The Importance of a Good Education

"An investment in knowledge pays the best interest."

- Benjamin Franklin

Last night I attended a photography seminar by one of the premier landscape photographers in the world today.   For the paltry sum of $7 (normally $25 but I found this great coupon) I got 2+ hours of instruction in Composition, Technique & Impact by Art Wolfe from the comfort of my den on my big screen TV.   This is by far one of the best investments I have made in my photography.

Preparing
Hot Air Balloon Ride 2014

Lemons

I always encourage people to invest in education as the best way to improve their photographs.   No lens or camera will make as big a difference as time spent with a quality instructor, taking an online course or participating in a photography group.  I've been in several photography workshops and sat through many webinars on photography.  I really enjoyed last night's session with Art Wolfe.  He spent the first hour or so talking about some techniques he uses to create compelling compositions.  The entire time he was showing his own photos as examples of each technique.  Just seeing his photos was worth the price.   The second half was a critique session.  Participants were able to submit some of their photos ahead of time and Art picked several to discuss.   With most of them he spent a minute or so showing what could be done with some creative cropping, exposure adjustments, and color balancing.   I found myself saying "wow, that really made a big difference".   In the last 20 minutes he answered a few questions that had been submitted online.

This was the first time Art did a live Webinar.  His next one is on  light, color and how to get more emotional impact out of your photographs.  Hop on over to http://www.photographywebinars.com/ and sign up to get notified when it is scheduled.   

Do you want to learn more about Adobe Lightroom?  Kent Ervin and I are planning to do a Lightroom class this winter in Kingsport, TN.  More information will be available in the next month or two.

Morning Jewels

God's beauty can be found in nature, even in early February when everything appears to be dull grey or brown.   It rained overnight but the skies cleared at sunrise and stayed clear long enough to get out and find something to shoot.

I went out intending to get shots of the early morning sunlight shining through a light fog in the woods next to our house.   I couldn't find any angle that worked that didn't include the neighbor's house in the picture.  I wandered around a bit and found a couple trees that still have some of their leaves hanging on.  The leaves are a golden yellow, which makes a great background, especially when the sun is just coming up and back lighting the leaves.  There were raindrops clinging to many of the small branches on these trees.  I had found my subject for this morning!

The cool thing about photographing water drops is the image of what's on the other side inside the drop . In these photos you can see trees, leaves, and houses inside the drop. Look closely (click on a picture to zoom in) and you'll see they are upside down! That's caused by the way the light is diffracted in the water.

This last image is a little different.   I used a small aperture to create the star burst in the drop.   The angle was such that I didn't have any of the golden leaves in the shot and instead got the woods in the background.  I used Lightroom to tone down the background a bit and brighten the twig to make it stand out.  I also used Nik Color Efex Pro to blur the edges.



As I finished up the wind picked up, the clouds rolled in and the day turned grey and blustery.  Today I was at the right place at the right time today to capture some of nature's jewels.

These are all shot with a Canon 7D, Canon 100mm Macro lens with the camera on a tripod. 

These and other photos are available for puchrase online at http://www.thesiggins.com/Macros/Macros/   In addition to prints, you can get any photo printed on a number of different items such as mugs, t-shirts, puzzles, coasters and more.

Rise and Shine

How many times have we heard, or said to our kids, "Rise and Shine!", usually followed by something like "sleepy head".   June and I went to church Saturday night so we could rise on Sunday and go to Rock Creek Park near Erwin TN for a little hiking.   Our goal was Rock Creek Falls.   We didn't make it to the falls because the creek was too high to rock hop across and the thought of falling in that icy water was not very appealing.  

We decided to hike the Rattlesnake Ridge trail instead and came across this little creek beside the trail.  In fact, we had to cross this creek several times, but this time the water wasn't too high to cross.   On the way back we stopped off to explore this creek a little bit.  

I was shooting almost into the low winter sun but with the mist in the air I got a pretty cool spot light effect where the sun was shining through the trees on to the creek.   What you don't see here is June holding her hat out over the creek the shade the lens.

We came away with several nice photos from our day at Rock Creek Park and I'll post those soon.

"Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD rises upon you."  -  Isaiah 60:1

Lighting Series - Backlighting

Note - larger copies of the photos in this post are available by clicking on the photo.

I've decided to write a series of three posts on backlighting, frontlighting, and sidelighting in nature photography.  As you might have guessed, this is all about the direction of light.  When taking a photo, you should always be thinking about the direction of the light that is illuminating the subject.  Is it coming from behind you, from the side, from behind the subject or somewhere in between?  Different subjects and situations call for different lighting direction.   By setting lights and placing a subject, a studio photographer has a great deal of control over the direction of his light.  A nature photographer has some control over sunlighting by planning ahead before going to a location.  Often we just have to take what mother nature dishes out. 

Backlighting is when the light in a photo comes from behind an object.  This can be a tricky situation to handle, but when done right can produce some very dramatic photographic compositions.  With a back lit subject you must pay attention to the exposure.  Manipulating the exposure can dramatically change the photo.

In this first backlight example the rising sun is behind the boat and I have set my exposure for the light of the sunrise in the clouds and on the ocean.   Because of the brightness of the sunrise and clouds, the boat and the bird are dramatically underexposed.  In fact, they are silhouettes with almost no detail.  If I exposed to see the details in the boat, the sky would be very over exposed or blown out with no details.  This is one of those situations where you're not going to capture the entire range of light without an advanced technique, such as HDR.

Sometimes when shooting into the sun you can create a sunburst or star effect by stopping down your aperture to a small opening such as f16 or f22.  In the photo of Crabtree Falls I used the leaves in the trees to block some of the sunlight so that it didn't overpower and cause the falls, rocks and trees to be under exposed.  The trees were blowing in the wind and I took several shots to get one with the star effect but not too much light.

You have to be careful when shooting into the sun. If the sun shines directly on the front of the lens you can get lens flare which will show up as spots or circles on your image. Use a lens hood or other object to shade the front of the lens to avoid flare.

The lightsource is not always going to be visible in a backlit situation.   This can make the dynamic range of light smaller and the photograph easier to expose correctly.  The subject is still backlit which can give you a very cool photo.

In the first example with the Great Blue Heron (I am calling this one "Fire Beak"), the sunlight is on the back side of the bird and is not lighting the side of the bird facing the camera.  Where the light shines through the feathers and beak it makes them appear to glow.  Photographing a person in these conditions can make their hair glow, almost like a halo.

In the second example, the sun is shining through the tulip, making the entire flower glow like a lightbulb.  Because the flower is very bright with the sunlight shining though, the background is dark making the flower stand out even more. 

Finally, you may be able to use your flash to compensate for a backlit situation.  In the photo of June and I, I intentionally positioned the camera to create a backlit situation so that the sun was shining through the leaves making the most of the fall colors.   Without a flash, either June and I would be underexposed or the leaves would be overexposed and I would have lost all those beautiful fall colors.   I used my flash to add some fill light to us in the foreground so that the photo was more evenly lit.   You might need to experiment a little with different flash settings.  I turned the flash down 1/3 EV so that we weren't too light compared to the background leaves.

I hope this short explanation of backlighting has been useful to you.   If you have any questions, please drop me a note or give me a call.  If you know of others who might enjoy these posts, please let them know about the blog.

I'll be talking about front lighting and sidelighting in future posts.