Photography

Today Joe Decker shares some tips on wide angle photography. One of the first lens purchases aspiring landscape photographers typically made is a wide or super-wide lens, anything (in full-frame 35mm terms) from 24mm on down, and with good reason, wides offer photographers the ability to capture the sweeping vistas of the natural landscape. But they can also be a challenge to use effectively, it’s all to easy to end up with a wide-angle shot that lacks the power and grandeur we felt when we were shooting. In this article, I’ll explain why that’s so often the case, and provide a few tips for working around those challenges, showing you how to use wide-angle lenses to create dramatic, effective images. Nordenskjöld Lake, Torres Del Paine National Park, Chile. Image Copyright Joe Decker 1. Get Close! Because wide-angle lenses take in a bigger angle-of-view than other lenses, using a wide-angle lens at the same distance from your subject will render that subject smaller than it would otherwise. To compensate for this, you’ll have to move closer to your subject. Don’t be bashful about getting close, particularly with super-wides&mash;it’s almost impossible to get “too close” to your subject with a 14mm lens. This emphasis in size that wide-angle lenses give nearby objects means that … 2. It’s All about the Foreground Contrary to what you might expect, this means that the most important element of your wide-angle landscapes is the foreground. While wide-angle lenses do capture the wider landscape, they also (almost inevitably, because of their wide field-of-view) capture quite a bit of foreground as well, and this foreground is emphasized by the wide-angle perspective. As a result, if your foreground isn’t interesting, your photograph won’t be interesting. This leads us naturally to the Josef Muench idea of the near-far composition, an image which uses a wide-angle lens to not only show a broad vista, but also to show one detail of that landscape in an up-close, intimate way. When you’re photographing wide, be sure to spend some time looking for the most interesting foreground available to combine with your grand vista.  (If there isn’t an interesting foreground, you might want to consider using a longer lens to leave out that less interesting foreground.) Fallen Redwoods, Stout Grove, Jedediah Smith State Park, California. Image Copyright Joe Decker 3. Watch those Verticals! Wide-angle lenses tend to bend and distort verticals, as you can see in the tree trunks near the top of Fallen Redwoods. Now, you might decide you like that effect, or that you hate it, but it’s important to be aware of it and to make a conscious decision about it. For some images it’s fun to embrace, but more often I find myself having to work to avoid it or correct it later.  Avoiding it can be as simple a matter as composing so that there’s only a single obvious vertical (and that that’s vertical), alternatively, using shift movements with a tilt-shift lens can correct some of this distortion in-camera. Post-exposure, Photoshop’s “Lens Distort” filter can also save the day. 4. Leading Lines Compositionally, lines (such as streams or railway tracks) leading from the bottom corners of an image towards the center often have a particular magic for guiding the viewers eye through the picture, making for strong images, and this is particularly the case for wide-angle images. Hot Stream is a great example of this, the viewers eye tends to wander from the corner  back through the image along the stream. As the stream moves back into the image, the stream gets smaller (in terms of inches on the printed page) quickly due the wide perspective. This quick fade (in width) into the distance creates a real sense of depth in the image. Hot Stream, Húsavík, Iceland. Image Copyright Joe Decker 5. Filter Woes Shooting wide creates two problems for t

Since this is apparently appliance week at TOP and I have toasted my brains on toasters, I thought I'd show you a picture of one of my prized possessions: And I'm not even kidding. It's a c. 1972 model Maytag made in Newton, Iowa, and I plan to keep it going as long as I can. Maytag kept Newton, Iowa prosperous for a hundred years...and then it moved production out of the U.S. and the town withered. It's down to a scant 15,000 people or so. Can't remember how I found out about this; seems to me "60 Minutes" did a piece on it or something. Anyway it was used as an example in a TV show about the decline of American manufacturing. So now Newton Maytags seem symbolic to me, symbolic of an era whose passing I feel pretty ambivalent about. How important is it to you to buy American? (Or British or Australian or wherever you live?) In my middle age I've come 180° on this. When I was young, the belligerent union "Buy American" campaigns seems jingoistic and reactionary, and anyway I was enamored of European sports cars and Japanese stereo equipment. Now I'm not so sure they didn't have a point. Seems to me it goes more or less like this. An economy grows prosperous through people making things and buying and selling things to their neighbors. Over time, sensible regulations are put in place to counteract the natural imbalances: workers are granted certain powers and rights so the all-powerful owners can't exploit them ruthlessly; safety regulations are enacted, both for producers and consumers; reforms like the 8-hour day and child labor laws are put in place; and environmental concerns are addressed so people can't just wantonly destroy the common matrix for fleeting gain. And after a while everything works out pretty much in balance. An uneasy balance, sometimes, but still. But all this is expensive, so we start buying things from places in the world where they're too primitive to have worker's rights or product safety safeguards or environmental protections. Then we start to get toxic heavy metals in children's toys and poisons in our foodstuffs, and we hear distant tales of egregiously oppressed and underpaid workers, unsafe working conditions, child labor sweatshops, garment factory fires with piles of dead seamstresses, horrendous environmental damage, and on and on. Exactly like it used to be in 19th-century America before all those quaint localized reforms were enacted. And our own neighbors go unemployed, the middle class declines, inequality imposes endless stressors on society, etc., etc. Meanwhile, I can't find a decent toaster, or a rake that doesn't break when you look at it wrong. The crazy cheapening of ordinary products is really getting frustrating. Of course, it does make some sense for production to be specialized. The Germans make the best cars...and, since I brought up the subject with the previous link, the best turntables; the British make (used to make?) the best loudspeakers; the Japanese make the best cameras. You can buy cars made in a whole lot of places, but in fact in many cases you can't "buy [blank]" even if you want to—the American textile industry is a faded ghost of its former glory (although, as I've noted before, I proudly buy American jeans), and the last plant in the U.S. that made flatware—eating utensils, I mean—closed down recently. And good luck buying an American-made camera—I think you'd be limited to a small selection of handmade view cameras. I just had to buy a new chair (my old one literally* fell to pieces), and the one I bought is made in southern Indiana. We'll see how that one holds up—the construction quality seems a bit suspicious. But hey, I supported some Hoosiers, and I feel good about that. So far so good. I'll leave you with a funny little exchange: Me, at a pool table store: "I've never heard of this brand before—'American Heritage.' With a name like that, these have got to be made in China, right? Salesman: Yep. There are only two brands of American-made p

The Sunday Stills Challenge this week is the letter W. Woodpecker..a Downy Woodpecker. A Whitetail Deer. Wildfire 20 miles east and south of us. 12 homes were lost and 7,500 acres of land were burned Tuesday and Wednesday.. Weather Vane and Weather moving in..we got some much needed rain last night. Have a good week everyone:)

A Guest Contribution by Anotherphotograpbynoob.com. What this tutorial will show you In short: how I made the photo on the right become the photo on the left. In this tutorial, we will cover basic tools of the free photo editing software GIMP. Here is a quick rundown of the features covered in this tutorial: Crop a photo in GIMP Increase contrast with the Levels panel Make the colors pop with the Hue & Saturation panel Adjust colors with the Color Balance panel Add a color filter to boost the warm colors in your photo. Sound hard? Don’t worry. I’ll guide you through the whole process, step by step. Resources First of all, you need to have GIMP installed. Click here to download GIMP, and then follow the instructions provided with the software. If you want to follow along with me in this tutorial, the original photo can be downloaded here. I shot the photo myself last year. The sportscar is a racing green Volvo P1800, just like the one Roger Moore drove in The Saint – yep, my dad tells me the story every time we ride in that car. You are free to use the photo for whatever you may want, as long as it isn’t illegal of course. If you are interested in the specifications of my camera, it is: Nikon D3000 Nikon DX AF-s NIKKOR 35mm 1.8G Shot at f/3.2, 1/200 seconds and ISO 100 The exposure compensation was set to -2.7 Enough with the anecdotes; let’s start editing. Start it all Up After you have started up GIMP, open up the image you want to edit. If you have chosen to follow along and you haven’t changed too much in the standard layout in GIMP, it should look like this. Fixing the Composition The first thing I want to fix is how I composed the image. I don’t like the license plate showing in the original photo. Ideally, I would like to see no license plate and at the same time as much as possible of both the car and sky. The easiest way would be just cropping off the right of the photo until the license plate is gone. But… I know my mother will most likely print this photo – just as with all the other photos I’ve sent her. In order to make the process of printing the images as smooth as possible, I need to keep the proportions of the image in tact (I don’t want the print service computer system to decide how the photo is cropped). With that in mind, choose the Crop tool from the toolbox on the left (Shortcut Shift + C). To make sure proportions are kept, check the box labeled Fixed. From the drop-down menu, you should select Aspect Ratio and the value should be set to current. Like this: Now you can drag out the area you want to keep. You can adjust it by dragging the corners around the image. When you are satisfied, hit enter and your photo is cropped. So far, so good. The image is still dull, I know. Let’s get moving. Quick Tip – Duplicate the Background Layer When you open up a photo in GIMP, a background layer will be created automatically. Don’t edit directly on that. Instead, you should make a copy of the layer by pressing Ctrl + Shift + D (Mac: Cmd + Shift + D). Now you have the original background layer for reference while editing, and no matter the mess you make, you can easily start from scratch. And now we must go back to the sports car! Use Levels to Increase Contrast The first thing I want to do is increase the contrast. This is mainly to darken the ugly details on the back of the car, in order to let the more shiny parts sparkle. First, open op the Levels panel Color > Levels: I’ve made a simple move. I just increased the darks by 10 and kept the whites at 255. I kept the whites at 255 to ensure most details are preserved in the sky; we’ve now set the best base for boosting the color of the image. Work the Colors The first panel I use in this process is Adjust Hue/Lightness/Saturation. Go to Colors > Hue-Saturation: I won’t be explaining every panel I use in detail. Instead, I’ll focus on the settings I needed for this tutorial. I’ve only adjusted the master channel in this panel. Hue I’ve increased the h

An autumn tree grows from a precarious crack in sandstone strata, Capitol GorgeAutumn Tree, Sandstone Strata. Capitol Reef National Park, Utah. October 7, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.An autumn tree grows from a precarious crack in sandstone strata, Capitol GorgeI’m often fascinated by places where the huge and ancient strata descend under (or ascend from, depending upon your point of view) the flat earth. In the bottom of this canyon, there is a section where, as we walked further into it, the strata angled down quite steeply. Given what I understand of the geology of Capitol Reef, it should be no surprise to find such a feature here.Another thing that continues to amaze me is the seemingly impossible places in which life springs up. Here this small tree (perhaps a single-leaf ash?) seems to be doing OK in a very tiny crack in solid rock and a few feet up the canyon wall from the wash at the bottom. The pink color comes both from the rock itself and the light reflected down into the canyon, bouncing off of other rock faces high above.G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | EmailText, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell. Photographs, text and other media in this RSS news feed from the G Dan Mitchell Photography blog are © copyright G Dan Mitchell - all rights reserved. This web site news feed is for personal, non-commercial use only.

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Close up of a yellow Shaving Brush flower from the ...Nature's Fiberoptics

Introduction The following is an excerpt from the SLR Lounge Lightroom Workflow System Workshop on DVD, a system designed to increase your post production speed by 5 to 10 times! Click here to learn more. In this article, we are going to talk about creating a develop preset that you would like to apply to all of your images when they are first imported into Lightroom. Although Adobe’s RAW image processing is extremely powerful, one common complaint is that your images may look flat and colorless at first. Often photographers will lament how beautiful their colors looked on the back of their camera. Well, in an effort to fix this problem and make our images automatically look a little more crisp and vibrant when we first bring them into Lightroom, we’re going to create a “Standard Import” preset. For this tutorial we will use the following image as our example: Basic Adjustments Panel The goal for a standard preset is twofold:  First, to simply help every image look a little better overall, of course. Secondly we also want to apply default settings such as a personal blend of sharpening, lens corrections, or other calibration-related things. First, let’s tackle the Basic Adjustments.  Open the Basic Adjustments panel in the Develop Module and apply the following settings: The idea here is that you want to keep detail in any bright highlights or deep shadows, but do it without making the image look flat overall.  This is why we bring down the highlights to -20 yet push the Whites up to +10, and the same with the Shadows and Blacks. The image gets a little “punch” to it, without blowing out any highlights or clipping any shadows. To enhance that subtle punch a little further, next we’ll boost both the Clarity and Vibrance to +15.  Note that we leave alone settings like Saturation and Contrast, because for the most part those adjustments are too strong for them to be applied to every single image. Of course, YOU should tailor the adjustments to your own personal style!  Usually however we advise that going too much further than subtle editing should be saved as a separate preset that you use part of the time, but not necessarily 100% of the time. The goal, of course, is to minimize the amount of editing you have to do to the majority of your images.  If for example you find that 80-90% of the time you wind up adjusting some of these settings even further, or less, …then you might as well create your Standard Import preset that way because it will minimize the amount of editing you have to do later, even if you have to undo one or two settings just 10-20% of the time.  See how that works? To be avoided, however, is using a standardized preset to cover your habitual mistakes.  A good indicator for this is is if you feel like you ought to adjust your Exposure slider in your standardized preset.  Unless you have a very good reason; you’ll probably want to simply work to meter and expose your images better in the first place! Detail Panel Adjustments In the Detail Panel, we are going to apply our own special blend of sharpening that we apply to 99% of our RAW images.  These settings are shown below: Sharpening is definitely one of the most subjective aspects of post-production, however this “recipe” is our tried-and-true blend for RAW images, and we use it for all types of images from general portraits, weddings, and details. So adjust the settings to your taste, however just remember that your goal is for these settings to become the foundation for all your images!  Try out these settings on many different types of images, and settle on something that works best for all of them. Lens Correction Adjustments Another common issue on DSLR cameras and lenses these days is vignetting.  By default, we prefer to correct for a slight amount of vignetting by dialing our Lens Corrections’ “Manual” tab to the following settings: Again, if you commonly sh

Gah! I actually almost forgot. The Preakness is today. ...Continuing OT week at TOP. Here's the TV schedule: Preakness Stakes Saturday, Pimlico, 2:30–4:30pm, NBC Sports Network Preakness Stakes, 4:30–6:30pm, NBC Preakness Stakes Post-Race Show, Pimlico, 6:30–7:00pm, NBC Sports Network Times given are Eastern. I still don't have cable TV. One year I will break down. Here's a basic background article. Enjoy! Mike Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. TOP's links! (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)Featured Comments from: No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

I had noticed this lighting scheme earlier in the song and missed it, focusing elsewhere. But when guitarist Brendt Allman went into his solo, I waited to see if it would happen again. Sure enough, it did. EOS-1D Mark IV, EF 70-200 f/2.8L IS II. ISO 3200, 1/200 f/2.8. A few years ago, I managed to start working with one of my favorite groups of musicians, a progressive heavy metal band from Pennsylvania called Shadow Gallery.  This has led to me collaborating with them in a number of ways.  I did some publicity photos for them, shot a music video (in another first for me) that ended up getting play on MTV in Europe, and in what I consider a career highlight, shot my first concert performance- which also happened to be their first concert performance. Having never shot a live performance, I didn’t know what to expect.  I knew the venue was a small local place, so I had no idea what the lighting would be like. I came prepared with two lenses, an EF 24-105 f/4L and EF 70-200 f/2.8L IS II, as well as a 580EX II speedlite. I wasn’t sure the speedlites would be allowed, and even if they were, felt they would limit my shooting since I’d have to wait for the recycle. I used two cameras- a Canon EOS 7D and a Canon EOS-1D Mark IV. Both are capable of relatively high ISO’s, which I knew I’d be using in a dimly lit concert venue. By raising the ISO, it minimized how hard the flash would have to work.  I experimented starting at ISO 800, and finally settled on ISO 3200 a song or two into the show. The great thing about musical performances is the lighting is generally pretty This shot was early in the show, and I was experimenting with flash for my exposures. I used the built-in flash on the EOS 7D, and set the flash exposure compensation to -1 so as not to overpower the ambient. The result was good fill on his face, while the stage lighting created a nice backlight. The slower shutter speed of 1/100 allowed some motion blur in the hair, but that adds to the energy of the image. ISO was only 800 here, as it was the first song and I was still experimenting. interesting, if not all that bright.  What I wanted to do was figure out, when the lights were at their brightest, what my exposure should be.  I had the luxury of an opening act to shoot some tests. In addition, I wasn’t limited to just three songs like you might be with more well-known performers. I had an entire two hour show, so I took the first two songs to really nail my exposure down. Even when using flash, I wanted to balance the flash with ambient light, not overpower the ambient lighting.  To do this, I shot in Manual mode.  I set my aperture wide open at f/2.8 or f/4 depending on the camera.  I wanted a shutter speed fast enough to stop any movement on stage, so I ended up settling on 1/200 for the most part. Knowing the 7D would be a bit noisier at the high ISOs due to the smaller sensor, and that the lens I was using was a stop slower, I put the 24-105 on that camera and shot it at 1/100 at f/4 to give it an extra stop of exposure.  That allowed some motion blur to creep in, but for the most part I lost very shots due to motion blur. The constantly changing lighting meant that some shots just vanished as I pressed the shutter button.  The lighting was frantic and pulsing and constantly changing. But after a song or two, it got easier to predict the patterns, as well as see where the band members liked to stand so I could plan for a shot. After a time I ditched the flash and opted to shoot sequences at 8 and 10 frames per second to be sure I caught a good expression or peak action. In some cases, I’d catch great lighting for an instant, and then wait to see if the lighting sequence repeated and I could catch it again. Overall, it was a great experience, one I hope to repeat again some time. It was the perfect combination for me- great music and photography. After a while I turned off the flash and raised the ISO up. Shooting using onl