We had an interesting conversation in Hokkaido one evening, and it stands out because when you put 15 photographers together for a meal, and there’s no shortage of drink, conversation tends to end up with everyone telling lies about how long they can hand-hold their long lens, or how Ansel Adams was a total hack. This time it was about …
Editing Hokkaido
Coming home from Hokkaido with 8000 images to edit should seem intimidating, but it isn’t. I got a couple requests from people to share my editing process, which hadn’t even occurred to me until I got them, because I’m pretty much done already. So then I went and told Twitter and Facebook I’d show people how I do this painlessly …
Long Exposure Light Leaks
I shot the image above in Patagonia this year, my first real work with the new Nikon D800, which always makes me nervous. So when I saw the weird banding you can see in the frame on the left, I got a little freaked out. In 25 years of photography, I’d seen some weird things, but never this. I was …
Shooting in Black & White
I couldn’t bring myself to shoot a single black and white image in Antarctica last year. To me the place was all about colour. This year it was very different. Last week I was on Deception Island in Antarctica, walking around an old whaling station in the crater of a still-active volcano. It’s a fascinating place, full of texture, contrasts, …
THE PRINT AND THE PROCESS Released.
It’s here! The Print and The Process, my latest book, and the unofficial 5th book in the Vision Trilogy is shipping! It’s a little earlier than anticipated, but I’ve just had an email from home telling my the first books off the press are sitting on my desk. I tried to do something different with this book, which we started …
Another Look at the B&W Mix in Lightroom
It seems like I get more and more people telling me they’re frustrated with their black & white conversions. It’s a topic all it’s own and this short post won’t do it justice, but the most important aspect of a black and white image is the control over tonal contrasts. You can do this in a number of ways, but …
Building SEVEN: CMYK, Etc.
One of the things I most dreaded about the building of SEVEN was the learning curve related to the CMYK conversions. Last week I set aside some time to prep a collection of images for the printer, putting 15 photographs into a Lightroom Collection and then taking a deep breath. The first thing I learned was that Lightroom 4 has …
LR4: Graduated Filter + Colour Temp
Near Tofino, BC. 4 Different Skies. The key to great black and white images (and by this I mean the B+W part, obviously light, lines, and moments still come first) is tonal contrasts. Those contrasts will occur within the scene, of course, but the way we chose to render them in Lightroom (or PS, ACR, etc) has a strong impact …
Snake Oil & Comb-overs: A Rant.
I initially posted this graphic in 2008. Seemed appropriate to bring it back… A friend of mine is a world-class chef. He got there after a lot of hard work. He studied under other chefs, all of them masters at what they do. He’s really good at what he does; he’s both a craftsman and an artist. He did not …
Five Minutes, Ten Stops
Lake Laberge, YT, 2012. Apart from a difference in timing, these two images might have been identical. What separates them, in terms of their aesthetic, is a difference in five minutes, and ten f/stops. The second image was made just five minutes after the first frame, but with the addition of the Lee Big Stopper, a 10-stop ND filter …