Fine Art Photography Blog

I’ve been convinced of the value of geo-tagging my images for a long time now, as you can see from my fondness for maps. Over the holidays I picked up a GPS unit, in part to help with this in the future, but sadly most cameras - including my 5D - won’t talk to GPS hardware.

The map above gives the latitude and longitude for any point on the globe; every click shows the location in the center of the map. It works, but, as Google would say, it’s not a very ’scalable’ solution. I’m working on a software approach, to match up time stamps in the photos against time stamps in the GPX files with some fuzzy matching. Clearly, though, it won’t work for older shots that still warm the heart, and the interactive map is still useful for that.

Normally, shooting “ghosts” is a pretty easy thing to do;  a double-exposure does the trick pretty nicely.

Of course, that’s a Film Age trick, and needs to be handled differently with digital.  Photoshop can come to the rescue, as always.  A long-exposure is a more natural way to accomplish the same thing, and demands low light … ghostly ambiance.  Shoot a scene in bulb mode, and put the lens cap on when your image is almost properly exposed.  Position your subject, then take the cap off and finish the exposure.  Most of the background will have already sunk into the photo;  only a hint of your subject will show up, like an apparition.  A similar trick can be done with a flash.

Sometimes, though, the camera plays its own tricks.  Try as I might, I can’t figure this one out:  Gandolph the Gray, from Lord of the Rings, or at least his ghost, seems to have shown up in a waterfall shot this spring, near Talapus Lake.

Have a look at the original;  he’s highlighted below:

Here’s a close-up: Read the rest of this entry »

Fog hangs in pockets of the Seattle, particularly near the water, while clouds blow overhead, reflecting the colors of the city behind them. This isn’t unusual for mid January in the Rainy City … most days, the sky scrapers are hidden behind the fog.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Ducks aren’t typically thought of as fine art, and generally for good reason. Still, it can be good practice trying to make something so plain look attractive. All of the same tools - lighting, color, depth of field, geometry - can be used on humble fowl:

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »