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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