I wanted to follow up on my article about how I expose, to clarify a few things. If you’ve read that article, read on. If not, you might want to read it first. To make a few things clear, my last post was not a dismissal of craft. Craft has its place. Excellence matters. But there’s this thing about people …
Vision-Driven Exposures
This is my confession. I no longer use a light meter. I don’t spot meter. In fact most of the time I don’t even know what metering mode I’m on. My life as a digital photographer became infinitely easier when I abandoned those, put my camera back to manual and simply began exposing for what’s important. Whether you use a …
Consider Your Colour Palette
One of the things you’ll notice consistently about the bodies of work of photographers who’ve been doing this a while, is that many of them, though not all, seem to work very intentionally to create a consistency within that body of work – some kind of unifying element. Often that element is on a theme, so it’d be a body …
Learn to Isolate More
Isolation: Use a Longer Lens The Visual Toolbox, Lesson 13 Nikon D800, 300mm, 1/400 @ f/11. ISO 800 This Whooper swan was photographed tight with a 300mm lens. Telephoto lenses, anything over a 35mm equivalent of 50-60mm, have the opposite effect of a wide angle, and the longer they get (200, 300, 600mm) the greater the difference. As telephoto lenses …
Learn To Isolate
This Red Crowned crane was among many, but isolated with a longer lens it creates more impact within the frame than it might have surrounded by context. POINT OF VIEW The first and most obvious way to isolate elements with the frame is the intentional use of point of view. What appears and does not appear, in front of, around, …
Printing Hokkaido
After narrowing down my Hokkaido work through my edit process, I’m now left with a collection of images to print. Here’s my rough process. 1. Image Prep. I take each image through a final pass in Lightroom’s Develop module. Here are the questions I’m asking myself as I go through the panels. Is my monitor recently calibrated? Am I completely …
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 …
The Created Image: Turkana Fisherman
I was swimming in Lake Turkana, just outside of the town of Loiyangalani, Kenya, when I saw this fisherman on the shore mending nets. Lake Turkana, I am told, has the highest concentration of crocodiles in the world, so while the swimming was lovely, this was as good a reason as any to get out. Kura, my Kenyan friend, went …
Northern Kenya on White
The images above are another sample of the photographs from this last month’s work in northern Kenya. I wanted something simpler than the environmental portraits I’ve done in the past. Something that isolated my subjects from their contexts and showed them, and their emotions and character, elegantly. Before I left I talked to the folks at Westcott, and picked up …
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 …