Category Archives: Creativity

Dusk Aurora

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Last night, I stepped outside just before bed. It was 10:00 and still to the west, there was a broad, dusky-blue streak, the last of the lingering day. It’s getting to a point where one has to stay up pretty late to see true night. It’s definitely spring in the interior of Alaska. But I was even more surprised to see a couple of streaks of green hanging in the sky. The Northern Lights had decided to make an early appearance. Bed would have to wait. I grabbed my camera and tripod and headed back out.

I love where I live. Below my small cabin is a creek surrounded by an open wetland about the size of a soccer field. This time of year that wetland is completely covered in ice and snow, but its big and open with views of the surrounding hills. As I travel down to the creek I pass through a few different areas. Around my cabin is a mix of big white spruces and birches. Some of the spruces are nearly 3 feet in diameter and tower over the much smaller birch. Closer to the creek there is an area of open spruce forest with smaller, narrow, 30 or 40 foot tall trees.

The lights weren’t booming as they sometimes do, but they were active and bright green in the dark blue sky. So I played a bit with compositions. I post-holed into the deep snow back in the trees and started experimenting. My favorite is the top image here. To round things out I went down to the open area around the creek and made a few more typical shots.

Let me know what you think. And if you like these, please feel free to use the links below to share on your social media networks. Thanks!

Experimenting at the Open North American Championships

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Under bright blue skies and intense sun, huge mushing teams took to the trails around Fairbanks this afternoon. I headed to Creamer’s Field where I could position myself to watch the teams race by on their way out, and then again as they headed back in toward the finish. I tried for variety, telephotos and wide-angles, backlit and front-lit, cropped and uncropped… After my first glance and early post-processing, these are my favorite. Thoughts?

On Photography Part II: The Tools of the Trade

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Photography tools are not limited to the cameras, lenses, tripods, filters, flashes, lighting accessories, computers, and software, but let’s start there.

First of all you don’t really NEED most of that shit.

What you NEED to be a photographer is a camera. Any camera. A plastic Brownie camera will do just fine, as will a $9,000 digital SLR.

What the higher end stuff does is allow you flexibility. Flexibility to make an image look the way you want it to look. With a variety of lenses and tools, and computer programs you can take the image you saw in your head and make it appear in the final product. Sometimes that takes just a snap of the shutter, sometimes it can take hours of work after the fact. It is understanding how you want the image to look that takes time. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

All those cameras and lenses and things are the hardware, but isn’t the end of the photographer’s tool box. The technical know-how is just as important. A couple of examples:

  1. A wide-angle lens will not only show you a broader scene, but will also make the elements in the frame appear further apart. Background elements appear smaller and further away. Distances expand. Telephotos have the opposite effect, everything is compressed.
  2. The smaller your aperture, the shallower your depth of field. If you have two identically framed images shot with the same lens, but one at f2.8 and one at f11, the image at f11 will have a much more in focus from foreground to background, while the f2.8 shot will show a narrow focus, drawing the viewer’s attention to a certain portion of the frame. Both strategies have their uses, one is not better than the other.

There are hundreds of examples I could use along these lines and each is a tool. The more tools you possess (particularly the mental ones) the more likely you will be able to create the photos you envision.

After shooting seriously for 15 years, I feel like I’ve got a pretty decent grasp on most technical aspects. But there is always more to learn. Right now, for example, I am spending a lot of time experimenting with artificial light. I’m learning about off-camera flash, how distance from light to subject changes the quality of the light, I’m practicing with multiple flashes, balancing light power, and how to integrate sunlight and natural light with my strobes. There is a ton to learn.

Never, never, stop learning the tools.

Next in the series we move onto subject matter: Recognizing Interesting Things.

On Photography- Part I: An Introduction

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Today I begin a series of rants on photography and creativity. I write these posts not as an expert, but as someone who is daily struggling with the artistic process of photography. If you manage to survive the reading of these rambling posts, I hope you gain some perspective on my place in the photographic progression.

Without further ado, Part I, the Introduction:

I’ve said it before, but it warrants reiteration: Good photography is not about equipment. (I know that sounds strange coming from someone who just blew a bunch of hard-earned income on a brand new Canon 5Diii.) Sure equipment is great and good gear allows you to better express your vision. But it’s the second part that there that is far more important than the first. Gear is the tool, but your mind, your perception, your thoughts, and ability to discern are far, far more valuable.

Photography is an art form that falls at the intersection of technology, engineering, and creativity. It’s complex. Even photographers who shoot exclusively using wet-plate emulsions, still rely on a form of technology (no matter how old). Without it, no photography. But despite the advances in cameras, from pinholes and powder-flashes to low-noise-high-ISO-mega-pixel-packing digital SLRs, I would argue there has been no equivalent leap in the art form. Sure images are being made today that could not have been made before, but are they better? Better than Matthew Brady’s stomach-churning images of the battles of the Civil War? Better than the grainy and blurry but terrifying shots by Robert Capa of the American troops storming the beach on D-Day? Superior to the candid street portraits by Henri Cartier-Bresson? Do they top the sweeping landscapes of Ansel Adams, or the hear-wrenchingly beautiful portraits by Dust Bowl Photographers Arthur Rothstein and Dorothea Lange?

In my humble opinion: No.

I guess what I’m getting at here is this: Good photography comes from putting yourself in front of interesting things, recognizing how to compose those interesting things, and knowing how to use the tools at your disposal.

The tools element is the part of the formula this is easiest to learn and teach. Depth of field, exposure, lighting, focus, focal length, shutter speed, are all elements that can be taught and learned. Which is why magazines and websites are so full of techy know-how. Understanding how these relate to the image is the first major step in photography. This is the base, the photography 101, and every successful shooter must have a strong understanding of the technical aspects. This is the science and engineering portion of photography, but it sure isn’t the art.

On the way to mastering the science the photographer moves forward in great fast leaps. Exposure and sharpness improve until that careening learning curve goes smashing into the towering brick wall of creativity. Many photographers, most perhaps, are left crumpled in a pile of frustration. Some will fall back on gear (if only I had this lens or that camera, or that tripod, my images would be SO much better). Some will quit entirely. But a few will dig their finger-nails into the cracks in the bricks and slowly struggle their way up the wall.

And what lies atop and beyond that great stone hurdle?

Of that, I’m not sure yet, but we’ll start on our journey tomorrow with Part II: The tools of the trade.

Intentional Blur

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So much photography discussion revolves around how to increase the sharpness of your images. It’s an unspoken rule: good images need to be sharp. But like all rules, it is one that should sometimes be broken. Blur can be a valuable tool in the photographer’s belt. Sometimes it portrays motion, or action, but usually these are only effective if they are partially blurred. An image of a racing cyclist for instance is not usually (note the emphasis) successful if the entire image is a big blur. Some sharp elements are generally required to tell the story, and clue the viewer in to what they are looking at.

But other forms of intentional blur are not used to tell a story, but instead simply to make washes of color and texture. And that is what I was aiming for in this series. It isn’t always clear what the subject is, but that doesn’t really matter. The questions they raise, or simply the patterns make each image interesting to look at. If you want to create photos like this, you just need a camera capable of manually controlling the shutter speed, something even most point and shoots can do. Here is how I did it:

Top Image: This is an image of a snowy aspen forest in the blue hour just before sunrise. It’s a 1/4 second exposure. During the entire shot the camera is in motion. I started panning the camera vertically, in line with the trees, then clicked the shutter, assuring that I didn’t stop moving the camera until the shutter had closed. It took a few tries to get it right.

This image is a 1/6 sec exposure made as I zoomed the camera out. The center retains some detail while the rest of the frame spreads out in a starburst pattern. Same rule applies as the top image: the entire shot must be made as the camera is being zoomed. If you click, then zoom, parts of the image will retain more detail than others, which usually ruins the effect.

This one is slightly different in that the camera is stationary while the grass is moving. I made this photo on a tundra ridge in the Alaska Range. The last light of the setting sun has just left the rest of the tundra, but these clumps of grass, a foot or so higher, held the light for a few seconds longer, which created the strong contrast between the bright moving grass and the dark surroundings (I emphasized this with a little tweaking in Lightroom). It’s a 1/4 second exposure, tripod mounted, while a strong wind blows the grass back and forth.

This 1/6 sec exposure of an autumn cluster of Fireweed was made in a very similar way to the top image. The main difference here is the angled lines. Though the fireweed itself was standing vertically, I held the camera cock-eyed as I panned it during the exposure.

This is the same cluster of fireweed as the image above, made with the same 1/6 sec exposure, but I moved the camera more slowly, so just a hint of detail remains in the leaves. The washes of color dominated by red and orange in the top image are here limited, allowing the greens to appear.

If you are feeling bored with your photography, go play with this kind of image. It’s fun, the results are often lovely and subjects you would normally pass right over become newly interesting. If you give it a try, I’d love to see your results. Leave a comment here, email me, or drop me a line on Twitter or Facebook.

 

Winter Light

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Winter in Alaska has unquestionably lovely light. The main problem is that there isn’t a lot of it. We are down to a mere six and half hours of sunlight per day and dropping at a rate of 6 minutes a day. What that means (aside from an increase in Seasonal Affective Disorder) is that the sun stays low on the southern horizon throughout the shortening days. For a photographer that means golden hour lasts all day long. It’s cold, the days are short, but the quality of light up here is unsurpassed.

By the way, the aurora forecast for tonight is looking promising…

Pop goes the Polarizer

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If you encounter me in the field, you’ll likely find the lens of my camera uncovered by any filter. UV filters just add a layer of unneeded glass, warming filters have limited use, colored filters, in the rare times I’d want them can be emulated in Lightroom, as can split neutral densities (under most circumstances anyway). The one filter I do carry, though use only under certain circumstances, is a polarizer.

And the images above are why. I made these a couple of years back on a very gray autumn day on Alaska’s north slope. Not the best light for landscapes, but really nice for details. I found this patch of flooded tundra as the group I was guiding and I were hiking down a bluff above the Arctic Ocean looking for wildlife. I was wearing a pair of polarized sunglasses (mostly to protect my eyes from the relentless, chill, wind) and noticed when I cocked my head to the side that these grasses just lit up with color. I set up the tripod, twisted my polarizing filter onto the lens and started making images. 

Both of the images above have the polarizer, but it has been turned 90 degrees, engaging the polarization for the second image. Striking difference isn’t it?The first thing you see is that the colors erupt, but the water darkens also as the reflections of the gray clouds are cut out. The images goes from dark and grayish, to flashes of color on a dark background. Night and Day.

While indispensable under some circumstances, polarizing filters should be used with caution. It is easy to over-use them. They have a tendency to unnaturally darken skies, and create strange gradations in wide-angle shots. But when used correctly it’s like turning on the color.

Return from the Noatak, Perspective, and Manipulation

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After 17 days of canoeing, hiking, photography, rain and wind dodging, and wildlife watching in the western Brooks Range I’m back in Fairbanks. The trip was…. well the trip was… It was kinda… It was a bit of everything. The weather was great, and then it sucked, and then periodically for a few minutes it was great, and then it sucked again and then it was amazing, and then it REALLY sucked, and then it was OK, and then we went home.

On wilderness trips, I am obsessed by the weather. My journals are constantly referring to what the sky is doing, whether the barometer is rising or falling, or if the wind is howling, or settled to a pleasant breeze. This trip, I gave up. I never could tell if it was changing, which it rarely did, and instead I went all Zen about the weather. Gave up worrying, gave up trying to predict, and just went with whatever came. It was liberating. More on the trip in the coming days as I settle down to image editing and have some more to share.

Today, however I wanted to address something that has come up regularly in my photography. A question that I’m asked on an all-too-regular basis: “Do you manipulate your images?” Immediately, I have to resist the knee-jerk reaction to become defensive, as though the question is an accusation. And because, if I’m as honest as I try to be, the answer is unquestionably a resounding YES!. Of course I manipulate my images. And it all starts the moment I’m inspired to make an image. From there on out it is all manipulation.

This image is a perfect example. Our second camp of the trip was situated a short walk from a couple of nice little riverside lakes. It was dead calm when we’d walked up to fish for grayling and pike. The lakes were like glass in the windless day and reflected, to perfection, the mountains, sky, and clouds. It was late morning, and the light was harsh, flat, and dull. But by god, those reflections were amazing. How to capture that? I set down fishing rod and picked up camera. And right there I started manipulating the image to come.

If I was trying to make the image look like the reality before me, I would have ended up with a shot of flat-lit mountains reflected in the water. Nice and boring. I don’t like nice and boring and so right in the camera I started working. First, I wildly under-exposed to assure that the sky and sun did not blow out. I went for a vertical composition, and put the horizon smack dab in the middle of the frame to create symmetry between the sky and its reflection. I clicked a shot, checked the histogram and the image, and shot again, and again, until I got close to what I’d envisioned, a dark, surreal image of the sun, sky and mountains, flipped like a mirror.

Later, in Adobe Lightroom, I did some more work, I evened out the exposure of the sky and water by throwing a digital neutral density filter on the top half of the image and then did a little color and contrast work to give the image some pop. RAW images, as many readers know, look flat when they are unprocessed, far less compelling than the reality they represent. To make them look decent they require some work. A few minutes of fiddling later, and this image emerged.

Is it manipulated? Of course it is. The reality looked nothing like this, and yet it’s almost exactly what I saw in my head when I picked up the camera.

Avian Retrospective 6: Buff-breasted Sandpiper

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Staying within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, today I’m sharing three images of Buff-breasted Sandpipers made in the middle of the night (still sunny that far north) on the Canning River Delta in June of 2007. Buff-breasted Sandpipers were one of the target species of that particular trip and we’d spent many hours wandering across the wet tundra in search of displaying birds. Buffs have incredible breeding displays where they rase and shake their wings, put one wing up in the air, showing off the elegant plumage beneath and wave it slowly around. It a beautiful thing to watch on the tundra of the coastal plain. Bizarrely, after days of searching without success, three birds turned up within ten yards of our tents. Two males and a female. For two or three hours we photographed the birds as the males competed for the attention of the female. They were incredibly tame, at times walking within touching distance, just to throw their wings up in a display too close for the camera to focus.

The three images here all share one particular feature: each are “almost” images. They are almost what they could have been, but for their own reasons falls a bit short.

The top image shows a bird nicely posing atop a small rise in the tundra. This creates a lovely separation between the bird and the background. The background is nicely blurred and the sandpiper stands out nicely from it. The late-night Arctic light is lovely and soft, and the colors of the Buff-breasted and the surrounding tundra match almost perfectly. Compositionally, its flawed. I put the bird in the dead center of the frame. It would look more balanced had I shifted the bird to the right a bit allowing the beak to point into the frame. The final, and what I think is perhaps the biggest (and not digitally repairable flaw) is the focus. The auto-focus on the camera grabbed the feathers of the bird’s back not the eye. At the time, I even recall thinking that was OK, because I assumed the depth of field would include the face. It didn’t. I was still learning about my new 500mm f4, and didn’t yet realize just how narrow the depth of field is on that lens. Wide open, it’s about 2 inches, not near enough to encompass the whole bird. Despite the flaws, I’ve held onto the image, and its been published at least once, so apparently they aren’t fatal issues.

The second image shows a displaying male from the back. Despite its flaws, which I will get to in a minute, I like this shot a lot. I love the pose, and the beautiful repetitive pattern of the plumage of the bird’s back. The wings point up in nearly perfect symmetry and create a great visual balance. But there are at least two issues, the first I had no control over, the second, I did. First is the bird’s pose, it’s great, but how I wish it had raised its head in the more typical spread-wing posture. If it had, the beak would have come into view and possibly the eye, both of which would have added some more visual interest to the image. And the final point, is I really wish I had gotten a lower perspective. As I recall I was sitting when I made this image, the camera mounted on its tripod about two or two and a half feet above the ground. If I’d gotten even lower, laid down on the tundra, I could have gotten some nicely blurred foreground elements and done an even better job of separating the bird from the surrounding tundra.

This final image shows the wing-waving display of a male Buff-breasted Sandpiper. I love the light in this image, and the nicely blurred foreground and background. The underwing, with its heart-wrenchingly beautiful plumage is well exposed with no blown-out highlights and is tack sharp. Unfortunately that last point is also the image’s major flaw. I focused on the wing, not the face, again hoping that the depth of field would incorporate the face, and again it didn’t. This is an interesting point about photography, the feature that makes this image most interesting, the raised wing, should not have been the point of focus, it should have been the eye. The eye should always, always, always be the point of focus of a wildlife image. Humans are visual animals and our eyes are immediately drawn to the eye of the subject, and in this case, I missed it. Damn.

Despite the flaws if you’d like to buy prints or digital downloads of these images you can find them and other shots of Buff-breasted Sandpipers here on my stock site.

 

Avian Retrospective 5: Rock Ptarmigan

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Today our Avian Retrospective moves north into the wild country of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In June 2007, I guided a custom photography trip for Arctic Wild to the coastal plain of the refuge. The two clients and I spent a great week photographing the birds of the area. We had two base camps during the week. The first was about midway between the coast and the mountains along the Canning River. The second was a mile or two from the Arctic Ocean on the delta of Canning. Notably, both these camps were located in the western portion of the infamous 1002 area, the part of the refuge constantly under threat of industrial oil development. Despite the rhetoric (and vitriol in the case of Alaska’s heartless congressman Don Young) of drilling supporters the coastal plain is in no way, shape or form an empty and desolate place. It is a spectacular, wide-open landscape. Lakes, ponds and expansive tundra grasslands sweep from horizon to horizon, and during June it is filled with birds (and caribou, bears, wolves, muskoxen, foxes, etc.). Drilling there would be a shame and a travesty.

At any rate both these images of male Rock Ptarmigan were made at the upper camp, a day apart. The first shot I made under conditions that would not normally be associated with good bird photography. It was near mid-day, the light is hard and bright, and striking the bird from the right side of the frame. However, the interesting terrain of the big-rock gravel bar, and the dark blue, shadowed background (created by a riverside bluff), add some visual interest to the image. The blues, grays and whites, add an almost monochrome appearance to the photo. The only flash of color comes in the narrow red eyebrow of the ptarmigan. I don’t like that the bird’s face is partly in shadow, which reduces the clarity around the eye. I also wish the dark blue of the upper left background extended across the frame instead of blurring out into more pale whites and grays on the upper right. If I laid down on the rocks and gotten a lower perspective, it would have helped the image substantially. Still I like this shot, I like the rolling formation of the rocks and the way the bird echoes those patterns.

Verdict? Though flawed the image is sharp and visually interesting.

This second image was made the first evening (late night actually) of the trip. We hiked up onto the dry ground of the bluffs surrounding our camp and found this bird sitting conspicuously atop a tussock. Male Rock Ptarmigan, unlike the females, hold onto their white plumage long into summer. This would seem an invitation to predators, and it is, purposefully so. They stand out to draw attention away from the nesting females. Somewhere not far away the mate of this bird, likely sat perfectly camouflaged on her nest, and not surprisingly, we never found her. This bird was extremely patient, allowing us to approach within a few yards before he started to look a little nervous and we backed off. This image is quite good overall. It is sharp, the front-light is excellent, the background is clean and lacking distraction. The tussock perch is visually interesting and provides at least a hint of the habitat on the coastal plain. Despite the difficulty of metering the white bird, sunlight and dark-brown foreground, the exposure is dead-on. Lastly the composition provides plenty of dead space at the top of the image for text or design elements. So all good right? I’d say yes. But it isn’t a Wow! image. This is great shot, well composed and executed but it doesn’t have that umph, that a truly spectacular image does. Also this shot was a long time in the making. I made probably 200 images of this bird that evening and this one came somewhere at the end of that process. In other words there was a lot of trial and error to get it right. That is a very rare luxury in wildlife photography as we are not often afforded the time to experiment. Most cases, we need to get the shot right the first time, because there is rarely a second chance. My first few images of this bird are wildly under-exposed and poorly composed, had the bird flown off after those frames snapped off, I would have come home with nothing.

The verdict: Lacking Wow! factor, but a very strong image.

If you’d like prints or digital downloads of these or other ptarmigan images you can purchase them right here.