Thoughts on Photography

I'll post here often on my approach, and method of landscape photography. Please, sit a while, read, and participate!

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Pondering something else.

I was tempted to get annoyed by a certain IT department's edict to refrain from updating iOS to 6.1 due to negative impacts on Microsoft's Exchange server. To be honest, I don't envy those people in a BYOD IT environment. They are literally at the mercy of Apple or Google, neither of which makes a habit of announcing bug fixes ahead of time. Apple doesn't even use Exchange, which is ridiculous; they rely on big installations to inform them about bugs after fixes roll. This would seem to be untenable. What solutions exist that give strapped IT departments the ability to ensure a safe and controlled corporate computing environment?

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Oaks in Fog, Eel River canyon.

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Plaszow Concentration Camp Memorial - Krakow, Poland

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Beautiful work. Go look at the whole thing.

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Short Hiatus

I'll be out of town photographing and working for the next couple of weeks. Please check back late this month!

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Black Rock Desert

Newest in a series of Fine Art prints featuring the Black Rock Desert.

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On The Road

Took a trip to Yosemite late last week to make some pictures. The post-storm environment was kind of blah - not much in the way of clouds or really exciting light, and dicey driving conditions in the park along with high gasoline prices - but I had a really nice, peaceful time.

Enjoy this photo of my favorite road to take to the Park - Road 600 through Madera county. 

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At the top of the Paramount building in San Francisco.

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Photo from Dec 29, 2011: Moist and cracked playa; Black Rock Desert, Center Camp of Black Rock City 2011.

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Lighting

Lighting is a difficult subject. Natural light, studio light, and light painting are three ways that I've used to light a scene or subject I'm photographing. 

Natural light is my favorite. It is made and destroyed in moments. The most beautiful things are lit naturally...naturally. 

Studio lighting makes for great support and effects. I don't own studio lighting equipment, so I don't use it often, but when I have, it's been a treat to learn and play with. I've even seen powerful soft lights used outdoors for incredible portrait effects. 

Light painting is something I've always been interested in; probably since I saw jet airliner light trails in National Geographic magazine as a kid. I count any kind of long exposure with artificial and directed light as light painting. 

Here's one of my favorite light paintings; a Night-blooming Cereus i found in New Orleans on July 4th, 1999.

In a dark corner of a private, walled garden, this Cereus is supposed to only bloom once, at night during hot, humid weather. The warm wet blanket of sweat wasn't broken by nightfall that July 4th, and when someone pointed the Cereus out to me, I decided to keep watch over it as long as I could stay awake.

Around midnight, the bloom began to open. I got my 6-volt D-cell MagLite out and made some quick meter readings on the bloom from three feet away. I set my camera up six feet away and after doing some math, came up with an aperture that gave me enough time to wave my flashlight around.

I made two exposures on this bloom; the second is almost as good as this one.

During the exposures, I waved the light around for the proscribed exposure time over the bloom, lingering on the parts of the flower that could cast a shadow or provide other detail. I got really lucky - there's only so much precision you can build into this process, so my guesstimates at exposure and movement worked out better than I could have hoped for. 

Because the background light level was such that NOT exposing the bloom to my flashlight would result in almost no light accumulation on the film, I was able to open the shutter, grab my light, and then carefully wave it around. Next, I put the light away, THEN I closed the shutter. Too many things in the hands can lead to bumping the camera and ruining the exposure!

Night-Blooming Cereus; Nikkor 300m, f16, ~30 seconds. T-Max 100, N+1.

Fog at Chinquapin; Nikon D300/50mm ƒ1.8. See the headlights on the bark at right?

Light painting in other natural light is also easy to do - sometimes all you have to do is wait for a pair of headlights to pass by, as in this example of a picture I made near Chinquapin, in Yosemite. I think it's a neat, if unintended effect. What say you? What kind of lighting challenges have you had? Since the light we most often see is a mixture of all different colors of light, how about an explanation of color temperature? Can you see the different color temperatures in the fog photo above? 

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Setting up for perspective

Spring will be here before you know it…but it looks like Winter is going to take her time this year.  Looking forward to more scenes like this one in the Merced River Canyon over the next several weeks. When I made this picture in 2001, I used Fuji Provia 100F film in my Wisner 4x5 view camera, selecting a 135mm Schneider lens. “Framing” a picture isn’t just a matter of looking in the viewfinder, selecting the zoom setting, and firing away. You have to select the lens that makes sense, and then move the camera around to get the perspective you want. And not just side-to-side or back and forth - your tripod can carry your camera at different heights…don’t forget about that. As you mature as a photographer, hopefully you begin visualizing scenes in your head before your camera is out of it’s case! Because shooting with the 4x5 involves fixed-focal length lenses, you’ve got to think a little differently, but thinking about where you can stand, how you can use your equipment, and being creative can all help you get a photograph from the perspective you really want.

Because the location I was shooting from was below and across the road from the scene I wanted to photograph, I chose a 210mm lens. This lens gives a field of view on 4x5 that’s roughly equivalent to a 70mm lens on a 35mm camera, or a 50mm lens on an APS-C/DX/EF-S (small sensor) DSLR. Similar to what’s desired in a portrait lens, this field-of-view offers a little compression of subjects, but it is still wide enough to encompass a medium-distance scene like this.

Even with a view camera that allows perspective control, getting the right shot was a little dicey. I would ideally have shot from a platform on top of my car - but I didn’t have one! In order to move the perspective and get the picture I wanted, I raised the front standard (raised the lens relative to the film) of my camera and raised the center post until the camera height was about six feet.

Why not shoot from road height? Simply pointing the camera up from chest level would have caused the tree trunks to appear to converge. I had to raise the camera itself, and use a special capability of the 4x5 to change the perspective even further.

Raising the lens relative to the film gives the effect of adding height to the perspective, without increasing the height of the camera. (There are some lens-specific drawbacks, but since you probably don’t shoot 4x5, I won’t go into them here.) Raising the camera to a reasonable height allowed me to keep vibration under control while getting the perspective I wanted (go too high with a heavy camera on top, and it’ll sway in the gentlest breeze and leave you with an unsharp picture.)

Those who have met me know that I’m about six feet tall, and this makes focussing in this scenario tough, since the focussing screen was about three inches above my eyes. I pulled my car up close behind the tripod and stood on the running board with my focussing cloth draped over my head (bewildering some passers-by). With the right perspective and focal length, the “above and over a road” scene was now framed just the way I’d seen it as I drove by the first time, without trees and other converging lines making it appear that I was looking up the hill.

Special techniques really weren’t needed here - you could accomplish nearly as much with your DSLR simply by putting it on a sturdy tripod, setting the self-timer and mirror lock-up (to allow vibrations in the tripod to subside) and making your picture from there. But it’s a good example of how taking a few minutes to puzzle out a problem sometimes involves a little more time, a few more pieces, and exactly the picture you visualized.

Next time you’re driving in a place you like to photograph, don’t be afraid to slow down - while on the road or pulled off. 

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Time+Seeing/Science =

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I've been taking a short drive more often lately to explore places near my home in San Jose. Yesterday, I went up to the summit of SR 17, then broke off and drove down the old Santa Cruz highway, which roughly parallels SR 17 on the east side.

The old route to Santa Cruz is a narrow two-lane road populated mostly by long-time homeowners. I met a couple walking along the road and talked to them for a while about the big trees ("that one's been there as long as I can remember, and my mom said the same thing", said a woman I'd have judged to be in her seventies). You can see more pictures from this short trip at:

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.3508814677974.2171140.1200030562&type=1 Interested in buying prints? Now you can, at http://dougbroussard.com! 

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Santa Cruz

A new set of Photographs from my trip to Santa Cruz yesterday. I seem to have solved some of the problems with sharpness on my camera by using mirror lockup exclusively. Seems the D300 on my tripod sets up a particular resonance when the mirror goes up. Will try to measure the frequency and dampen it, I guess.

Measured subjectively, the sharpest lens I own is the Nikon 80-200 AF-D (Push-pull) from the mid 1990s. I really like it. 

These are in a public Facebook album, but you do need to be a Facebook user to see them. Click here to see the Album, and click here to 'Like' my page on Facebook. Thanks!

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Forest Litter, Yosemite National Park

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Detail and Acuity and Loss Thereof

After spending a couple of days in Yosemite, I spent a few hours going over some of my photographs, throwing tweaks on them, and putting a few of them onto Facebook to get some initial reactions. More about that later.

I was disappointed. The Sierra is one of my favorite places to photograph because of the variety of textures and shapes of things there. In a properly-focussed 4x5 view camera, those textures leap out. The sharpness (acuity) is highly apparent, even before sharpening for print or screen.

From the D300, I'm getting consistently soft results. My lenses are all pretty sharp, and all in good repair. My tripod was used for nearly every shot, as was a remote release. I'm cognizant of the causes and remedies to camera shake, and I always try to avoid it. Still, most of my pictures feel too soft on screen. The lit edges of twigs and branches are sorta kinda soft. Not blurry, just soft.

Now, how can you diagnose a problem like this?

First, you have to understand that there are two components of what we like to think of as "sharpness". There's detail - the sheer amount of information recorded and realized by the camera - and then there's acuity - how those details are rendered. Loss of acuity can be caused by camera shake or mirror slap - two things that vibrate the camera with obvious results. But acuity is not just about eliminating camera shake or software that increases edge contrast.

Most digital SLR cameras employ a moire filter that reduces sharpness. (The moire filter sits in front of the camera's sensor and cancels out the aliasing of pixels that occurs when "busy" fabrics or other textures interfere with the line frequency of the sensor.) I don't think the moire sensor is causing my problem, since it hasn't changed that I know of. But cameras that employ these filters could show more acuity if the filter were removed. Unfortunately, my D300 can't work without a moire filter.

Photographs from this camera have plenty of detail - you can see individual grasses and spots of lichen from hundreds of feet away. There is no dumbass button I forgot to set (even if you could shoot low-res RAW images, which this camera doesn't allow). I'm getting to be at a loss, and wondering if there's something Nikon repair did when they had the camera that threw it out of whack. Plenty of detail, but loss of acuity. 

Recognize this tree from the picture above?

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Rain!

Many people are conditioned to consider rain as a necessary nuisance; something over which we have no control, and a transitory condition. This was how I viewed rain when I grew up and lived in Louisiana - sometimes, it rains. Usually, it stops shortly and life goes on.

Moving to California in 1995 changed that for me. Over the years, I've come to consider rain as a treat. After all, in most years we don't see rain for nearly six months out of the year - May to October is a dry time, and November to March is when the skies open. (April is a wobbler.)

Rain in Louisiana can be hard, soft, hot, cold...you name it. When I was growing up, I loved riding my racing bike in the rain, charging hard enough to make the drops sting when they hit, weighting my body and bike through turns to keep myself upright (if you've seen my right hip, you know that didn't always work).

Summer rain storms on the bike were the most fun; we'd take off, riding the frontage road in the moist Louisiana heat. Sometimes, the clouds would build and open on top of us, bringing relief and a bit of a departure from reality. You could go faster in the rain. My legs and lungs and eyes stopped hurting and my brain started to revel in the splashes, looking for puddles to hit, keeping the rims dry occasionally, and playing with English to keep the bike upright.

It's raining right now, and I love it. Cold California rain - which is the only kind California gets, really. Riding my motorcycle or bicycle in this rain would be hellishly cold, but there are people who like to do it. I prefer to see rain as an opportunity to get the camera out.

Rain transforms photography, because of clouds serving as giant screens and reflectors of light and because the rain itself makes normally dull objects reflective, makes colors 'pop', and is a method of creative destruction. A field of dun-colored grasses transforms from a mass of grey-brown to sharp relief of individual stems with green shoots beneath, and the coast erupts in a frothing white riot as storms move through. Rocks go from dull stanchions covered in bird poop to shiny, rinsed bulwarks. And of course, rain becomes snow in the Sierra, with all of the contrast and magic of Ansel's Clearing Winter Storm. And so, I present one of my own - Clearing Storm, Madera California.

  What's your favorite rain story? Share your thoughts below in the comments.

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Dry Ice

I made this picture on the back of Tioga Pass overlooking Lee Vining Canyon a few weeks ago. This season has been highly unusual in terms of snowfall, and the Tioga road stayed open a historically long time, allowing me to cruise over in the near-zero temperatures and see sights most people never experience - mid-winter ice slowly coursing out of the cracks of Mt. Dana.

The ice form itself was curiously dry. Overnight temperatures had been around zero, so the surface of the ice was extremely hard, covered with a fine layer of rock dust. As the sun crept up, the specular highlights on some parts of the ice made interesting, contrasting textures against the rippled and matte-like texture just a few inches away.

Such a monochromatic subject lends itself well to interpretation in black and white; by eliminating the slight color in the image, you can immerse yourself purely in the fun world of texture and tonality, without the distraction of color. I like that sometimes; it sets me free to play a bit in ways that color doesn't. I tend to like working on monochrome images that have a wide latitude rather than high-key images, but it's always worth popping in and out of the Channel Mixer in Photoshop or your favorite image editor if you like the tonality more than the color in an image. You might find something interesting.

With nothing identifiable for scale, the textures and light really start to pop. How large do you think the subject is...given that it appears similar to the side of a mountain?

When I made this picture, I was working quickly thanks to the cold; with my CR-V idling nearby, I tried to set up my tripod on ice and found that much to my surprise, the tripod legs 'stuck' quite nicely, with none of the spreading I expected. (Leg spreading happens when the camera's weight pushes the flexible tripod legs open across a slippery surface; it happens on ice, wet floors, and in snow.)

A few pictures later, I hopped back into the car and engine-braked my way down Lee Vining Canyon; by the time I reached the bottom, my engine temperature gauge was lower than when I'd started. The temperature in the shadow of Mt. Dana 200 feet below was 20 degrees colder than in the exposed area where I'd made the picture near the top of the pass.