The Discerning Photographer » Landscape

Photographing On the Water

DiscerningPhotog — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 02:16:12 +0000

On my list of “Photographic New Year’s Resolutions” that dates back to 2009 has been to get my old aluminum flat boat up and running. A fishing boat that originally belonged to my father-in-law, the boat has worked, and not worked, over the years. After a number of fits and starts, I’ve finally (I think) solved all of the nagging little problems that have stopped me. My motivation: an ideal shooting platform.

What’s a shooting platform? Anything you’re standing or sitting upon when you shoot a photograph. One of the very best shooting platforms, for any photography under a couple of thousand feet, is a helicopter. Take the door off, make sure your seatbelt is securely fastened, and you have the absolute best way to shoot lots of aerial stuff.

When you live in south Louisiana and your primary landscape subject matter is in and around the water, a boat is the perfect shooting platform. For a lot of my work, this has been an overdue development that has me truly excited.

I’ve been on two ‘shake down’ cruises so far, seeing what works and what still needs work. I’m using an old Gott ice chest as a ‘dry box’ for my camera equipment and that seems to work fine. (I have it shock-corded to the bottom of the boat.) I still need to invest in a push pole but have a paddle and very nice donated trolling motor (thanks to a colleague who had an extra one). These things, and my 18hp Nissan outboard, turn my old boat into a fabulous new photographic tool.

I’m researching the northern shoreline of Lake Pontchartrain on Google Earth, planning my next few trips.

So why is this such an exciting development?

One of the fundamental facts of photography concerns vantage point: the position you’re in when you press the shutter determines a big, big piece of the result you will obtain. Now with the boat, I get a chance at an unlimited number of new vantage points to shoot from. This is probably the thing I’m most excited about.

I have two early examples included with this post. Both are images that could not have been shot from land. So right away, I see a new world opening up.

Isn’t this what’s at the heart of our love and passion for photography? Exploring new vistas, working in a new area or in a new way, learning new skills and applications that we can bring to bear upon our work and art.

So in the weeks and months ahead, I plan to spend a good bit of my shooting time out on my new platform.

Bon voyage!

Hi, I’m Andrew Boyd, a.k.a. The Discerning Photographer, and I hope this post has been interesting and informative. Please leave me a comment about it, let me know what you’d like to see more of on the site! You can also sign up for email delivery of all future articles or my RSS feed. Or subscribe to our Facebook page or our Twitter feed. Thanks!–DiscerningPhotog

Getting Up Early in the Morning

DiscerningPhotog — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 08:30:14 +0000

There’s an old expression: ‘You have to get up early in the morning…” if: you want to succeed in life; you want to catch that big fish; you want to be the early bird getting the worm, etc. Like a lot of old expressions, there’s a measure of truth in this one. I was reminded of this while driving home yesterday, after an ‘early morning’ of productive shooting.

I had done a bit of scouting the day before and checked to see when sunrise would be. I knew it would be important to hit this area early, before the sunlight really got up enough to illuminate things. I was hopeful as well because the weather forecast called for partially cloudy skies, slowly becoming more threatening throughout the day: just the type of sky I like for photography!

This image was the first thing I shot. Tripod-mounted, with a 16-35mm zoom and five exposures, combined in Photoshop CS5’s HDR Pro to extend the tonal range. I used the black/white Adjustment Layers feature to do most of the rest of the toning, adjusting green and blue sliders to accentuate the sky and ground.

What about you? Do you have a favorite early-morning photograph you shot? A favorite early-morning photography adventure? Or do you always sleep till noon? I’d love to hear what others think about predawn trips…

Two Views of One February Day

DiscerningPhotog — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 09:30:00 +0000

February is a time of contrasts in south Louisiana. Spring is beginning to hint that it’s about to be upon us; at the same time, it was 26 degrees last night and the devastation is everywhere evident on our 2 acres.

These two photographs are good examples of this contrast. Taken just a few moments apart, I have the first blossoms on one of my cherry trees today. This tree, even though heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina, is always the first to bloom, and the first plant to burst forth each year in our yard.

Then there are the remains of last summer’s banana plants. We brought some roots over from New Orleans over 20 years ago, and they never thrive sufficiently to produce fruit (which we used to get in the city). But they’re vibrant and beautiful and fun to have around in the summer. But what a cycle! Every year, beautiful green succulent summer plant, followed most assuredly by a complete die-off with the first freeze of winter. But aren’t they great when they’re dead? I love to explore the sculptural remains with my camera once all the life is drained out of them.

So a study in contrasts today. All in the space of a few moments.

Shooting in the Rain and Fog

DiscerningPhotog — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 09:00:29 +0000

Photography today in the rain and fog: fantastic! I found myself thinking about the post I wrote some time back about how to photograph in the rain, because that was definitely what I was doing today: rain pants, rain jacket, umbrella, towel to wipe camera off, one camera on very wet tripod, one canvas near-waterproof Domke F2 camera bag.

The fog showed up today on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain as the warmth of the last few days met the new cold front blowing in: lots of wind and spray but the fog was beautiful! Working fast, trying to see, shoot, and see again, working against time as I knew the fog wouldn’t last.

A great morning of shooting in Fountainbleau State Park. Out on the edge of the lake in the fog, no one around, the whole place to myself. Looking, shooting, looking again. Wiping off the gear. Socks and shoes soaking wet. Moving again, seeing something else to try. Lots of failed experiments and a few successes: we live for the successes, don’t we?

Modern Trends in Landscape Photography

DiscerningPhotog — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 08:00:32 +0000

I’ve received a positive response, both in comments and offline in email, to the article I posted last week aggregating some landscape photography resources. This got me thinking about assembling a group of landscape photographs as a post. The idea that interested me was to limit the photographers featured to those that are members of our Discerning Photographer Flickr pool.

This has turned into a truly rewarding little field trip for me, venturing out literally all over the world as I looked through the photostreams of our members. What follows are some of my favorite images that the group has shot, along with some selected comments about the photographs and the trends that I see represented.

I think our group is large enough to be a ‘scientifically valid’ sample of what’s happening in landscape photography today. The results may surprise you! This is where landscape photography stands in 2010.

First: some classic black and white photography.

When I think about landscape photography, the first photographer that comes to mind is the granddaddy of them all, Ansel Adams. There are still some photographers out there concentrating on black and white landscape work, and we have (at least) one of them in our group: Nurse Kato (all names listed here are Flickr names) from Washington State, U.S. Here are three of his images:

"When I Close My Eyes" by Nurse Kato.(http://www.flickr.com/photos/25978351@N07/4170012176/sizes/o/)

"Angels and Demons" by Nurse Kato.(http://www.flickr.com/photos/25978351@N07/3645494960/sizes/o/in/set-72157612530504022/)

Untitled, by Nurse Kato.(http://www.flickr.com/photos/25978351@N07/3271334368/sizes/o/in/set-72157612530504022/)

Kato modestly states on his Flickr page: “Black and white is my personal favorite. I sure do enjoy a good color image but I guess I just don’t see colors properly or something.”

Trend #2: The Influence of HDR

This was one of the most striking things that surfaces when looking at quantities of landscape photography from diverse sources: the powerful attraction that so many photographers feel for HDR shooting. Since this technique became so easy to implement in Photoshop, there has been an explosion of work done using this method. Question to consider: when does the HDR technique work, when is it a gimmick or crutch? Here are some samples from our pool:

"Foto 0672" by Inigo Aspirez.(http://www.flickr.com/photos/iaspirez/4133906224/sizes/m/in/pool-1182517@N23/)

"Calor polar - Cala Tarida - Ibiza 2008" by Joseeivissa(http://www.flickr.com/photos/joseeivissa/4254351745/sizes/o/in/set-72157623158042271/)

Question to consider: when does the HDR technique work, when is it a gimmick or crutch?

"Cabin1b" by Danny Bourque. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/dannokablammo/524027193/in/set-72157600246810166/)

"Myrtles Plantation" by Danny Bourque. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/dannokablammo/3435073421/in/set-72157600246810166/)

Autumn Sunrise in the forest of childhood dreams, nothing has changed ... in the forest - Missano , Via Fontanazzo.. (zocca modena italy) by Masotti Primo. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/masotti-primo/4046592337/in/set-72157622820476607/)

"Seychelles without you" by Stephane Dufief. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/penarbed/4460387688/in/photostream/)

"Twilight - Porzh Goulom" by Stephane Dufief. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/penarbed/4484508080/)

Trend #3: The Use of Texture

This is another popular Photoshop-based trend: layering on textures to create moods within photographs. An Italian photographer in our group, Duarja, has perfected his method and uses it to create dense, dream-like images. Here are three examples:

"Roads that open and close" by Duarja.(http://www.flickr.com/photos/34238858@N00/3895677661/sizes/l/in/set-72157594588096558/)

"Come on, wherever the heart leads" by Duarja. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/34238858@N00/3923409798/sizes/l/in/set-72157594588096558/)

"The Reason for the Wind,": by Duarja. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/34238858@N00/2822331758/sizes/l/in/set-72157621382353171/)

Trend #4: Bumping Up the Saturation

Here’s another trend that lots of photographers are utilizing: increasing the saturation, or in a RAW workflow, bumping up the vibrance and/or saturation, to really make the colors pop. This is another one of those toning techniques that some people love, other people see as an overused, trite gimmick. Here are a couple of examples from our shooters:

"Where the River Meets the Lake," by LPS129. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/kozmokat/3042198293/sizes/l/in/set-72157607833672837/)

"Aiguilles de Baulmes (VD)" by Mathieu GUY. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/camerone/4404107742/sizes/m/in/pool-1182517@N23/)

Trend #5: Beautiful straight-up (more or less) landscape photography

Finally, just some great images! There may be a bit of the various toning techniques illustrated above in this final group of photographs, but it’s always subtle. Take a look:

"Nordvikvågen Utsira" by Atgrims. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/17853411@N00/309859181/sizes/l/in/set-72157594193904875/)

Photo by Martin Zalba. "No HDR." (http://www.flickr.com/photos/martinzalba/4138097723/sizes/o/)

"Bardenas en Junio" by Martin Zalba. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/martinzalba/2560088925/sizes/o/in/set-72157613007382188/)

"Bardenas de Navarra" by Martin Zalba. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/martinzalba/2562656638/sizes/o/in/set-72157613007382188/)

24 novembre 2009 - (zocca modena italy) by Masotti Primo. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/masotti-primo/4131591434/in/set-72157622820476607/)

"Today It Rained" by Romorga. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/romorgan/4209341402/sizes/l/)

Summing Up.

I’m awe-struck by the amount of talent and energy on display here within our Flickr group! Hats off to all of you landscape shooters who’ve contributed your photographs. We’re all in your debt as your images enrich our lives and make our photographic community all the stronger.

Related articles on the web:

Five Fantastic Flickr Photographers at Epic Edits

50 Breathtaking Waterscapes to Inspire and Amaze at Phototuts+

What Every Landscape Photographer Should Know About Lenses at Lightstalking

Landscapes of the Spirit at The Luminous Landscape

Landscape Photography Resources

DiscerningPhotog — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 16:12:39 +0000

A confession: I love landscape and nature photography. I don’t consider myself a landscape/nature specialist, although nature photography was my very first photography love. Backpacking in the Appalachians as a teenager, I attempted to photograph the beauty that I was experiencing with my Instamatic (read ‘point and shoot’) camera of that era, and was sorely disappointed in the results. That led to my first ‘real’ camera, a Konica 35mm rangefinder that shot beautiful, sharp photographs….the beginning of my continuing photographic journey.

Here are some landscape and/or nature photography articles or sites that I think you might find interesting. Bookmark the ones you like!

‘The Light Fantastic’ by Ted Leeming & Morag Paterson at The Luminous Landscape.

Wow! Read through this story of personal discovery—or rediscovery, really, of the naive wonder of nature photography, expressed in a truly intimate, personal way. You won’t come away without new questions for yourself about your own approach and results. Beautiful, impressionistic photographs from the wilds of Scotland.

Quality vs. Value at The Luminous Landscape—A thoughtful, carefully-worded trek through the world of digital camera costs vs. value as multi-megapixel sensor advances have flattened out and we’re left to ask what we’re paying for, along with some beautiful images from a photo safari trip to Antartica. A great read!

Perserverance at Serious Amateur Photography

Jeff Lynch is a landscape/nature photographer in Texas whose writing style I find particularly engaging and easy to read. Here’s a piece about what it takes to shoot great landscape photos. Don’t let the “Amateur” in the title of his blog fool you, these are seriously nice images!

Panorama photographs by Neil Creek

Neil Creek is an Australian photographer who many of you may be familiar with (he’s got an ebook selling online right now at the Digital Photography School called Photo Nuts & Bolts). But I want you to go to his site and check out his pans. They are beautiful and done with a little piece of software that allows you to ‘go into’ the photo and mouse around, scrolling and looking at different angles of the image. This sounds like I’m describing a gimmick, but in this case it really works. His panoramas are stunning!

Eliot Porter’s photographs at the Amon Carter Museum.

Eliot Porter revolutionized landscape photography. He was the first of his generation to shoot color landscape photographs, using a dye transfer printing method which conferred upon his images something close to the archival quality of black and white prints. (Up until then, color was too short-lived to be taken seriously by art photographers.) These are stunning images. Unfortunately I haven’t found a web source that does them justice. You really need to see these images in the original full-sized, ‘coffee table’ books, most of which are still available. Appalachian Wilderness, Glen Canyon, The Color of Wildness (Aperture) are three amazing examples. Might want to hit your local library too to see if they have any of his original hard cover editions.Eliot Porter page at Amazon.com

Paul Butzi’s Musings on Photography blog

I love reading Paul’s blog. I go there when I want to slow down mentally and take a moment to reflect upon why we do what we do…not strictly a nature or landscape site, but Paul’s imagery tends to usually be naturalistic. Here’s a takeout from his March 22^nd post:

“It’s staggering to me that so many photographers think photography is about sitting at a computer and reading stuff on the internet, or sitting with a book and reading about photography in their den. And it’s really about – dare I utter the phrase? – *making photographs*.”

Ted Orland’s Holga and panorama photos

Go poke around Ted Orland’s web site and you won’t be disappointed. His pans remind me of the Polaroid work of David Hockney, really interesting and sometimes challenging to view. The hand-colored stuff is great too. Orland is one of the co-authors (with David Bayles) of the best-selling Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of ArtMaking. Highly recommended. Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

Anybody have a favorite nature or landscape site? Favorite article on the subject? Favorite book? I’d be interested to see what inspires others…

Two Seasons, Two Images

DiscerningPhotog — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 23:09:41 +0000

I was tramping around one of my favorite local shooting spots on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain the other day, looking for images near the water’s edge south of Madisonville, Louisiana. The wind was out of the south and blowing, whipping things up and driving off the brown pelicans I was vaguely hunting. Driving out, I stopped on the small raised bridge that goes over the Madisonville Canal just as the late afternoon light illuminated the tall marsh grass that lines both sides of this little waterway. The light was beautiful and the colors coming off the water iridescent.

I backed up, parked the car and walked back up to the middle of the bridge to make this first image.

It’s a stitched-together image made from three raw files, shot vertically with a Canon 50mm macro lens and overlapped with using Arcsoft’s Panorama Maker stitching software.

As I was shooting this image, I was thinking about another one: about 8 months earlier, right at dawn, I had shot another photograph at this same spot, the morning glow in the east reflecting up onto some clouds in the west, the direction I was shooting in. Remembering that photograph and wanting to duplicate it compositionally, I used my macro lens and shot, planning on the panorama I knew I was making.

Below is the original photograph. Back on the computer doing the initial processing, I was surprised to see how far off I was on the whole composition! I didn’t come home with quite the right pieces to revisit my first image. The nature of the seasons plays a role too: the marsh grass is 8 feet high and already dead in December, unlike the young sprouts that were growing in April. Looking at both images now, I see them as very distinct, truly unique and different moments in time.

Do you have a favorite place you photograph repeatedly? How does it change from trip to trip? Maybe more importantly, how have the changes in YOU resulted in changes in the photographs you come away with?

Sometimes, our photos really are windows into our souls, aren’t they?

Two Images, Two Seasons

I was tramping around one of my favorite local shooting spots on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain the other day, looking for images near the water’s edge south of Madisonville, Louisiana. The wind was out of the south and blowing, whipping things up and driving off the brown pelicans I was vaguely hunting. Driving out, I stopped on the small raised bridge that goes over the Madisonville Canal just as the late afternoon light illuminated the tall marsh grass that lines both sides of this little waterway. The light was beautiful and the colors coming off the water iridescent.

I backed up, parked the car and walked back up to the middle of the bridge to make this first image.

It’s a stitched-together image made from three raw files, shot vertically with a Canon 50mm macro lens and overlapped with using Arcsoft’s Panorama Maker stitching software.

As I was shooting this image, I was thinking about another one: about 8 months earlier, right at dawn, I had shot another photograph at this same spot, the morning glow in the east reflecting up onto some clouds in the west, the direction I was shooting in. Remembering that photograph and wanting to duplicate it compositionally, I used my macro lens and shot, planning on the panorama I knew I was making.

Below is the original photograph. Back on the computer doing the initial processing, I was surprised to see how far off I was on the whole composition! I didn’t come home with quite the right pieces to revisit my first image. The nature of the seasons plays a role too: the marsh grass is 8 feet high and already dead in December, unlike the young sprouts that were growing in April. Looking at both images now, I see them as very distinct, truly unique and different moments in time.

Do you have a favorite place you photograph repeatedly? How does it change from trip to trip? Maybe more importantly, how have the changes in YOU resulted in changes in the photographs you come away with?

Sometimes, our photos really are windows into our souls, aren’t they?

Creating Great Panorama Photographs

DiscerningPhotog — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 02:28:11 +0000

I’ve always been fascinated by the photographic process-how all of the technological aspects of our craft come together with a photographer’s creative vision to make something wonderful. The perspective created by various lenses, and the physical limitations of those lenses, can result in some unwanted results, however.

If you look out at any expansive scene-a valley at dawn, a mountain vista, the sweep of a big room from one side to the other-your eye doesn’t actually “see” all of this at once, does it? Check it out right now: look around the room or space you’re in. Your peripheral vision is about 180 degrees, but your “eyes” (really your brain, processing the visual imagery in front of you) is really focusing only on part of this scene at a time, darting here and there as you look, sharply focused on only one bit at a time. We end up with the illusion of sharply seeing all of this at once as our brains assimilate the information coming in.

Camera lenses don’t work this way, of course. To “see” a big wide expansive scene, you use a wide angle lens, which distorts the reality in front of you: foreground becomes foreshortened and overly prominent; things further away recede unrealistically into the background. You end up with a different reality from the one you’re actually experiencing.

The 35mm widelux camera. The lens moves behind the curtain at center.

What’s the solution? At one time you could try shooting with a Widelux camera. This was an innovative and very cool 35mm camera which had a normal lens on the front of it and a transmission mechanism for the lens: when you depressed the shutter, the lens actually moved during the exposure from left to right, scanning the scene, much like a photo copier mechanism works today. The 35mm negatives were about twice as long as regular ones and required special negative carriers to print. But what you got were wide scenes in which details did not recede. These always looked strange to the eye, so accustomed have we become to the receding compositional aspect of modern wide angle photography.

Now you don’t have to have a Widelux to create these images, only some “photo stitching” software. I’m going to explain two ways to do this: using the Photomerge feature in Photoshop, and a little piece of ArcSoft software called Panorama Maker.

Start with a wide scene you want to shoot, but put a normal (around a 50mm) lens on your camera. Set your camera for a manual exposure. (If you don’t, the exposure change that your camera decides will result in poor stitch results). Now shoot the first image of the scene. I always start on the left side of the photo, although this is personal preference. Now, keeping your eyes, head and arms locked in position, rotate from the hips and shoot the second shot, making sure to overlap with the first exposure by about 20 percent. (You’ll get better at judging this with practice.) Keep shooting until you’ve finished your composition. Alternatively, you can mount the camera on a tripod, making sure it’s truly level, to create this composition. I’ve found that with practice, I can eliminate the necessity for the sticks.

Now you’re ready to assemble your image.

Create a folder on your computer and get the images into it. (I’ll do this with my image browser software, Photo Mechanic.)

If using Photoshop:

File>Automate>Photomerge

You’ll be prompted to Browse to select your files, and given a choice of options as to how you want Photoshop to assemble the image. Start with the “Auto” setting and hit OK.

Stitching a series of photos together using the Photomerge feature in Photoshop.

Photoshop will process your combined image, creating a layered document with each of the original photos on its own layer.

You’ll need to crop the resulting combined image to eliminate edge distortion.

Now go to Layer>Flatten Image.

Congratulations…you’ve just assembled your first stitched panorama!

Using Arcsoft Panorama Maker:

This is my preferred method, simply because this relatively inexpensive piece of software is so much more versatile than Photoshop for creating panoramas. This software can create stitched VERTICAL as well as horizontal photos and can even “tile” images together: imagine creating a pan that’s four images across and three images tall, for instance.

Assembling a panorama in Arcsoft's Panorama Maker software.

The software has a wizard-like interface that will guide you through the image creation process. When finished, you have the option to Save as a jpeg, create a Quicktime or Flash file or html for web display. The new version (which I’m not running yet) even allows you to create pans from video footage! This is very cool stuff!

Another aspect of this worth considering is how much higher your resolution can end up when creating a pan vs. a straight wide angle photo. Instead of one wide shot with say, 23.5 mb of information in it, now you’ve got over 100mb of information from the five combined images in your composition. The difference in the final result can be startling.

The biggest attraction for me, however, is how much closer to reality these images look to my eye. No more foreground foreshortening, no more side-edge wide angle distortion. No more middle ground diminishment to objects in the middle distance…just a lot more in-your-face immediacy to the result! This is truly cool stuff.

Hi, I’m Andrew Boyd, a.k.a. The Discerning Photographer, and I hope this post has been interesting and informative. Please leave me a comment about it, let me know what you’d like to see more of on the site! You can also sign up for email delivery of all future articles or my RSS feed. Thanks!–DiscerningPhotog

Today’s Photograph: Pontchartrain Cloudscape #1

DiscerningPhotog — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 03:33:43 +0000

Sometimes all a post needs is a photograph. Today I saw this as I drove across on my way in to work in New Orleans. The clouds were amazing, enough to make me stop. I’ve written before about what a powerful factor the lake and its sky are on my shooting, and here’s a good example!