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Paul graciously awoke very early for this photo shoot. Thanks to Dad for help with the lights and EV for collecting tennis balls and cheering when I hit 4 balls "out of the park" after the shoot. Too bad hitting them out of the park doesn't count in Tennis. I'd also like to thank Paul for not actually using this type of serve when I stood on the other side of the net.
While visiting family in Idaho, this was my bed.
Nick, take 2.
Nick Vienneau is a world-class skeleton slider who asked if I'd make a required shot of him for the national association. The rules were pretty stringent, things like, head and shoulders only, square with the camera, plain background, no toothy smiles, must be able to see the eyes, and prefer natural light rather than flash. Bah! This is the edit where I took some liberties. Click for the full version.
Back to Guardsman Pass, this time looking back toward Park City:
I haven't stopped by Lamb's Canyon for quite some time so I made a quick stop on the way home today. The wildflowers are still looking pretty nice and so I made a very quick run up the north side of the canyon to see if we could find a good panorama opportunity. Still working on those but in the meantime, I was pretty happy with this shot of the flowers right by the side of the road:
Sunset time in the mountains, or pretty much anywhere, often comes with a breeze. That's very refreshing after a hot summer day but can be maddening if you're trying to photograph the sunset and you have a plant as a foreground element.
I once heard a story about the late Galen Rowell, a gifted National Geographic landscape and photo-journalism photographer. He died tragically in 2002 which means that most of the work he did during his career involved film rather than digital cameras.
Stick with me, I'm laying out the background for this story.
You sometimes hear people say, especially when they don't want to get out their flash or when they're not comfortable with their strobe skills, "I'll just fix this shot in post..." This means they know that the image they capture in the camera is not how they want the final image to look but they'll just tweak it, or in some cases completely distort it, to look like they originally intended in Photoshop or any variety of post-processing applications.
Now this is not necessarily a bad approach and I'm not saying that I've never done anything like this myself. But if it is the only strategy I have in my "bag of tricks" I may find myself at a significant disadvantage.
Galen Rowell and Shelton Muller were once out photographing landscapes at mid-day and Galen demonstrated to Shelton how to light the foreground, part of a tree in this case, with his off-camera flash that was gelled with a warm, orangish piece of cellophane (known to cinematographers and studio photographers as a "gel".)
So not only did Galen manage the light in his photographs by evening out the contrast to a level that his film could handle, he also took the liberty to create some of that warm light we typically only see at sunrise or sunset.
The topic of gels is a discussion for another time but this story popped into my mind as I was trying to photograph the sunset and moonrise with gently moving sunflowers in the foreground. The trick was that with the evening breeze and the waning light, my shutter speed was in the 3 second range. Moving sunflowers and a three second exposure resulted in fuzzy looking sunflowers which was not the look I was going for.
So, I ran in and grabbed my little flash and a white shoot-through umbrella and grabbed this shot:
This was a break-through for me even though this is not one of my best-ever shots. I was able to get the color saturation I wanted in the overall scene, get sharp sunflowers that still have a sense of movement (click to view the larger version and consider what flash along with a 3 second exposure did), and produce the image I envisioned. There is no way to freeze flowers in post so I'm glad I heard this story and pitched the "fix it in post..." philosophy for a moment.
Thanks Galen. We miss you. But your influence remains.