I took this photo while hunting a while back, and it is part of my High Lonesome photo project. I definitely remember shooting this photo after being entranced by the amazing colors and iridescence of turkey feathers in the sunlight.
Many thanks to Texas Highways for choosing my photo!
Michael was born this morning, and both he and Tanya did very well. Henry is excited about his new baby brother and keeps talking about him. Stay tuned, more pics to come very soon!
added 20-Oct-2008:
Be sure to check this page for updated photos:
www.texbrick.com/photo/averybros
Essentially, what I've realized is that the form of the land can be visually described with great clarity and impact. The landscape is distilled to its basic shapes and lines, i.e. it's core content. It's like looking at a pen and ink sketch instead of a color photograph.
Well, that's sorta obvious :-) No revelations there. But there are a couple of tricks that can help to make better such photos of dimly-lit landscapes with gray skies: 1) using the patterns and shapes that are present in the clouds, and 2) strong compositions. It is, however, a matter of taste and subject to your own personal photographic vision.
These type of photos usually convey a moody emotion - typically sadness, isolation, or deep calm. I get that too sometimes, but I also feel like I'm experiencing the raw landscape on a deep level. It's not colored by pretty light, and I prefer black and white to take away the typically muted and dull colors found in dim, diffused light (this isn't always the case; one example being the bright yellow and orange leaves of trees in the fall season, but this post is more about exposed landscapes that have little color in such lighting conditions).
Canon 5D with Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L
25mm, f/11, ISO 100, blend of 2 exposures: 1/50 & 1/20 sec.
On a recent trip to Big Bend National Park, one afternoon I experienced unusually heavy, gray clouds that blanketed the entire sky. This condition would have turned me off, photographically speaking, but I became very inspired because of the patterns in the clouds. I knew that I could work with those patterns and find strong forms and lines in the landscape to create photos that featured the essence of the land.
Canon 5D with Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L
27mm, f/11, ISO 100, blend of 2 exposures: 1/50 & 1/20 sec.
Whether you like them or not, again, is a matter of your personal taste. Nearly all photos of Big Bend are in color and a good many of them feature some sort of dramatic lighting condition.
I see a lot of photographers whose style focuses on the light, particularly golden, directional, and dramatic light. You've probably seen this style announced with a statement of their creed of "chasing", "following", "capturing", or "being led by" the light. There's nothing wrong with that, and I've done a lot of that in my own photography. I think nearly everyone is attracted to dramatic lighting conditions and finds them appealing and moving. At the very least, they are certainly eye-catching.
But I also think that amazing light can be very distracting from the true form of the landscape. The land is beautiful even when distilled down to its basic components of shape and line. If you take away the warm light, dramatic shadows, and eye-piercing colors, you are then left to focus entirely on (and enjoy) the core essence of the landscape. (Like when I tell my wife that she's just as beautiful without makeup on - but she never believes me.)
BTW, my portfolio of photos from this trip to Big Bend is now complete and online:
www.texbrick.com/photo/bb_sept_08
There is also an extended gallery that is a visual trip report:
www.texbrick.com/photo/bb_sept_08/all_pics.html
Parts 1 and 2 cover my attempts to document the Window in my own way for my ongoing photo project on Big Bend.
Canon 40D with Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L & polarizer
24mm, f/8, ISO 200, blend of exposures from 1/30 to 1/10 sec.
I wasn't inspired to take a tightly composed, cropped-in photo of the Window. I'd say the majority of the Window shots I see are just that - only the Window, i.e. a tight shot of the classic V-notch (and also the view through the Window to the lower desert beyond, but the air is often too hazy to make out good details).
The photo above is the tightest composition I could stand to take, but I still included a lot of the surrounding mountains and sky.
What I think best reflects my experiences in Big Bend, and particularly in the Basin, is more of the whole package rather than some isolated component. What pleases my eye is seeing the surrounding components and the stuff that connects to the main feature to tell the story better and put the main feature into proper context.
Canon 5D with Canon 17-40mm f/4L & polarizer
19mm, f/11, ISO 100, blend of exposures from 1/15 to 1/2 sec.
The shot above puts the Window about as small as possible by using almost the widest focal length I have, and it's my favorite shot from that morning. It's perhaps a little ordinary because of the simple composition - the Window is dead-smack in the center.
But when I look at it, I feel something. It stirs up some emotions. It possibly captures more essence of the Basin than just specifically the Window itself. You see how the Basin is this fertile, green pocket that's walled-off by mountains and clouds. Yet, despite the wide angle of view, the main feature (the Window) is highlighted by direct light.
I like it, but that's just me. What do you think?
These two photos (below) were taken at sunrise when the light was hitting the Window directly. I spent two mornings in a row, during our recent trip to the park, observing and photographing the sunrise from atop a large boulder in the Basin.
Canon 5D with Canon 17-40mm f/4L
17mm, f/11, ISO 100, blend of two exposures: 1/4 & 1/2 sec.
I try to avoid photographing subjects that are cliché and obvious because they're often overdone and boring. The Window is one of the primary features of Big Bend that most park visitors get to see and photograph. If you've been to Big Bend, or you've seen published photos from the park, chances are you've seen the Window, Casa Grande, Santa Elena Canyon, and/or the South Rim of the Chisos. The park's website even has live photos of the Window from a webcam permanently mounted in the Basin.
But, as I continue to work on my Big Bend project, I realize that I do not have any good photos of this well-known icon. Our recent trip gave me good opportunities to photograph it because we were staying at the lodge in the Basin and taking things very easy (my wife is 8 months pregnant; i.e. we were not doing our usual routine of backcountry camping and all-day hiking). I woke up early for the sunrises and wrapped up my shooting sessions just about the time the sweet light was ending and my family was finishing up breakfast and ready to depart for our morning venture.
Canon 5D with Canon 17-40mm f/4L & polarizer
23mm, f/11, ISO 100, blend of two exposures: 1/5 & 0.40 sec.
It's not impossible to come up with fresh, interesting photos of well known subjects but it's certainly a challenge. Fortuntely, there are an infinite amount of combinations of camera positions, focal lengths, lighting conditions, weather, etc.
I'm not sure I pulled off some good shots here - you be the judge of that. I decided to feature the great clouds present during this shoot and make the Window (the notch in the lower left) smallish in the frame by using wide focal lengths. These compositions also feature another great aspect of Big Bend - the skies. The frequent, huge, and unobstructed views throughout the park allow people to see for miles and that's quite refreshing for those park visitors confined into city living back home. One thing I always look foward to when visiting the park are the amazing vistas.
At the time these photos were taken, the light had lost its early morning warmness and become somewhat harsh. The scene's colors were a little boring and muted. I tried two approaches to create more interest - 1) using a color-enhancing filter, and 2) black and white.
The black and white helps viewers to really focus on the subject matter and its form, IMO. Effective monochromatic photos are sometimes hard to make, but having a good, strong composition (and nice clouds :-) ) certainly helps. For me, this works well because what I'm most interested in is the rugged line of mountains (including the notch of the Window) and the wide-open, huge view of the sky. These are quintessential features of Big Bend.
For the color shot, I used a Singh-Ray gold-n-blue polarizer. I'm new to using this filter, but it can produce some garish results. I "dialed" in the filter to a nice warm spot somewhere between its two points of maximum effect. In post-processing, I further subdued the effect of the filter by fine-tuning the white balance in RAW conversion. The end result, as you see above, is a warm, pastel color scheme that I think looks more like the sweet light that comes immediately after sunrise.
Anyway, I've got more sunrise shots of the Window from my second day of morning shooting in the Basin. I'll have these up in the next few days.
Canon 40D, Canon 400mm f/5.6L
1/400 sec. hand-held at f/5.6 and ISO 400
Many thanks to our state for building and maintaining one of the cleanest and best rest stops I've ever seen!
Canon 5D, 17-40mm f/4L, tripod
13 seconds at 27mm, f/8, ISO 200
This was taken about 30 minutes after sunset, September 5th. My wife and I love this little church. We've stopped by several times over the years since our first visit four years ago. The church appears active and is slowly being restored. We considered renewing our vows there (the 5th was our 10-year anniversary), but didn't want to make firm plans because she's 8 months pregnant and we weren't sure the trip out there would even happen.
The Ghost Town is a neat place to wonder around after dark. It's a great place for night photography.
I promised myself that I'd perform some "Mike-ism" today in honor and memory of him. Something along the lines of:
- watch a stupid movie and then spend the next 6 hours quoting it and laughing
- get involved in a lively discussion about politics or sports
- fart and pretend that it didn't smell
- drink single malt scotch straight
- create a massive spreadsheet to analyze and plan my next major purchase
- stop for a green light
- laugh and laugh some more at a stupid joke
- not get pissed off, no matter what angered me
- smile all day long
Mike was the kinda guy that you would like only after 30 seconds of knowing him. He always wore a smile. He always had good things to say about things and people, no matter what. Even the jackass that just cut him off in traffic.
His wife and three young children miss him terribly. We all do. Life is just a little less bright and fun without his presence.
The basic interface of the program takes you back to the old days of DOS :-) To run it in Windows, you have to create a batch file that establishes the path to your files, calls up the program (with optional switches that adjust the processing options), and tells the program which image files to combine. It's fairly easy and straightforward once you've done a run.
TuFuse will accept 16-bit TIF files and produce a 16-bit TIF as output.
I finally got around to seriously using TuFuse and tackled some of my older, difficult images. First up was a 5 exposure scene shot last year.
The above scene was shot with 5 exposures (all in RAW). The result, using nominal processing settings in the program, was fantastic.
I still ended up layering (with masks) some content from the original files over the TuFuse output in PS (Photoshop). Using layers and masks is my normal approach to combining multiple expsoures, and it's tedious and labor intensive. I've tried manually combining the exposures for the above scene about 6 times in the last year and never got a result that completely satisfied me.
For comparison, here's my original attempt at exposure blending - manual blending only (i.e. using only layers and masks in PS):
With a scene like this (one that has a very bright source of light in a localized region in the scene) simple layering with masks is quite difficult. Imagine concentric rings of differing exposure around the point light source (the sun). This is further complicated by the mountain in the upper right - this mountain is one of the darkest parts of the scene and renders nearly black in simple layering because of its close proximity to the sun in the scene.
The beauty of TuFuse is that it handles these areas of difficult exposure transition well. And then you can layer in bits of the original files into the "easy" areas of the scene (not that the TuFuse output is bad, but the original pixels just seem like a better choice to me where possible).
Since I was pleased with the TuFuse results, I also tried the sister scene to this shot, one that I'd not processed before:
This was another 5 exposure blend done in TuFuse, and then supplimented by bits of the original files in PS (i.e. layering in, using masks, some of the original files over the TuFuse output in PS).
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To reiterate what I've said before, shooting wide dynamic range scenes (i.e. scenes that contain a dynamic range greater than what the camera can capture in one shot) is quite difficult, and there are different approaches to doing it. Each approach has its pros and cons.
I prefer not to use graduated neutral density filters (the traditional method of shooting such scenes) because it's a one-size-fits-all approach that isn't always well suited. Take the above scenes for example. A graduated ND would have made the upper right-hand mountain very dark (much like my original efforts in blending the scene manually). There is no ND filter made that has a ND spot to handle scenes like this, and if such filter was made, the size and ND strength of the spot would have to be just right.
HDR programs (like Adobe HDR and PhotoMatix) have not worked well for me in the past. In fact, my first attempt at blending this scene was done in Adobe HDR. I spent long hours with it trying to fine-tune the processing and output with only poor results.
Manual blending (using layers and masks in PS), when done with care and skill, seems to produce superior results. The con is that it requires a lot of processing work. But I feel that the results are the best that can be achieved and also make the most and best use of digital post-processing (or, digital darkroom, if you like). Using TuFuse definitely helps to handle those tricky areas, like the upper right hand corner of the scenes above.
click for larger pics
The weight was estimated at 5 pounds! And it's still a boy :-) No change there. Due date is Oct. 14.
Tanya is exhausted and uncomfortable, but she's hanging in there. I'm real proud of her and thankful. She's a terrific mom.
The 50D's 15 MP (megapixels) jumps the count up from the 40D's 10 MP. I thought the megapixel race was over or at least slowing down because manufacturers were finally coming to their senses. I guess not.
Canon claims that the 50D's microlenses occupy nearly 100% of each photosite (as opposed to microlenses of previous models which presumably didn't fill up each photosite). Because of this, the 50D's sensor should not suffer from increased noise levels at high ISOs (the typical result when you cram more MP's into a given sensor area thus making each photosite smaller). In fact, Canon claims the noise levels to be approximately 1.5 stops better than the 40D. Their claim is reflected in the ISO settings of the 50D - the highest (in expanded mode) is 12,800. The highest on the 40D is ISO 3200.
As my grandfather was famous for saying, "We'll see..."
Interestingly, if you take the 50D's pixel density and apply it to a full frame sensor, you get a 39 MP chip. Whoa...
Earlier this year, with a little help from a photo workshop, I figured it out. I decided to write a piece on it since the whole process was complicated and deeply emotional for me.
Click here to read the article.
I hope that by sharing my experiences I can inspire those of you searching for your style and meaning in your work. Maybe you’ve found your style but it seems somewhat superficial. Maybe you wish to move beyond just making pretty pictures and create work that is more meaningful to yourself and others.
Defining and knowing your style will help you connect better with your passion in your work, IMO. Knowing your style isn't necessary for creating meaningful work, but I think it helps. Good luck!
