High country like this is under ten feet of snow and more all over the Northern Rockies and the Pacific Northwest in mid-summer 2011. This picture of dawn at Logan Pass in Glacier National Park was shot in 2009.
The main problem with these areas is that at this time, mid summer 2011, the high country in all of these areas is under many feet of snow.
The Grinnell Glacier Trail, one of my favorites in Glacier National Park is 60% snow covered with steep, exposed, extremely dangerous snow crossings in many places.The same holds true for Rainier National Park in Washington. One of the major scenic areas in Rainier, Paradise, which is usually one of the best wildflower areas of the Pacific Southwest is under eleven feet of sno. In the North Cascades in Washington, Cascade Pass, one of the best scenic and wildflower locations in the Northwest, is under many feet of snow and the conditions are so hazardous that ice axes are required to venture up the normally simple trail.
This is a picture I took while walking with my camera
along the Maine Seacoast.
Here's the truth. Most professional landscape photographers are not hikers. Most great scenic photographs are shot very close to the road. Landscape photographers rarely or never hike to take pictures. Most of them don't even like walking. I was once one of these guys.
How do most professional landscape photographers get their pictures? How do I take my pictures now-a-days? Why, over the past ten years have I gradually moved away from the crowded "Great picture locations" and out to the more lonely trails. What is "Walking With a Camera" and how and where can you do it for the most fun and the best pictures. Read the entire article to find out.
This is a picture I took while hiking on Shrine Pass in
Colorado, near Vail
Part two of my ongoing series on Walking With a Camera is about where and when to walk with your camera. If you are wondering how to begin walking with your camera, here are some ideas that I have come up over the years to maximise both enjoyment and productivity. Here are the stories of how I do it.Read the entire article.
This picture was taken while walking along the Green
River in Utah
This third article about Walking With a Camera is about buying a great camera for walking. I compare seven good to great cameras and discuss the strong and weak points of each. Also I cover important stuff you should know whenever you are buying a camera.
It you are in the market for a good camera, this is one of my best articles on the subject. Read the entire article.
Grinnell Glacier Trail in Glacier National Park,
Montana. The best walk with a camera I ever took.
The best way to walk with a camera is to keep it very, very simple. This often means carrying just one lens. But if it's the wrong lens it can lead to disaster.
Read the stories of some of my disasters with lenses. Learn how to use and buy the right lenses. Plus my two favorite scenic locations in New Mexico. Plus some of the best of our new pictures for 2010.
Walking with a camera Part 5, Packs
The above pictures is in Arches National Park where there are tons of great places to walk with a camera.
Most serious photographers spend tons of money on fancy, special back packs designed for carrying photo gear. This really doesn't work very well in practice. These packs work great for sorting out bunches of photo gear, several cameras and all the lenses you could ever want into nice neat little pockets. Unfortunately they don't work well as packs. They are horribly heavy and horribly uncomfortable and they often have no space for non-photographic stuff like water, parkas, fleece jackets, or lunch.
Here is an article about camera backpacks that actually work.
Walking with a Camera, Part 6, Boots
Buying the right hiking boots is much more important, and
much harder than you might think.
One piece of equipment that is essential for walking with a camera is a good pair of hiking shoes. Worrying about what kind of shoes you are going to wear on a hike sounds a little silly, but there is a lot more to choosing hiking shoes than it seems.
Buy your walking shoes after a good walk or after you have been on your feet most of the day when your feet are a bit swollen. My experience is that you should buy walking shoes a half to one whole size, or even a size and a half larger than your regular shoes. Feet swell considerably on longer hikes and what felt great at the shoestore in the morning may cause blackened toenails and all kinds of other problems after even a moderate hike.
I can't tell you how many times I have made the mistake of buying walking shoes too small. I think at least my last four pairs of hiking shoes have been too short. Finally, I'm beginning to wise up. As I said above, I returned my last pair of hiking shoes and the pair I replaced them with are a full size larger than my regular shoes. I have now had these shoes about six months and they seem to be working perfectly.
Using Point-and-Shoot Cameras for walking with a camera.
The very simplest way to hand-hold cameras and get good results is to use one of the better point and shoot cameras. These are the smaller cameras with a built in zoom lens and a built in flash. Many of these will take quite high quality pictures while handheld.
One reason these cameras work well for walking with a camaera is that these small point and shoot cameras are very light and are thus easy to hold steady. Also, these cameras often have stabilized lenses and this will allow you to shoot quite slowly, down to 1/60 or 1/40 of a second.
When I am using my small point and shoot, I often just shoot at the P (automatic) setting, focus on the closer details in the picture and don't even worry about depth of field. The background is not always razor sharp, but it is always sharp enough that no one notices.
Small point and shoot cameras have another big plus. They often have a built in flash which is very useful for smoothing out the dark shadows and bright high-lights that develop on sunny days. To use your flash this way just set it on fill-flash when you are shooting a scene with a dark foreground or a foreground that is a mix of dark and light. It is amazing how much this will help these sorts or pictures.
Using larger SLR type cameras for walking with a camera
If you are shooting a larger, SLR (Single Lens Reflex) camera that has exchangeable lenses, you definitely should be shooting using a stabilizer lens if you plan on doing a lot of hand-holding, which walking with a camera requires.
The easiest way to take handheld pictures using these larger cameras is to set the exposure control on your camera to P, which stands for program or automatic. This will ensure that your camera will automatically choose a shutter speed fast enough to not blur the image. The wind can be blowing and you can have the too-much-coffee-jitters or the hangover shakes and you will still get sharp pictures. And you won't even have to use high ISO speeds. This is the upside. The downside is that your pictures won't have much, if any, depth of field. In other words, that great picture of yellow daisies and grasses where you focused right on the flowers will be dead sharp but the Teton Peaks in the background will be quite blurry. This actually isn't too bad though. It can actually look very nice.
This picture of Deadhorse Point in Utah is
one of the pictures I took on my recent
Southwest Photography trip.
I just got back from a three week shooting trip in the Southwest. May 2010.) I was in New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. I visited twelve National Parks and areas that should have been National Parks and I shot over 7000 images.
Here is an article about that shoot that contains 21 pictures of the best scenery of the southwest from Petrified Forest National Park, to Grand Canyon, Zion, Capital Reef, Arches, Bryce, Canyonlands and a lot more.
The artical also contains a link to a slideshow with 60 more new pictures of the Southwest.
This article is not only about what we consider the best way to frame our pictures, it is also an overview of all the ways to frame our pictures.
We think that one of the best and least expensive ways to frame one of our pictures is to have it framed at Reed Photo in Denver and then have it shipped to you.
We think that this may be true even if you have the finished picture shipped half way across the US.
Yes, I know that I have always said that framed pictures are too expensive to ship and that it is best to buy a loose photograph from us and have it framed locally. So, how can it be best to have the framing job done in Denver and then shipped to you? Read the entire article to find out.
If you are thinking of buying one of our pictures and getting it framed, this article is a must read.
The Gila Wilderness is one of the more lonely
wilderness areas in the US
Gila Wilderness Backpack
Last week, near the end of March, eight of us set out from the Visitor Center near the Gila Cliff Dwellings in Southen New Mexico for a five day backpack in the canyons and mesas on the east side of Middle Fork of the Gila River.
I was a little worried about keeping up with a bunch of nineteen year old kids who all looked like lean and fit high school athletes. So, when we hit the trail I tried hard to keep from falling behind. As it turned out, I did struggle a bit, but I quickly saw that I had a big advantage over the kids (as I soon began to call them) even though I was three times as old as most of them. The kids all showed up with huge packs full of all kinds of luxury food, fresh vegetables, tubs of butter, bags of fresh meat and heavy cooking utensils. Clearly they had never heard of Ultra Light Backpacking, or maybe they had heard of it, but were tough enough and young enough to care less about lightweight anything.
Read the entire article to see how all of this worked out.....
Read the entire article about the Gila Wilderness and see the pictures I took there.
Depth of Field, part 2.
How to get both sharp foreground and background all
at the same time when using SLR cameras.
Several years ago I wrote an article called Depth of Field, Part 1. That article was a very good introduction to the basic principles of depth of field and described how to get good depth of field when shooting small point-and-shoot cameras.
The current article is about how to achieve a great depth of field when using using SLR cameras, not point-and-shoot cameras. SLR cameras are larger, more professional cameras with interchangeable lenses. Since more and more people are buying digital SLRs, I thought I had better update the article on depth of field.
In part one of "How to Shoot Wildflowers" I advised you to wait for a cloudy day, or at least not shoot until a big cloud floated by to soften and diffuse the harsh light of the sun. I also advised that you might want to use a two or three foot diameter diffusing screen that you hold between the sun and the flower to soften the light. However, I stated that I really don't use diffusing screens and mostly just waited for a passing cloud or even came back later on a cloudy day.
In this article, I discuss my recent conclusion that I really do need to use a diffusing screen and how such a screen really can make a huge difference in how your wildflower pictures look.
How to Take Sharp Pictures
Taking sharp pictures is an art. There is a lot to it and whole books have been written on the subject. However, the basics are not all that hard. This article is an introduction to the basics of taking and printing sharp pictures.
Reed Photo in Denver is a Great Place
To Have Our Pictures Laminated and Framed
We have moved from CO to NM
Read about our old home and our new home
The Maroon Bells is one of the most
beautiful spots in the world
The Maroon Bells are definitely one of the premier scenic locations not only in Colorado but in the whole world. The mountains are not only huge but extremely scenic since they lie at the far end of a classic U shaped mountain valley. In the fall they reach the peak of their beauty when the aspens that cover the high mountains on both the right and left sides of the valley turn yellow and gold and red. To top it off, the whole scene is perfectly reflected in the waters of Maroon Lake.
Because almost all photographic shooitng and printing is now digital, we are capable of making photographs far more beautiful and far more faithful to the real world than we ever have before. And as everyone who regularly deals with computers knows, it also means living with a bunch of very complex, temperamental equipment that goes haywire pretty regularly.
Mostly real landscape photographers use Photoshop to bring a scene back to what it actually looked like before the camera screwed it up. For example, cameras don't see nearly as many levels of brightness as the human eye does. This is why photographs often show what was originally a bright blue sky as blank white or why they show the gorgeous shadows at dusk and dawn as pure black. One of the main jobs of photoshop is to fix problems like this.
Good Light is Crucial
for Great Photographs
One of the most basic principles of photography is shooting in good light. Everyone knows, even non-photographers, that you should take photographs early in the morning or late in the evening. We all know this truism, but it is amazing how easy it is to forget it, since we have all taken lots of pretty good, mediocre but still pretty good, photos in all kinds of light.
Introduction
Hand holding a camera will immediately make any photographer much more creative and spontaneous. This is especially true if the camera has a long range zoom lens and you don't have to break your train of thought to dig out an new lens and put it on the camera. You can quickly shoot a distant scene with three different kinds of foreground or flop down on the ground and get all kinds of great close ups. It takes no time at all to take twenty shots from all kinds of different angles and positions that you would never have gotten had you been using a tripod.
Hand HeldCameras, Part2
The Olympus C8080
The Olympus C-8080
I had been in the Winds many times before and taken many pictures using film cameras but I had never been satisfied with the results. This year I wanted to shoot the Winds digitally. I wanted the best quality pictures but my best quality digital camera (a $8000.00 Canon 1Ds MarkII) weighed almost 7 pounds with a single lens and with my lightest tripod and tripod head the whole outfit weighed over fifteen pounds. This was just out of the question for someone who was no longer a young man. The maximum pack I could carry comfortably was no more than 40 pounds max, and I really wanted to go with no more than a 30 or 35 pound pack.So I decided to take my Olympus C-8080 and no tripod. This whole outfit weighs 2 pounds.
The Green River in Utah
My first thought was that I didn't want to take my good camera; it was sure to get full of sand and wet and ruined before the trip was over. So I decided to take my trusty Olympus C-8080. As described in my last post, I had good luck handholding it in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming the previous summer and I thought it would be perfect. It was.
Canon Rebel Xsi
However, even though my Olympus was doing a pretty good job, I thought that maybe I needed a camera that had a little larger image size than the Olympus but that would still be very light, easy to handle and could be taken on long backpacking trips. Also, when shooting in RAW format, the Olympus is unbelievably slow and I really wanted to be able to shoot in RAW.After a bit of research on my favorite camera reviewsite, dpreview, I came up with the Rebel Xsi, also called the 450D.
Depth of Field
I shot the picture to the left in mid July on day one of my month long summer shoot. I was driving through the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado on my way to our old home in Howard, Colorado. I had my new Canon Rebel with the new Tamaron 18-270 lens on the passenger seat right beside me. It was so easy to stop and take pictures that I was stopping fairly regularly, wandering around a bit in the close vicinity of the car and shooting whatever looked good. In the location of the above picture I shot half a dozen pretty good images.
But I also made some serious mistakes.
High ISO speed and Noise
There is a downside to using higher ISOspeeds; the higher they are, the more noise you add to a picture. In the case of my 1Ds Mark II, I'm lucky, it's a very good camera and there is not much noise added even at ISO 1000. There definitely is some though; however if the picture is not sharpened, almost all of this noise can be removed later in Photoshop and it will never be noticed.
More on Depth of Field
There are several ways to get greater depths of field when shooting with hand held cameras.
Image Stabilization
Image stabilizers are a huge help when hand holding. Since this picture was shot with an image stabilized lens, I could shoot at a much slower speed than I usuallly would. I could use a smaller f-stops which enabled me to get a much better depth of field.
Often I don't have to resort to increasing ISO speed to get smaller f-stops, I just rely on the image stabilizer and shoot more slowly.
Part I
Buying a digital camera can be complicated. If you go to Best Buy or WalMart or some such big box discount store you are confronted with a whole rack of cameras and about the best you can do is maybe choose a name brand and megapixal size and hope for the best. However, there is a much better way of going about this.
Range of Wyoming,
Part I
Range of Wyoming,
Part II
This part of the article concentrates on Bear Lake Road, one of the most scenic sections of the Park.
Read the entire article.
Good landscape photography is always a combination of good camera technique and a more creative element that is usually called something like artistic vision. (Words like art and artistic sound hopelessly pretentious to me, but I can't seem to come up with a better word so I guess I'll have to use them.)
The technical part of photography consists of things that can be fairly easily learned like getting the proper exposure, making sharp rather than blurry images, choosing the right lens, and the using filters correctly. The artistic part of landscape photography deals more with composition, aesthetic balance, light, how the photographer sees the world, what he thinks is important in life, and what he is trying to communicate in his pictures. There are lots of different views of what the art of photography should be and how to go about achieving it, probably about as many different opinions as there are different photographers. Even though I really don't think much about art when I take pictures and tend to do what I do more instinctively than logically, my recent temporary move to Maine got me thinking about art and photography. Below are some of the conclusions I came to about the "art" in my photography and how I go about doing it.
or Not?
Part 1
The question, "To use a tripod or not?" is a pretty important question if you seriously want to take good pictures. Five years ago I answered this question with a most emphatic "Yes, of course, I always use a tripod. I haven't taken a picture without a tripod for twenty years." Now-a-days, with the advent of digital photography, the answer is not quite so simple.
In this part of the article, Part I, I discuss the reasons why use of a tripod is absolutely essential if you are serious about landscape photography and if you take outsanding nature photographs.
To use a Tripod of Not, Part 2
I love to lie down on the ground with my little camera, snapping away at wildflowers, colorful lichens, dewy spider webs, lacey birch bark and what-not. Some surprisingly good pictures come out of this. This works especially well with wildflowers. An added advantage is that many smaller cameras have a built in flash which can be adjusted to a greater or lesser intensity and which can add immensely to close-up pictures taken close to the ground. The flash will add flawless lighting as well as stopping any wind movement as long as the distances are short.
Part 1
High winds have been a part of many art show disasters. I have seena whole row of tents tumbling down the middle of the street like tumbleweeds in a spring dust storm on the Texas plains. I have seen tents hanging from stoplights suspended over a busy street corner. I have seen tents impaled on balconies three stories above the street.
our lives on the
art-show road.
you decide to drop out and be a hippie
This long article which I wrote in 2004 is still a very good read.
When I first began photography seriously in the 1980's, I was shooting negative film and printing in an old fashioned wet darkroom using a monstrous paper processor the size of a small dump truck. I continued to make photographs this way through the first of my years as a professional photographer. This took me into the mid 1990's.
Between my beginnings in the 1980's and now (early 2010), photography has gone through one of the most monumental changes in the entire history of photography. It is certainly of the magnitude of the change from black and white photography to color photography.
By 1997, I was still using film, but now shooting both negatives and slides. I had abandoned my non-digital printing lab and was having the film scanned on large, digital, drum scanners and then digitally printing on very large and expensive Light Jet Printers in commercial labs.
In 2004, when I wrote this article, I was still at this stage and just about ready to begin using digital cameras and inkjet printers.
Even though this article is most about the recent history of photography, I think it is still a very good read. It is the story of where I was in 2004, half-way between two photographic worlds. It is concerned with the basic principles and problems of trying to catch all the beauty of the natural world on a piece of two dimensional paper. The tools change, but the problems of light and color and tonality and composition and image quality remain the same.
This is a good article to read if you are trying to become a competent photographer yourself. It gives you a good sense of some of the recent history of photography and of the basics of making good pictures that all photographers need to understand.
I have updated the article at various points to explain what we are currently doing as opposed to what we did when the article was written.
Read the entire article.
