Landscapes

Landscape photography is one of the more difficult things to do.  Its hard to get a clear picture when you have miles of distance in between you and your subject.  It is also hard to translate the natural beauty you see into something that looks good on film.  One method I like to use to keep landscape photos interesting is to partially obscure the subject matter with any means available.  One easy way to do this is to just wait till the sun starts  to set, you can use the mixed lighting to obscure areas of the photo that wouldn't be sharp enough.

You can also use fog to create the same effect.

Woods of Guilford

On Monday this week I packed up my gear, lenses, batteries, memory cards, and camera then headed out into the woods to take some pictures.  Unfortunately the weather was not perfect it was a little cloudy and in the shade of the woods it was pretty dark.  Generally in photography you want as much light as you can get.  To counteract the lack of light you can do a couple things.  You bring down the shutter speed so you have a longer exposure, the only drawback to this is you cant capture moving objects without blur and you either have to have an extremely steady hand or a tripod.  With a tripod it takes a while to set up for each shot so it is definitely a slower means of shooting.  The other option is to bump up the ISO this basically affects the speed of the "film" the higher the ISO the shorter exposure it requires.  However is you take the ISO too high you can make you picture appear grainy.  The third option is to adjust the aperture to be as wide as possible this will affect how large the area of focus is in the photo.  Using these tools in conjunction you can compensate to some extent for poor lighting.  As you can see in this first picture I had it on a higher ISO setting and the graininess is apparent.

Film grain isn't always bad for a picture it can be a good effect on certain photos but sometimes you just want it clear and sharp.  I managed to get this next picture with a lower ISO as I rested the camera on my arm and laid on the ground this steadied it enough to allow me to lower the shutter speed.

Sometimes it can be hard to find subject material that actually produces a good photograph in the woods.  Lots of things look interesting to the eye but when you try to capture them with a camera they turn out boring and lacking feeling.  I find that close ups are essential you don't want the background to be distracting.  The next two photos are actually the same picture however one is cropped and in black and white, cropping is the most useful tool you have as a photographer.  As you can see it removes a lot of the noise and confusion from the original photo.

The HDR Photography of Trey Ratcliff

A very interesting technique to use is HDR or High Dynamic Range photography.  Its a method that is newly available to photographers through the benefits of digital cameras and the ability to edit them in photo software.  Basically what it involves is digitally blending several pictures of the same thing together but each picture is slightly different in contrast exposure et cetera.  I don't have the software required for this technique yet but I wanted to show it anyway so Ill be sampling some of Trey Ratcliff's photos.  You can find some of his best work here.  Here are a few of my favorites:

This technique can really bring out the beauty in the natural world.

It can also be really abstract as seen here:

Darker shots are also great looking

My favorite out of all his pictures this one has so much intrigue

Ice

My last two posts were about water.  First water in its smallest form visible to the human eye water drops.  Second running water the type we see most commonly around us in streams rivers lakes and oceans.  So I've decided to continue on the water theme for one more post and show water in its third form, when it is frozen.  The following series of photos were all taken on the same morning after we had a freezing rain.  The weather conditions the night before were somewhat unique.  I am not a meteorologist but from what what I can assume the temperature in the clouds must have been higher than that on the ground.  But it was extremely cold on ground level so water hit the ground in liquid form then began to freeze almost instantly.  This produced some very interesting patterns in the ice and dramatic looking icicles.

As usual I played around with the color in all of these photos.  My style in Photoshop is to not edit the original image in any way besides cropping, changing colors, sharpness, and blacks.  This way everything you see in one of my photos is actually there I simply edited the feel of the photo to bring out certain bits I thought were interesting.  These three pictures were altered to change their base color one to red and one to blue and one to green.

While I was playing around with the colors I found a combination that seemed to work very well bringing up the blacks and contrast and letting a hint of green and blue show through.

One handy thing you always have in your back pocket as a photographer is to simply remove all color from a picture this can give it an old timey classy feel.

You can also use the sky as a blank background in order to draw more attention to your subject.  As you can see in these next three photos.

Water

As a follow up to my last post I'm going to post some pictures of water.  Water can be the most interesting thing to photograph sometimes.  There is so much variance in it you can take a long exposure of fast moving water and get a ethereal ghostly effect or you can take quick snapshots and freeze fast flowing water.  Capturing something you wouldn't normally be able to see.

The best thing about water is how abstract it can be.  You can play around with reflections and colors and create an image that looks like a an alien landscape or some kind of weird plant.

You could photograph water all day and never run out of interesting things to do with it.  

If you are shooting on a sunny day you can afford to bump up the shutter speed to capture moving water in really interesting ways.

Water can add so much to a photo, the variability of it always makes it interesting take for example these two shots.

Both are different in color and mood but are essentially the same subject matter.  Here's one more photo for good measure.  Taken on the Delaware river it's one of my favorites.

Water drops

An interesting project you can do if you have the materials and equipment is to attempt to photograph water drops.  I can't lie this is not an original idea I got it from somewhere on the internet.  I don't remember exactly where from but its all over the place.  If you search photographing water droplets on YouTube you'll get about a million results.  Anyway my method was to hang a plastic bag full of water off a tripod, cut a hole in the bottom so it would slowly drop water into a container then get my camera focused, set it to burst and hold down the button here's what I got.

First couple tries I had a hard time getting the droplet in focus,  as you will see below focus is just barely off center.

My solution to this was to put a thumbtack directly under where the drops were hitting and use where the thumbtack breaks the surface of the water as a focal point.

After this I had better luck and produced some decent pictures.

This is a very fun experiment if your looking to get some neat shots.  Especially if you have color films for your flash or even just a colored piece of paper to bounce the light off you can make a simple water droplet pretty interesting. 

Bellezza in italia

Lets get this started with a little background. I was in in Italy October through early December of 2010 working on an organic olive farm.  They provided me with room and board in exchange for work.  This gave me a great opportunity to go out and shoot on the weekends when I had time off.  So here are a few of my favorite photos from the time I was there.

My favorite photo from Italy, hiking in Cinqueterra I looked down the mountain and got this shot of a quintessential Italian hill town.  Unfortunately it's a little distorted as it was taken from a distance on a grey foggy day, so I had to play around with the clarity and colors a lot.

These next two photos were taken in Venice, I had a lot of fun playing around with reflections most of my shots from there involve water, which only makes sense...

This photo is also a Venice shot taken as the sun was just setting I noticed a gondolier pulling out of the dock and positioned myself so he was in between me and the sun.

My best friend Sergio he worked on the farm with me the whole time I was there then returned to Spain as I left for america.  His dream was to come back to Italy on a Vespa and tour the country with his guitar, cigarettes and plenty of wine.