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Posted by on Nov 13, 2012 in Photography | 24 comments

Why So Many People Love Landscape Photography


Ever hear about (or see) one of those popular landscape photography locations that’s absolutely packed with people? Ever wonder why everyone is standing there taking the same exact photo that maybe tens of hundreds of thousands of photographers have taken before? If you haven’t witnessed it personally, then you’ve probably seen it. And if you haven’t, then just check out the photo above taken at Delicate Arch in Arches National Park near Moab, Utah. Believe it or not, you’re not even seeing the other 50+ people that were to the right of me in that photo. So with crowds often like this, and so many photos looking similar to each other, why do so many people love landscape photography?

This all leads to something I’ve been wanting to write about for a while now, but just haven’t found the right context to talk about it. Basically, as a landscape photographer I often hear two things said about shooting landscapes:
1) Some one will say landscape photography is kinda like photo collecting – meaning you simply walk up to a location and “collect” a photo (implying you’re not doing anything creative or photographic-like since you’re just snapping a photo).
2) The other thing I hear a lot is people wondering why anyone would sit at a location like you see above, knowing all of those other photographers are there taking the same photo and yours is going to look just like it.

Years ago, it used to bug me a little but I’ve gotten over it. Mainly because I realize it’s just personal taste. Everyone likes different foods right? So why would photography be any different? But there’s a little more to it that I think reading on will help you consider…

My Buddy RC And A Recent Trip Out West
Last week my friend RC Concepcion was teaching a workshop with Bill Fortney and His Light Workshops. I’ve always wanted to shoot Monument Valley so I figured it was a great chance to head out there and enjoy some time with friends while I was at it. Well, one of the things I’ve always known about RC is that he kinda had that “photo collecting” mentality about landscapes. Now, he was never mean about it and never did anything to belittle my photography. In fact, he was always very quick to recognize a nice photo when he saw it. But landscape photography just didn’t seem to be his “thing”. But I think that changed a little last week.

It All Started When RC And I Had To Go On Separate Sunset Shoots
This all begins with RC and I going on separate shoots. See, part of the ride to the sunset location he was going to, involved driving down an extremely bumpy dirt road for about 30+ minutes (we’d gone to a similar location for sunrise so I knew the drive). It was seriously like being on one of the Deadliest Catch boats ;) Little known fact about me: I get REALLY motion sick. And when I say REALLY I mean REALLY bad. If I’m not the one driving a car then I’d better be sitting in the passenger seat or I start to feel ill (and even that doesn’t always help). And I knew from the sunrise shoot earlier that day, that I couldn’t take another one of those trips. So I bailed out and shot something different for sunset.

The Moment I Knew It Changed
Later that evening RC and I are sitting in the hotel room looking at photos from the day. RC looks over at my laptop and says “Dude, where was that!!!???”. He then proceeded to mutter a few expletives about me getting a cool shot that he missed. It’s not that he was mad at me or anything. And it’s not that his sunset shoot was worse than mine or anything. It’s just that he loved the shot and wished that he had been in a similar place. It was at that moment I knew RC got “it”. What is “it” you ask? It’s that feeling of creating a a beautiful photo of a beautiful place that no conversation, debate, and no amount of discussion between us would ever make him see.

(here’s the photo I had up when RC looked over – click to see larger)

Here’s What It All Comes Down To
We actually talked a little about the topic during our trip. What I explained to RC was that saying landscape photography is like photo collecting, is devaluing the actual process of taking the photo. Look at the Story Behind The Photo posts I’ve been doing. They’re some of the most popular posts, and it’s not because everyone likes the photo. It’s the story behind the photo, and the journey that it took to create the image. We’ve probably all been to crowded photo locations where several, if not tens or hundreds of photographers are trying to take the same photo. So why don’t we just skip that location and look at, buy, or admire their photo, instead of trying to make our own? Because making our own photo of a beautiful or memorable place is part of photography. I’ve personally seen many great photos of Monument Valley. And honestly, I’ve seen many greater than mine. But I consider my trip an absolute success because I got to shoot Monument Valley the way I wanted to. I can still admire other’s photos of the area, but now I also have my own – and that means a lot to me. I was there. I got to feel what it was like. I got to experience the scenery, the air, the beautiful color in the sunset/sunrise, and the feeling of taking my own photo there. Plus, I got to put my own spin on the post-processing (which regardless if anyone admits is a HUGE part of landscape and outdoor photography).

That’s what it’s all about and that’s why I have absolutely no problem walking up to a location that’s been photographed a million times before, and taking my own photo there. Do I love hiking out into the wilderness and capturing places few ever get to see? Sure I do. But a beautiful place is a beautiful place – whether I had to hike for hours and camp overnight to get it, or I walked 15 feet out of my car and set my tripod next to 10 other photographers.

Thanks for stopping by today. Have a good one! :)

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Posted by on Nov 12, 2012 in Photoshop | 11 comments

Photoshop For Landscape Photographers At The Wacom Booth


A while back at Photoshop World, I did an hour long session at the Wacom booth called Photoshop For Landscape Photographers. It went over really well and the audience really seemed to dig it. The best part about it is that Wacom recorded the sessions. So even if you couldn’t make it, you can go back and watch them. Here’s a link if you want to go visit the post with the videos on their blog. But I’ve also linked to both videos right below too. Hope you enjoy!

Part 1

Part 2

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Posted by on Nov 9, 2012 in Photography | 5 comments

A Quick Star Photography Q&A


Hey everyone. I’m heading off to Branson, MO with my wife for a friends wedding this weekend. So if you know of any cool things that I need to see or do, let me know. Next, I wanted to say thanks for all of the nice comments on yesterday’s post about night sky star photography. I did see a few questions between the blog and some social media sites I posted the photos on, so I thought I’d do a quick Q&A.

Q. Does it matter what room you have in the Monument Valley View hotel?
A. If you didn’t read the post, I wrote about how I stayed at the Monument Valley View hotel and they have great views right from the balcony of your room. If you stay there, you need one of their “premium view” rooms. What’s funny is that some wrote a comment that my view looked like the view they had while staying there and was it room 226. It actually was 226. Too funny. Anyway, there’s 3 floors in the hotel and I thought you’d need a 3rd floor room to get an unobstructed view, but it turned out that any floor would do. There was plenty of room overhead that I could shoot at 16mm all night and never worry about the overhang above me getting in the way. I believe there’s also a patio area that has a great view. So even if you can’t snag a premium view room you could try that. Or heck, even the parking lot has a spectacular viewing area.

Q. I heard that you can put your ISO up really high to test out composition while shooting the night sky. Is that true?
A. That’s actually a great question and is something I actually did do (but forgot to mention yesterday). While you’re setting up and testing composition (remember, it’s so dark that you won’t see anything through your viewfinder), try putting your ISO up really high so shorten the shutter speed to a few seconds. That way, you can test out composition without waiting 15-30 seconds for each exposure to see if it was good or not. When you dial in the right composition, then you start adjusting your settings for the “official” shoot.

Q. Matt, don’t you have a 50mm f/1.4 or 85mm f/14 lens? Wouldn’t that let you get your ISO down because of the really wide aperture?
A. I do have both a 50mm and 85mm lens. But when it comes to star photography they’re not wide enough. I briefly put the 50mm on to try it. But I took it off after taking just one photo. It’s just not wide enough.

Q. This wasn’t as much of a question but a cool tip from Myer Bornstein that I’ll try next time. He wrote:
TIP: Here is a trick ab out focusing. Prior to going out, focus the lens with auto-focus at an object at least 30 feet away, look at the distance scale and see where the infinity mark is, note it and use that mark to set your lens for thee night shooting. I take the focusing ring in place with gaffers tape. I then set every to manual and go from there.

Q. Nice work. Have you seen what Royce Bair has done with light painting? Look him up on Flickr, or Into the Night Photography on Blogspot.
A. No I hadn’t seen his work but he’s got some great stuff. Here’s a link.

Q. You didn’t mention white balance. What white balance where you using? (especially in the first photo with the purple color in the sky)
A. I set my camera to Daylight white balance. It’s a great start but I found I adjusted the Temperature slider in Lightroom to make it more blue, as well as the Tint slider for some more magenta.

That’s it for today. Have a great weekend! :)

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Posted by on Nov 8, 2012 in Photography, Story Behind the Photo | 22 comments

What I Learned On My First Star Photo Shoot


I’m on my way back from a quick trip out west to shoot Monument Valley, Page Arizona and Bryce Canyon. I’ve always been interested in night photography and star photos, but it’s pretty hard to do living where I live in Florida (because of light pollution). So while I was out there I took the opportunity to do some late night shooting.

Note: Make sure you click on each photo to see it larger

The First Location
For my first try at shooting the stars, I got myself a room at the Monument Valley View hotel. It’s a hotel right in the heart of Monument Valley and it’s rooms have balconies that look right out into the valley. It was such a cool view. So a few friends (RC, John “the snake” Barrett, and Chuck Barnes) came over and we all set our tripods out on the balcony for some shooting. It was actually a great setup. I could shoot and look at my photos on the laptop to figure out what to fix (since it was my first time).

Here’s a poorly stitched iPhone photo where I moved too fast for it to shoot correctly. But it still gives you a good idea of what the view was from the balcony :)

The First View
The view was awesome. Part of what I find (from looking at photos that inspire me) makes good star photography is having an interesting foreground. You’re generally not going to see too much detail. In fact, a lot of star photos I see, show the foreground as a silhouette. That’s why it’s even more important to pick something interesting. What better foreground then the scenery at Monument Valley? And the best part about it was that the view was right on my balcony.

(Here’s one of the first photos I took. You can see a hint of the Milky Way as well as the moon starting to rise in distance)

The First Shoot – Shutter Speed
Okay, I knew some basics going into this. First, I knew that I wanted to be shooting in Manual mode so I could set everything exactly as I needed. I knew that one of the most important parts of star photography is a shutter speed that doesn’t blur the stars. See, if the shutter stays open too long then the stars appear to move, and look blurry. It’s not an exact science, but depending on which way you’re facing, that shutter speed is between 15-30 seconds. So my first tests were to find out which shutter speed worked here. In this case, I found 15-20 seconds was the sweet spot. At first though, I did think 30 seconds was good from looking at the LCD. But that’s why it was such a benefit to have the laptop nearby for my first shoot – so I could load the photos immediately and really zoom in and look at what’s going on. At 30 seconds, you could tell the stars were blurred.

(Blurry Stars)

The Lens
Another thing to keep in mind is that most people I find shoot star photos with a wide angle lens. I used my Nikon 16-35. So those numbers typically work well for wide focal lengths. But if you zoom in, then those shutter speeds need to be even faster. There’s technical formulas to figure it out, but honestly, I find it easier to just do some test photos. The shutter speeds are short enough (somewhere between 5-15 seconds) that you probably won’t spend much more than a minute or two figuring it out. And even if I knew the formulas, I’d probably still do test photos anyway :)

The Rest of the Gear
Camera: Nikon D800
Lens: Nikon 16-35mm
Cable Release: Vello Shutter Boss Cable Release
Tripod: Really Right Stuff TVC-33
Ballhead: Really Right Stuff BH-55

The Aperture
Once you figure out what shutter speed is right, then you need to start working on the other aspects of exposure. For most star photo shoots, you want to choose the lowest f/stop number that your lens will give (widest aperture). For me and my Nikon 16-35 f/4, I chose f/4. If I had a lower aperture setting I would have definitely used it (the other guys were using a 24-70 f/2.8 lenses so they used f/2.8).

(Here’s a photo of the moonrise. It actually looks almost like sunrise doesn’t it?)

Now, that’s very different from what we usually think with landscape photos. We usually want to shoot at f/11, f/16, or even f/22 to get the most depth of field and keep everything sharp. That’s great when shutter speed doesn’t matter and your subject isn’t moving. But remember the whole thing on shutter speed I just mentioned? Well, since the stars are moving (well, I guess technically the earth is really moving) you need every trick you can get to keep your shutter speed down around 15-30 seconds. So that’s why we go with a wide aperture setting. Remember, in this case, there’s not much foreground detail so you’re mainly concerned with getting the stars sharp.

ISO
The next part of the equation is ISO. Here’s a quick recap first. We’re in Manual mode right? Shutter speed is now fixed at 15 seconds. We know that can’t change or the stars will be blurry. Aperture needs to be at the lowest setting your lens will allow so that your photo won’t be underexposed (remember, you’re in complete darkness so 15 seconds really isn’t that long of a shutter speed). The only other variable here is ISO. If you keep your ISO low (100 in my case), the photo is underexposed and you barely see anything. So what do you do? Raise the ISO. Again, it’s not an exact science. Though I’m sure somebody knows another technical formula you can use, I found doing test photos was simple and quick. First, I tried 200 and that was too dark. So was 400, 800, 1600. I finally landed on 3200 and got a properly exposed photo.

(Here’s a photo right before sunrise, about 5 hours after the previous photos were taken. Yeah, this star shooting stuff and sleep don’t go together ;) )

Focussing
For me, this was probably the hardest part. When everything is dark and there’s no moonlight to light anything, you basically have nothing for your camera to lock focus on. So I set my camera to manual focus and and focussed the lens at infinity. I took some test photos and that wasn’t quite sharp so I backed off just a bit from infinity and that seemed to nail it. Depending on the scene you’re shooting you can also try live view on your camera, but it was literally pitch black where I was shooting so live view didn’t work.

Lessons Learned
As with anything, there were some lessons learned along the way.

1. First and foremost, I learned what the general settings were. So the next time I shoot, I’d immediately set my Shutter Speed to 15-20 seconds. My Aperture would automatically go down to it’s widest setting. I’d probably try to borrow a wide f/2.8 lens from some one too. I love my 16-35 for landscapes but it only goes down to f/4 which means you need to crank up the ISO more to offset it. I’d immediately set my ISO to at least 1600 and do a test to see if I needed to go higher. So basically, my camera settings and technical stuff would be good to go in about a minute, and I could quickly start concentrating on composition and being creative.

2. Use a cable release or self timer. Your tripod and camera need to be absolutely still. I just picked up a Vello ShutterBoss cable release from B&H photo and it worked great.

3. If you don’t have a laptop nearby, then make sure you zoom in (way in) on the photos to make sure the stars aren’t blurred. I’m telling you, this is huge. When you’re looking at your LCD without zooming in, even the blurriest of star photos looks sharp.

4. Obviously noise is a problem with higher ISOs. Since I had the luxury of having my laptop nearby, I did an experiment. I tried lowering my ISO to 1600. The photo was definitely underexposed, and you couldn’t see the stars and sky like you should be able to. So I opened the photo in Lightroom (or Camera Raw) and increased the Exposure setting. It looked perfect! So rather than settling for a noisier photo at 3200 ISO, I decided it would be better to not get it quite right in-camera, and take advantage of just how good Lightroom and Photoshop are when it comes to adjusting Exposure.

5. Chances are you won’t be able to see anything through your viewfinder. So composition is basically a guessing game. If that’s the case, once thing that helps get your camera level is the virtual horizon feature that some cameras have. Get familiar with it and exactly where it is in the menus.

What About Star Trails?
I figure somebody reading this is probable wondering about star trails. You know, the photos where the stars form a streak across the sky (here’s some examples from 500px.com). For me personally, I don’t like star trails. To me, it’s kinda like infrared. Photographers love it, but the rest of the world looks at it and wonders why the trees are white and the skies are black. People don’t view the sky in long exposure, so when they look at those photos they wonder if it’s a bunch of shooting stars or did the camera move or something like that. Photographers know it’s cool because we know the work the went into it. But most people don’t see it that way. Now, you may totally love star trails. That’s perfectly fine. But for me, it’s just not my cup of tea.

Part 2?
Here’s a teaser photo for next week (see below). You may have noticed at the beginning of this post I wrote “First Location” and “First View”. That’s because I actually did two shoots while I was out there. The second location was a bit different. First, we light-painted the hills and trees and the Milky Way was actually in view. So we had to contend more with focus and exposure. But I figured I’d write about that in a post early next week so stay tuned.

Thanks for stopping by today. Have a good one!

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Posted by on Nov 7, 2012 in News | 0 comments

Tomorrow’s Blog Promise On Shooting Star Photos


Hey everyone. I’m on my way back from my photography trip out west. It’s been absolutely brutal to try to get a connection (and the time) good enough to write anything for the blog the last few days. So here’s my promise. I’m sitting on my plane at the gate now. On my trip back to Tampa, I’m going to write a post called “What I Learned From My First Star Shooting Experience” (based on the photo above as well as some others I have to share). I had a great time shooting the night sky, but it’s definitely tricky and you’ve got to set things up a little differently, so I think you’ll really enjoy the post.

Have a good one and I’ll see you back here tomorrow :)

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Posted by on Nov 5, 2012 in Photography | 7 comments

This Photo Is Why I’m Not Blogging Today


Good morning everyone and happy Monday. I’m out in Monument Valley for a few days shooting with my buddy RC and Bill Fortney. The photo above was taken just minutes ago as we get ready for our sunrise shoot. Internet coverage has been absolutely horrible and we’ve been traveling and shooting non-stop for 2 days. So I’m about to head out to shoot more but I’ll try my best to write about the trip and some photos as the week continues.

In the meantime, for all of you metadata junkies out there, here’s the camera info:
Camera – Nikon D800
Lens – Nikon 16-35
Aperture – f/4
Shutter Speed – 15 seconds
ISO – 800
Focal Length – 35mm
Tripod – Really Right Stuff TVC 33

Have a good one!

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