Long Exposure Light Leaks

In GEAR, The Craft, Travel, Tutorials &Technique by David46 Comments

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

In Antarctica, The Craft, Thoughts & Theory, Tutorials &Technique by David9 Comments

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, …

Five Minutes, Ten Stops

In The Craft, Tutorials &Technique by David27 Comments

  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 …

Lake of Circles, Post-processing.

In Lightroom & Workflow, Photographs & Photoshopping, The Craft, Tutorials &Technique by David26 Comments

Here’s one of my favourite images from the trip up to the arctic last month, and a quick walk-through on the post-processing. In Vision & Voice I explain what I call the vision-driven workflow, and there are 4 steps: Identify Intent, Minimize Distractions, Maximize Mood, and Direct the Eye. Identifying the intent here was simply a matter of asking myself …

Cape Kiwanda Post-Production

In The Craft, Tutorials &Technique, Wallpapers by David19 Comments

On Wednesday I was digging around the archives, looking for something new for this month’s desktop wallpaper when I found an image I forgot I had. This is Cape Kiwanda, near Pacific City, Oregon. I did about 10 minutes of post-production on it in Lightroom 3 as one last hurrah before moving to Lightroom 4. Here are some of the …

Why I Print

In Creativity and Inspiration, Pep Talks, Photographs & Photoshopping, Tutorials &Technique, Workflow & Technical Issues by David63 Comments

Monument Valley, 2011 With the advent of digital photography, and even more importantly, the internet, our ability to share and experience photographs has changed dramatically. The wet darkroom, once so necessary for creating prints we could touch and feel, is much less common than it once was, and if I were a betting man I’d wager that the majority of …

Shooting Wet

In GEAR, Travel, Tutorials &Technique by David24 Comments

Me. Shooting in the driving rain in Iceland. Cold. Wet. Deliriously happy. I’ve never shot in the rain, drizzle, dew, fog, and general “water coming out of the sky in every possible form” as much as I did in Iceland the last couple weeks. There were days my boots were so wet I thought they’d never recover – they were …