Posts Tagged photo workshop
Frosty morning on the Merced
Posted by Doug Otto in Photography on November 2, 2009
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I think that nearly every landscape photographer struggles when they visit a location for the first time. The first instinct is to grab the widest lens that you have and try to capture it all. More often than not the resulting images are busy, confusing and uninteresting.
During the Gary Hart workshop that just concluded, a number of folks commented that they had struggled with one location that we visited. It was a morning shoot along the bank of the Merced River. It’s also really the only place that you can get an end-to-end view of El Capitan and the Three Brothers. While I’d been to this particular location many times, I’d never really captured an image that I felt did it justice.
After the group spread out and began searching for their compositions I tried to break the scene down to find it’s essence. Really, this hugely vast scene came down to just a few things: the Merced River, the golden first light on El Capitan, the chill in the air and the color of the fall leaves. The next step was to find a composition that embodied those components. After a short walk I came upon this vignette. It’s not the grand vista that one first imagines from this spot but, at least to me, it more accurately captures the “soul” of the location.
I purposely left the technical details of my last couple of posts because I felt them to be conflicting with the message of the post but I know that people like to see them. This simple scene contains a challenge that is worth commenting on.
Reflections can be difficult. The tendency is to focus on the reflection which often results in a loss of sharpness in portions of the frame. The distance to the object not the reflection, determines the focus. In this case, El Capitan was at infinity not the 2 foot distance to the reflection. To get the leaves and grass sharp and have reasonable sharpness in the reflection I set my aperture to f/11. I was using my Canon 24-70 at 55mm and was as low as my tripod would go. I tried several exposures but the blurring of the water seemed distracting so I brought the ISO up to 400, giving me a shutter speed of 1/5 of a second. I felt like it was just enough water motion to give it texture without being a distraction.
Cheers
Half Dome – Alone in the moonlight
Posted by Doug Otto in Photography on August 13, 2009
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Just over two years ago I took a workshop with Gary Hart. The main goal of the trip was to shoot Yosemite under the light of the full moon. This is one of my favorite images from that trip. That was also when Gary first asked if I’d be interested in assisting on future workshops.
The workshop group consisted of just 5 students, including myself. The small group made for a really intimate setting and I still hear from nearly all of those folks on a semi-regular basis. I think that part of that bond came from the grueling conditions that we all endured together. Because it was summer, the days were very long. We’d get up at 3:30Am to be in place before sunrise. After shooting all day and well into the night we generally didn’t return to the hotel until after midnight; only to do it again the next day. I’m still not sure how we all made it through but I will admit that by day 4 we were all a bit punchy.
If you’ve never experienced Yosemite by moonlight, you should make that one of your goals. The stark white granite absolutely lights up under moonlight and is unlike any place that I’ve ever seen.
This image really formulated my basic strategy for moonlight shooting. With a fairly wide angle lens, in this case a Tokina 12-24 @ 16mm, an exposure of 30 seconds still results in fairly sharp star images. Longer exposure and focal lengths make the rotation of the Earth much more apparent. I wanted as much light as I could get so I set the aperture to f/4. The entire scene was at infinity so depth of field wasn’t a concern. I left the shutter speed at 30 seconds and started raising my ISO until I got the exposure that I wanted. In this case, I ended up at ISO 400. My old Canon 30D was pretty clean at ISO 400 or below but I did do some noise cleanup using Noise Ninja as well as basic color correction and sharpening in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CS4.
Cheers
Landscape Lenses
Posted by Doug Otto in Photography on February 12, 2009
This shot is was taken from the same vantage point as the previous entry only on a different day. On this morning the sky wasn’t particularly interesting so I choose to avoid it entirely. When I’m on a workshop folks will often ask: for this shot what lens should I bring? My standard answer is: “that really depends on the composition that you choose but I’ll be bringing all of mine.”
Good landscape photography requires you to follow the light. A beautiful scene with ugly light makes a wonderful travel snap shot. It doesn’t make a for a successful landscape image. In this example, the drama and the light was all happening at the tree level down in the valley. If I’d approached this as a “landscape shot” I would have left my 100-400mm lens at home I’d never have gotten this image. Being able to adapt to the conditions that you’re dealt will go a long way towards helping your grow in your craft.
Having a long lens in your landscape kit allows you to add another dimension to your shooting. Some of my favorite images are telephoto shots. The next time someone tells you that a 100-400 isn’t a “landscape lens” tell them that you know differently.
Cheers
The Photo Workshop Experience
Posted by Doug Otto in Photography on January 9, 2009
A photography workshop can, and should be, a very special learning experience. Under the right circumstances, a good workshop can have a measurable, positive, impact on your shooting. Under the wrong conditions, it can be frustrating and fruitless.
Workshops should be small and intimate. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to create a valuable learning environment in groups larger than 7 or 8 students per instructor. To paraphrase a quote from Galen Rowell; “if your group has 20 people in it, it’s a seminar not a workshop.” Some of the best workshop learning opportunities come from interactions between the attendees. In the short time that you have together, you just cannot foster that environment with a large group.
The distractions of daily life often make it difficult to let our creativity shine. Often, we try to include photography into our vacation time. Planning the trip requires time and effort. The details of the trip become so tedious that it becomes very difficult to release your creative mind to the task of making images. Those details, or left-brain thinking, cloud our creative nature. The result is, often, a memory card full of uninspired images.
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