Fine Art Photography Blog

I’ve been working for Getty Images as a contractor over the last few months; all contractors are being dismissed due to budget constraints, so I’ve found a new job - still in the IT sector - and managed a few days off to explore Western Washington, my little corner of the Pacific Northwest. Unfortunately, with my new tripod broken out of the box, I came back with less photos than I’d intended.

Directions

North Cascades is a long drive from Seattle, but it doesn’t have to be an ugly one; leave I-5 for route 530 just north of Marysville, avoiding the ride and traffic all the way to Mount Vernon. You’ll pass through what feels like hundreds of miles of forests, farmland, and foothills before joining SR 20 in Rockport and starting your ascent. Unlike most national parks, North Cascades doesn’t have an entrance fee, as it straddles one of three passable routes across the mountains in Washington State.

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Digital cameras are a lot like slide film, from the 35 mm days. With negatives you would expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights; slide film had a much narrower exposure latitude that would clip the highlights easily … much like today’s CCD or CMOS chip.

So, we find ourselves exposing for the highlights, checking the histogram when time allows, and avoiding overexposure like the plague. This doesn’t mean you should under-expose by habit, but when there are important highlights in a scene, you may be forced to underexpose much of your photo to retain detail in the brights.

Over-exposure can be the kiss of death, so when you “develop” an image in Photoshop, you don’t want to create the same problem in post. There are a number of ways to approach this, all involving selective edits. The Curves and Levels tools are a good start, but you can do better. Read the rest of this entry »

“Fine Art Adventure Photography” has grown quite a bit lately, to the point that reorganizing has become necessary. The main site was beginning to be cluttered with not only articles on photography technique, but software, travel advice and trip reports, and more.To make the site and the information it provides easier to use, we’re being split into a site for galleries and photos, this blog to announce new photos and to share tips about photography, ones that don’t merit full articles. Software will be moved to a separate web site.