Fine Art Photography Blog

Light is the essence of photography, as we can see from the word roots.  ( Photo = Light;  Graph = Visualization, Display )  Most landscape photographers take this to mean shooting during the Golden Hour, and for good reason.  Incident light falls on our subject from its source - often the sun - before reflecting off the subject, to the camera.

The tonal quality of the light can play more role in the final image than, perhaps, any other single factor.  We can see this in the work of Ansel Adams ( the crosses of Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico;  the clouds in Clearing Winter Storm ) or Sebastiao Salgado ( Sudanese Refugee Camp, Boys in Mexico City ).  Both men produced gorgeous zone-system exposures, but, two of these show light filtering through the atmosphere. Black and white zone system photography highlights the effect, but it can work well in color, too.

Dust particles in the air can be one of the easier ways to capture the filtering light effect.  Storms are harder.  Water droplets suspended in the air can reflect the light perfectly, as Old Ansel  showed us.  Unfortunately, low hanging fog tends to block the sunlight;  finding the right conditions can be difficult.  Edges of storms are most likely to catch the light - and let enough of it through to make a good exposure. Read the rest of this entry »

Bored one cold, dark night in the upper left corner of our map, I found another use for the fire. Today, the sun went down around 4:30 pm, although the Olympic Mountain Range across the water to the west means we loose sight early. It would be an exaggeration to call us the land of the midnight sun, but it certainly feels like eternal night in the winter here.

We respond by staying indoors, drinking lots of coffee, dressing like Eskimos for the occasional sprint from the door to the car. We find “indoor activities.” We feel like miniature Alaskans, bound to The North not just by our coastal mountains, totem poles, and frontier heritage, but also by our brutal climate. It was against this context that photographing two pennies seemed like a reasonable way to pass time:
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The time the shutter stays open really doesn’t matter indoors when using a flash. A bright pulse lights up the room for 1/10,000 to 1/100,000 of a second; the shutter curtain seems glacial by this standard. Naturally, whether the shutter ’speed’ is 1/250 sec or 1/160 sec won’t amount to a noticeable difference. The flash has already frozen the scene in this case.

Outdoors, shooting with more ambient light, or a very reflective subject will change things. Your flash has a maximum sync speed listed in its specs telling you the fastest shutter speed you can get away with. Light will continue to flood your camera’s sensor even after the flash stops firing, and can ruin an exposure. Read the rest of this entry »

Every photographer goes through a period of looking for clever ways to make use of stair cases. Mine was extremely brief, just long enough to set up the tripod for this:

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This miniature world is hidden in day-to-day life, giving you access to an unfamiliar world of fine detail. Along with the lost sense of scale, exemplified by MC Escher, this is a key element in a lot of abstract art.

Definition: “Macro” Photography

Macro simply means shooting close-ups; technically it means “life-size” or 1:1 magnification. The size of the image on the film plane can be as large as it is in real life. This strict technical definition is being eroded; zoom lenses that achieve 1:4 - quarter-sized reproduction - call themselves macro, and compact digital cameras measure their macro ability by how close they can get to the target, rather than how many of the chip’s pixels can be devoted to recording a small topic. So, for simplicity’s sake, in this article we’re talking about close-up photography, which doesn’t have to be specifically at a 1:1 ratio.

Obviously, this is far from”life-size;” the leaf was probably two inches across, recorded on a 35 mm digital camera, with a 135 mm f/2 L, a lens offering a sorry (for this purpose) magnification of 1:5. Some cropping was naturally in order to “get closer” to the subject.

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This is admittedly an unfair comparison; we may as well ask whether there’s much difference between a disposable cardboard camera and a high end digital SLR with the best prime lenses. A fair analogy, in that Quantaray’s best tripod comes with the legs and head as one inseparable piece. But the question isn’t whether there’s a difference; it’s how much, and whether it’s worth the difference in price. Nobody should doubt for a second that the Manfrotto is a better tripod.

Some Context

The back story is that a strong gust of wind blew my tripod over with a Canon EOS 5D and Sigma 15-30 EX attached. I was waiting for the fog to blow where I wanted it in the frame, and taking shelter against a cold, damp wind, when a strong gust pushed the system over, bending the petal hood on the wide lens. The old tripod is broken, and in any case, it’s hardly trustworthy after the stress it’s caused.

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