I’m just starting a third revamp of my own nature photography website, (the first two dating from 2002 and 2004), and I wanted to share my thoughts on creative, effective photography websites. While it’s tempting (at least for geeks like myself!) to drop immediately into the nitty-gritty of implementation details, it’s far more important to first plan out what your web site is going to be for and how it will function as a part of your photography business (or even hobby.)
First, consider how your website will fit into your sales cycle. What is the site supposed to do for you and your clients? The most common mistake I see from aspiring nature and fine art photographers is (more…)
It seems that lately I am beginning to see more wedding photographers who are “photojournalist only” or “natural light.” I don’t want to get into a debate about the merits of these specialties as I’m a big believer that whatever works for you and your clients is great. Everyone doesn’t have to do it the same way. In fact, it’s a good thing we don’t because then wedding photographers would be like gas stations: Whoever has the lowest price gets the business.
That being said, it still seems like we are starting to move towards a complete elimination of the “formal” wedding portrait. I know for a fact that many photographers hate to shoot them and some flat refuse to. I don’t understand that mentality. (more…)
Shafts, Zabriskie Point. Death Valley National Park, California. Usually I think of Zabriskie as a morning shot, but afternoon works here.
In this last installment of my introduction to Death Valley, I’ll touch on a few more locations for first-time visitors to Death Valley.
(If you haven’t seen them yet, check out part one and part two.)
Zabriskie Point
One of the classic photographic locations of Death Valley is Zabriskie Point, located just up the road from Furnace Creek. Erosion has carved up these layered, multicolored hills into strangely folded patterns. The main viewpoint overlooks this folded landscape and marks the beginning of trails which descend down into it. I’ve most often photographed Zabriskie in the early morning, the area does not get first light until a half-hour or more after nominal sunrise, but there are things to shoot here all day. (more…)
Many times I’ve heard the understandable complaint that, after a good bit of working an image to get just the right color, that those colors are sapped by Photoshop or Lightroom when the image is exported to JPEG and then viewed on the web. There are all sorts of explanations on the web about this, and a lot of posturing about the “right way to handle things,” and there are all sorts of issues with the wealth of uncalibrated monitors out there, web browsers that don’t support color management at all (IE, Chrome, older Firefox) vs. those that do support it (Safari, more recent Firefox).
Over the years, I’ve become enamored of wide zooms–the wider the better. One of my faves is a Tokina fisheye zoom that I practically take everywhere. But there’s only so much barrel distortion one person can take, and only so far that distortion correction can take an image–when you want to employ it, that is. Sometimes you just want to start out with straight lines wherever you can get them. So, when I heard that Nikon had a new 10-24mm lens, I was on it like an egret on a fish (hey, it’s the first metaphor that popped into my head).
I’d worked with Canon’s EF-S 10-22 mm lens–and simply loved it. At the time, I still had an APS-C Canon, but I was fast moving toward full-frame and knew the lens would not be long for this world if I bought it. So I tested it, and sadly said goodbye. Now that I’m back in the APS-C camp with the Nikon D300–and loving it!–it was time to examine yet another zoom in the ultra-wide dimension (super-wide? potato, potato–you get what I mean).
If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.
Last week we discussed areas of high contrast, this week we’re going to turn around and say a few words about low contrast areas and how they contribute in a composition.
At least one of these effects shouldn’t be too much of a surprise if you read last week’s column. If our eye tends to gravitate over time towards the high-contrast parts of a composition, then it more or less equally gravitates away from the low-contrast areas of the image. I won’t dwell on this aspect of it, if you want a nice, simple example start with the tree at the head of last week’s column and notice that the valley walls don’t pull your eye the way the tree does.
But as much as that’s true in last week’s tree, it is even more true for Tree Ballet. Save for three small areas of the image (the bare trees and a couple patches of dead grasses) Tree Ballet has no real detail or contrast whatsoever. Whereas the small amount of detail in the valley walls in Morning by the Merced will occasionally pull your eye in to look at what detail is present, the complete lack of sharp detail in Tree Ballet does not. We say that most of this image consists of “negative space”. “Negative space” is the art term for space around the subject of an image. The large area of this image devoted to negative space is important to this image, it emphasizes the cold, isolating fog. (more…)
Peter Burian tests this 12.3 megapixel interchangeable-lens camera with HD Movie mode and a wealth of SLR-style features
The first Olympus Micro Four Thirds system includes the E-P1 camera, two lenses, adapters for other types of lenses and a compact flash unit.
In their promos for the 12.3 megapixel Olympus E-P1 camera, the company often referred to the heritage provided by their Pen series SLRs first introduced in 1959. That’s understandable, because the Pen models were unusually compact and featured classic styling.
Those qualities also apply to the E-P1, available in a white or silver stainless steel body with silver or black (optional) lenses. That’s where the similarities end however, since the Pen SLRs were small format cameras, taking two photos on a single frame of 35mm film. The E-P1 also accepts interchangeable lenses, but it’s not an SLR nor a small format camera in terms of sensor size. Even so, the new Olympus Micro Four Thirds concept certainly has a great deal of appeal and it should be as successful as the Pen concept was in the 1960’s and 1970’s. (more…)
Of all the things that I do, from the late nights working on new lighting techniques to the hours of building wedding albums and retouching photos… nothing is a stressful as the client interview. When a client comes in to interview you about shooting their event, it’s like the worst job interview in the world. Unlike other jobs, photography is so subjective that just being able to convince someone you take good pictures isn’t enough.
You have to convince them that the pictures you take are substantially better than the pictures that your competitors take, or at the very least, possess some form of artistic merit that screams for them to hire you. While it’s true that they would not even be speaking to you if they didn’t like your work, it’s also true that there are usually at least a few other photographers in town who produce work similar to yours. This is why it’s important to differentiate yourself from those photographers during the pitch. (more…)
I recently returned from the coastal little town of Essaouira in Morocco, where the world-renowned 12th Festival of Gnaoua Music took place from June 25 to 28. This is an annual event, religiously attended by fans of international and African music since it’s the venue of many world-class musical groups, generally from Africa, Europe and the Americas. To me, the attraction was to photograph the exotic Gnaoua musicians during their performances, as I had heard they had small–almost private–seances in various parts of the little medina in the very heart of Essaouira.
Gnaoua (sometimes also spelled Gnawa) music is a mixture of sub-Saharan African, Berber, and Arabic Islamic religious songs and rhythms, and it combines music and acrobatic dancing. Aurally and historically, its main influence is traced back to sub-Saharan Africa, but its current practice is concentrated in north Africa, mainly Morocco and Algeria. However, I have discerned similarities between Gnaoua music and folk songs from Sudan, so perhaps its influence extends even further. (more…)
Death Valley is a land of extremes. In part one of this series, we talked about its vastness and extreme temperatures. But another way in which Death Valley really “takes geography to eleven” is in elevation. Death Valley’s low point, Badwater, is nearly three hundred feet below sea level but is located almost directly between Dante’s View (over a mile “up” on the near canyon wall) and Telescope Peak, just across the valley at over eleven thousand feet above sea level.
Both the highs and the lows have much to offer photographers. (more…)
