the eyes.
Catch light helps to draw our interest to the eyes. It makes the eyes “sparkle.”
We can add catch light with a reflector or a flash – or by carefully positioning the subject so that sunlight catches the eyes.
Now you know why I never leave home without a reflector or flash.
Explore the light,
Rick
See the diffusers, reflectors and other light modification tools in the OPG Store here.
Here’s the first installment in a series I plan to post on quick lighting tips. Let us know if you want to see more stuff on lighting – indoors and out.
In the top photograph, a remote flash, mounted on a stand and placed in a softbox, was used to freeze the action of the model jumping. Compare the contrast and detail in that image to the second image. That image looks flat, because the day was overcast, and overcast days produce flat lighting.
The pictures below (clockwise, from top left) show:
When the Sun Ignites the Steam by Rick Sammon
Thursday, December 2nd, 2010Hey Gang,
I first met Chris Klapheke, founder/owner/operator of Outdoor Photo Gear, during a workshop I was co-leading in December 2008, in Bosque del Apache, New Mexico. We met during the event that Chris eloquently describes below, and exquisitely illustrates above.
I was new to the area, but Chris had been there several times before.
Day one of the workshop: Not only was I freezing, but I needed some help with finding the best shooting locations. Chris took me under his wing, so to speak, and helped me, and all the members of the group, get some knockout images.
Chris is a humble dude. You never hear him brag about his photographs, yet he is one of the best outdoor photographers I know. Recently, I asked him to jot down a caption for the image you see here. Well, Chris is the kind of guy who goes above and beyond in everything he does (most recently when it comes to customer service at Outdoor Photo Gear). Below is the “caption” that Chris sent me.
• • •
My alarm clock went off at 4:30 am in the Super 8 motel in Socorro, New Mexico. A sleepy little town about an hour south of Albuquerque, Socorro is the gateway town to the Bosque del Apache national wildlife refuge.
At 4:30 in the morning in Socorro in December, it’s darn cold. Fumbling awake, I checked the temperature: 12 below zero. Great. No, wait a minute—Great! Yesterday was a nice warm day in Bosque, with plenty of sun. That means, with this brutally cold morning, that any water that was shallow enough to warm up would be emitting a rare substance in the desert winter—steam.
When you get a nice warm day and a shivering cold morning, you can have steam rising from some of the ponds in Bosque. And when you get that steam and a clear sunrise, you have a chance to capture one of the “holy grail” shots from Bosque —birds in a golden mist of light.
Bosque del Apache has an avian cycle that repeats itself daily during the winter. Tens of thousands of Snow Geese and Sandhill Cranes spend the winter in Bosque. Each night, all those birds seek out water as a resting place for the night, where they are safe from predators such as the coyote. In the morning, through some hidden communication, the birds will start taking off out of the lakes and ponds. If you’re lucky, they will all take off at once, in what is called a “blastoff”. The sky becomes so thick with birds that sometimes the sky is nearly blocked out. It’s noisy, and you better wear a hat.
To experience this blastoff, and to get some fantastic images, photographers start setting up and jockeying for position in the cold dark. Depending on the wind and the light conditions, photographers scramble for the best views. You can glance down the road and it looks like the Olympics or a Space Shuttle launch—hundreds of long lenses pointed in the same direction.
But that’s not the shot I was after. Soliciting a few hardy members of our workshop, we were going to gamble. In trying for the golden mist shot, you are far away from the action of the refuge blastoff. Many conditions have to fall in place: a warm previous day, a cold cold morning, a clear sunrise, and of course, birds have to be in your chosen pond. You either get the shot, or you come away with a big fat nothing.
To have a chance at this shot, we would have to get off the road and crunch across frozen swampy grass to get close enough to a small pond. Leaving the road is strictly forbidden in the refuge. So, we scraped our windows, cracked open our chemical hand warmers, grabbed some coffee and headed in the dark to a pond along the road just outside the park.
Pulling off at the exit for the pond, we knew two of our four conditions—the warm day and the cold morning. Now we had to check the other two conditions in the pitch dark. Looking up, we could see the Milky Way spill across the sky. Good. A clear sunrise. As to the birds, it was too dark to see them. So we stood still and listened. We could hear their honks and grunts. The birds were there. All the conditions were in place, so if the birds hung around for sunrise, we’d have about a 60 second window, when the sunrise was just right, to try for the shot.
With hikers’ headlamps on, we carried our gear across the frozen ground toward the pond. We did not want to get too close, for fear of spooking the birds. Enough other things could do that, like coyote, leaving us with nice steam and no subjects. We used a compass to point where the sun would rise. Then we waited in silence (except for chattering teeth) for the sun to rise.
As the eastern sky lightened, our main concern was for the birds to stay put. They like to fly off at sunrise, and we needed them to stay long enough for the sun to pour over the hills and rushes to light the steam coming from the water.
The steam slowly gained color. In looking at my images in sequence, you can see:
Black gray gray gray gold gold GOLD! gold gray gray gray, all in a small amount of time.
Happily, the birds stayed, and the sun lit up the steam like flames. We snapped like maniacs. And only a minute later, it was over. Lots of LCD checks confirmed that we indeed had some good chances. We headed back to the hotel, freezing on the outside, but excited and warm on the inside.
I hope you enjoyed this "Story Behind the Shot"
Explore the Light,
Rick
Check out my blog here.
Tags: Bosque del Apache, Chirs Klapheke, learning, mist, photography, Rick Sammon, Travel Photography
Posted in Articles, Commentary, Photographer Spotlight, Vision, Wildlife | 1 Comment »