Jeff Sullivan Photography

The Geminid Meteor Shower Peaks Tonight!

2011-12-13T15:48:00.000-08:00

The good news is that the Geminid meteor shower peaks on the nights of December 13 and 14, so tonight one of the strongest meteor showers of the year. The bad news is that the moon rising around 8 pm tonight and 9 pm tomorrow night will interfere with the visibility of the meteors. How much will it interfere? Actually I have a video of Geminid meteor shower from past year with and without the moon in the sky which can show you the difference. Make sure you're watching this in HD, and it's best watched full scree as well:You'd definitely see more meteors without the moon, so try watching before the moon rises, but if you're up in the key viewing hours between 11am and dawn, look up in the eastward sky and you might get lucky and see a decent fireball!

Chasing The Moon: Lunar Eclipse December 10, 2011

2011-12-12T15:03:00.000-08:00

Having shot lunar eclipses several times in the past, my objective this time was to see whether I could line up the Eclipsed moon with a major landmark. I selected San Francisco's most iconic building, the Transamerica Pyramid. The time I chose was 6:06am, right when the eclipsed moon should be coming out from total eclipse and brightening back up. I looked up the height of the building, the elevation angle of the moon at that time, and that enabled me to calculate the distance I would need to be from the building. I determined the compass direction the shadow would fall, and located point on Google earth with the right direction and distance.

I set my camera up in that spot 10 minutes early, and here's how the next 10 minutes turned out:
I pretty much nailed it... the center of the moon passes right past the tip of the building!

Here are some more of my images from that night:

Lunar Eclipse Photography, Dec 10, 2011

2011-12-09T06:31:00.001-08:00

Red Eclipsed Moon, Dec 20 - 21 2010, originally uploaded by Jeffrey Sullivan.

For tonight's moon rise and lunar eclipse events, there are a range of shots available:

Moon Rise: Friday evening before sunset (about 4:15, but time varies with location)
Sunset: Continued moonrise in best post-sunset color (about 5pm, but time varies with location).

Penumbral Eclipse Begins: 3:33am PST, moon at 41.4 degrees altitude
- Night landscapes or cityscapes with full moon in penumbral slightly dimmed state
Partial Eclipse Begins: 4:45am PST, moon at 27.0 degrees altitude (partial eclipse)
- Telephoto shots of moon in various eclipse phases
Total Eclipse Begins: 6:06am PST, moon at 12.3 degrees altitude (nice crescent moon w/red shots in the moments before this)
- Images of red moon and sky over landscapes/cityscapes
Total Eclipse Ends: 6:57am PST, moon at 2.9 degrees altitude
- Partially eclipsed crescent moon setting in best pre-sunrise light
Sunrise: 7:12am PST, moon at 0.4 degrees altitude (partial eclipse)
- Sunrise to moonset, "golden hour" daylight
Moonset: 7:17am PST, moon at -0.3 degrees altitude (partial eclipse)
- If you're in a very high place with very low horizons, for a few short minutes you may be able to capture a panorama, with the rare event of having both the sun and the moon in the sky at the same time!

The additional numbers are the degrees the moon will be above the horizon. Here's a chart enabling you to anticipate which of your lenses can cover something that high, for the shots where you'd like to include both the ground and the eclipsing moon:

Common lens angles of view
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_of_view#Common_lens_angles_of_view

If you shoot the entire eclipse in a sequence of still shots with your camera in one place, you can assemble them into a timelapse video like this one:

The other post-processing option for a sequence would be to create a composite photo of the phases, stacked into one image using software such as the free StarStaX:

Lunar Eclipse August 2007

Here are my planning notes from last year, when it took me 46 hours to reach Tucson and a clear patch of sky to shoot the eclipse under:

Phases of the December 2010 Total Lunar Eclipse
http://activesole.blogspot.com/2010/12/phases-of-tonight-lunar-eclipse.html

For most viewers the apparent moon set time will tend to be a few minutes earlier due to terrain (or fog/smog).

Hopefully I'll find it a little easier this time around. The next total lunar eclipse isn't until 2014, so make the most of this one!

HDR Isn't Just a Crutch, or a Crime!

2011-10-11T10:22:00.001-07:00

Crescent City Sunset, originally uploaded by Jeffrey Sullivan.

Some photographers have fallen in love with High Dynamic Range (HDR) post-processing, producing dramatic but strange results. Other photographers dismiss the often wacky-looking HDR results as "technicolor vomit" and note that any monkey can move a slider in software to make a scene look strange, the talent lies in making a single, flat camera exposure look more like what we experienced onsite. Unfortunately, the range of light present, the dynamic range of the scene, is often far beyond what a single camera exposure can capture. So like so many polarized debates these days, the prudent path may lie somewhere in between.

Take the example below. Often the most interesting and dramatic lighting can be found shooting straight into the sun, but if you expose to preserve the outline of the sun you'll completely lose shadow detail, and if you expose for the shadows, the sun will be an amorphous white area, a clear failure to accurately capture the scene. There are multiple strategies for capturing a scene like this via bracketed exposures, and multiple options for combining those exposures to recreate the scene, but HDR software such as Photomatix can be a fast and easy option, without requiring a lot of detailed manipulation in Photoshop layers.

Before you focus on post-processing however, it's important to capture useful exposures which really do improve your dynamic range in the shadows and highlights. Bear in mind that your darkest and lightest exposures are not to capture balanced images across the scene, they are primarily to capture detail in the darkest and lightest areas of the scene. Review your dark, medium and bright exposures. Are you capturing the outline of the sun, detail on the moon, or detail in the clouds, sand, water in the darkest exposure? Are you revealing shadow detail in your lightest exposure? If your exposures are not competently recorded, if you leave the bright areas blown out, some percentage of your audience may dismiss your result no matter what you do in post-processing. HDR is no cure-all, no excuse to ignore the basics of photography.

Once you have three competent exposures to work with, the first option in Photomatix that many of HDR's detractors are completely unaware of (and I think many of its users as well) is the ability to simply average the three exposures together. By averaging three exposures, the darkest exposure adds detail from the bright areas "blown out" to white in your center exposure, the lightest exposure adds detail from the darkest, "blocked out" black areas which your center, best single exposure couldn't handle. This useful functionality has been cleverly hidden in the Batch Processing section of Photomatix, and for years now it's been available for use indefinitely in the free trial that you can download from www.HDRsoft.com. Since your'e simply blending together actual light values captured by your camera, much like the iris of your eye captures different exposures as you look around the same scene, the result is a completely natural-looking result, with more range and detail than any single exposure.

The next level of processing available in Photomatix are the various Tone Mapping, Exposure Fusion and Compressor options. Fortunately in the latest versions of Photomatix you can see previews of how these will turn out, and you can pick the best processing option and proceed to fine tune it even more before saving a 16 bit TIFF file with maximum range. Some HDR users stop at this point. But while you can preserve useful detail with these techniques, even when you try to use HDR carefully and in a non-destructive fashion, these processing techniques are pretty intensive and can seriously damage the realism of the scene. Fortunately you can still have the best of both worlds: recover and even enhance detail beyond what a single exposure can handle, and end up with realistic results.

The next step is by far the most critical, and this is where some HDR users fail to complete the process. The more aggressive HDR techniques can do a good job at enhancing highlight and shadow detail, but used alone, they tend to be lousy at producing a balanced scene with proper contrast, similar to what you'd perceive onsite. The Tone Mapping technique in particular can produce distracting "halos" around objects in your scene that will only serve to scream "rookie" to many viewers. Once you're aware of this you can decrease the strength of the effect as you use the software, but you can also read your 16 bit TIFF HDR result into Photoshop or Photoshop Elements and blend it with your best single exposure edit, or with your Photomatix-averaged exposures to restore much more natural color and light values, while retaining much of the detail enhancement as well. With HDR and realistic (single exposure or averaged) images loaded into two different layers, you can even use Photoshop layer masking to selectively choose areas of the scene which look good in HDR, and select other areas like sky in the non-tone mapped result to simply leave out the blatant halo flaws.

Taking the critical step of blending away HDR flaws doesn't have to be complicated or expensive; if you don't have Photoshop try the layer functionality added into the latest version of Photoshop Elements (about $79.99 in the U.S.). You can download a free trial at www.Adobe.com

How do you know when you're done? Think of it like building fine architecture or high end furniture. If the first thing your customers or audience are going to see are nasty sanding marks in the wood, they'll probably think you've blown it, that you have no skill. Similarly, if you can immediately tell at a glance that HDR was used in processing an image, many people will notice the lingering process details before they notice the subject of your image, and that's unfortunate. Weren't you capturing that image to show something other than simply your ownership of a certain tool?

If you can't accurately capture a scene, you'll never get your results into National Geographic. Even if you don't aspire to submit images to them for consideration, it's not all that hard to correct many simple HDR flaws; so why set your sights for image quality any lower?

Now before I set myself up to receive a bunch of hate mail from HDR users, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with uncorrected HDR. You can produce whatever you want. Some people are happy with Polaroid images, cell phone images, disposable film cameras and I've taken some of my favorite images on a point-and-shoot digital camera. People can call anything they want "art," and if they find customers for that, I'm happy for them. All I'm pointing out is that there is no need to let the HDR process control your results. You can occasionally demonstrate to your audience that you have skill, that you're in control, even if you choose to stop short of that point and produce artistic, partially-processed results to satisfy HDR fans the rest of the time. I'd love to see more HDR users develop and demonstrate that skill more often. Where you go from there is entirely your call.

http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/national-parks/yosemite-photos/#/yosemite-sunrise_2087_600x450.jpg

You Can Shoot a Magazine Cover

2011-09-13T11:47:00.001-07:00

Outdoor Photographer Magazine Cover, originally uploaded by Jeffrey Sullivan.

A few months ago I mentioned that I had gone out for a few days in pursuit of images which might serve as a good magazine cover. In photography circles the term "landscape" is often synonymous with a horizontally-oriented image, capturing broad swaths of the outdoors with a wide angle or ultra-wide lens. Most landscape photographers know that it can also be very powerful to emphasized objects in teh foreground by using a vertical orientation with a wide angle lens. To be able to offer prints in a format such as 16x20 which is more square than a typical sensor's 4x6 aspect ratio, you have to compose the shot with a shorter height in mind.

A few years ago I met a full time stock photographer in Mt. Rainer National Park, and he pointed out that magazines are close to the relatively short 8x10 vertical format, but they require even more open and non-critical space in the image to accommodate the magazine's title and text describing the articles inside.

I never forgot this advice, so when I was looking for images to submit to Outdoor Photographer, I was able to offer a range of possibilities which were not only nice photos, but also met the layout requirements for a magazine cover. It works, as shown by my photo on the cover of Outdoor Photographer's October issue.

The next time you're out shooting landscape photographs, visualize an 8x10 composition which is shorter than what you see in the viewfinder, but also intentionally leave room in the composition, maybe shoot a little wider, to improve your odds of producing a magazine-compatible result.

Shooting a little wider when composing a shot also enables you to perform leveling adjustments in post-processing, it improves your cropping flexibility, and it can make gallery wrap canvas prints easier to produce as only non-critical portions of your image will get wrapped around the frame. So give vertical compositions due attention next time you go out, and in particular try to back off a bit from tight, tall compositions, and see what you can can up with!

Anticipating Sun and Moon Alignments

2011-09-07T08:00:00.000-07:00

Vane Attempt, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

The full moon sets behind the old State Capitol building (now the Placer County Courthouse) in Old Town Auburn.

I'm bumping this forward in my blog so you can plan to take an amazing sunrise moonset or sunset moonrise shot this coming Monday.

I did this first shot above the old-fashioned way... looking up the full moon rise, arriving and seeing where the moon was, predicting where it was going, and changing my position several times to try to be in the right place at the right time.

Now there's an application that takes a lot of the guesswork out of lining up the sun and moon with natural or man-made objects to take stunning photos. The application The Photographer's Ephemeris allows you to plan a shooting location for a fairly exact alignment with particular landmarks: Free Download

It runs on Google Earth satellite photos, so you can easily see your planned shooting position, it shows you the azimuth angle (compass direction) of the sun and moon at any give time from there, and you can read the elevation angle as well. If the lineup isn't just right as the sun or moon is coming over the horizon, you can adjust your shooting position (at various times and stages in the sun or moon rise) to get just the alignment you want.

View the tutorials for some examples of the capabilities of, and applications for, this program.
Tutorials: stephentrainor.com/tools#tutorials

Below are my results from researching on TPE a much more subtle event: anticipating and planning for the position of a crescent moon. I identified two positions a couple of blocks apart for two different times, then adjusted my position a few yards onsite to place the moon beside or behind the same courthouse, while avoiding trees or power lines.

So fire up TPE and go give this a try in your area on the next full moon rise (and set), or whenever! Remember to pick a target reasonably far away (say 1/2 mile to several miles) to put the moon alongside, so you can use a long zoom lense and capture the moon really large by it.

What Canon Should (Should Have?) Put in the Canon 5D Mark III

2011-08-28T14:34:00.001-07:00

What Canon Should (Should Have?) Put in the Canon 5D Mark III, originally uploaded by Jeffrey Sullivan.

As I read the various forecasts about what improvements might appear in the Canon 5D mark III, I manly see lists of slightly improved technical specifications. Those types of improvements are good, but are you really understanding and solving the challenges that current customers are facing? Are you also looking at not just evolutionary improvements, but revolutionary ones as well?

Digital cameras seem to be limited to simply copying the functionality of, and the limitations of, analog film cameras. This is unfortunate and unnecessary. True innovation will give some camera company a commanding advantage in the market. Will it be you?

Your customer base has changed dramatically. Your typical customer even for your highest end cameras has little to no experience. Accept and adjust to that fact. Make your products much more approachable to these new customers, and you will have a major competitive advantage.

With far more customers who are relatively new to photography, it's time for you to address the limited and poor quality information included in your manuals. Don't just describe how to navigate through the menus and how to change settings. Explain what situations those settings are actually useful for. Have a complete and expanded rewrite done in English. Let me download your manual to store, search and use on my iPhone and on iPads. I won't pay more for that (and there's no reason why you can't release the manual in that format... allow others to post it online if you're too cheap to host a couple of servers to provide that service). As I'll explain below in much more detail, there are many features which you may wish to change if you consider more carefully how your cameras are actually being used today.

Your customers are using HDR. A lot. Even people who don't use HDR specifically use other forms of exposure blending: layer masking, image stacking, and so on. These uses are increasing throughout the market, so your performance on multi-shot modes will either become a strategic opportunity to increase market share, or will become a strategic weakness of your cameras. Put a lot of time, thought and effort into improving and extending your multiple exposure modes.
- Create an HDR-friendly Automatic Exposure Bracketing mode which automates the AEB-setting process so the user selects the center exposure value, but the camera selects the brighter and darker exposures to preserve highlight and shadow detail. Let those two additional exposures be asymmetrical, such as one stop brighter and two stops darker. This would be highly valuable to any photographer who might blend exposures via any technique, not just HDR. Don't assume that the feedback you get from a few top professionals (who are comfortable setting bracketing) reflects what your typical customer needs; if you can improve the HDR results of a beginning user, as they share those with their friends you will gain market share.
- Limiting AEB sequences to 3 shots is not acceptable, and not competitive with Nikon. I may only choose 3 shots to process out of the 5 or 7 I shoot, but I want the RAW files available.
- Limiting AEB sequence spacing to +/-2EV shots is not acceptable.

Many customers are producing timelapse sequences, or will be soon. Consider the usability and performance of your camera for producing timelapse videos.
- For sunset and sunrise, the light changes too much over time to set a single manual exposure. Few of your actual customers have a tripod sturdy enough to allow touching the camera to manually change exposure during the timelapse (and that approach would be too prone to inconsistencies anyway). Yet trying to automate exposure adjustment by using Aperture priority mode, when the camera is about to change to the next 1/3 of a stop brighter or darker, sometimes the camera goes back and forth between brighter and darker exposures, creating unnecessary flicker in the results. One solution would be to create a Timelapse Mode, where the exposure trajectory can be considered (comparison to a moving average), so abrupt back and forth exposure changes will not occur.
- There is no reason to have a computer (digital camera) act in such massive increments as 1/3 stop of light. At least when the camera is operating in Timelapse Mode as described above, let the camera adjust itself in much more gradual exposure increments, such as 1/10th stop.
- There is a need for faster frame per second performance, preferably 6 or more. This helps reduce long term performance bottlenecks over the course of a long timelapse.
- Try using the 5D mark II for timelapse sequences with a long lens. When I'm using mirror lockup with an external timer, give me the option of leaving the mirror up, rather than have it slap back and forth, wearing it out and inserting 2 more seconds between exposures.
- Solve serious performance bottleneck issues with the 5D mark II: The current 5D mark II performance breaks down during sustained shooting. While rated at 3fps for burst shooting, when shooting timelapse sequences of several minutes to an hour or more, it becomes apparent that the actual long term fps performance of the current 5Dmark II is less than one frame every 5-6 seconds. So on the Canon 5D mark II, actual performance experienced by real users can be 18X lower than the specifications commonly advertised! This is not an insignificant shortfall in a $2699 camera (mine was close to $3000 after California sales tax)! If you try to shoot at any faster rate, the camera occasionally gets bogged down processing RAW files and skips a scheduled frame in the timelapse as it tries to catch up. I haven't done the math to calculate whether it's simply a bandwidth issue since I use a 533X card, but neither will most other photographers, If there's a specific card we need for certain types of performance, first know that yourself, then tell your customers what they can expect at various card performance levels. Do I really need the newest, fastest $300 memory card, or will a reasonably fast one closer to $100 be sufficient?

Unconventional features - Sometimes camera manufacturers seem to lack experience and imagination when it comes to how their camera features are being used or could be used by members of their broader customer base. Get used to the fact that 99% of your customers are not too proud to use automatic modes or simple accessories like built-in flash. Some people are really into setting up custom modes, but I suspect that most professionals will use whatever works; whatever saves them time and produces results in a predictable and consistent manner.

Flash: The lack of pop-up flash appeals to many elitist snobs, but such a bias is short-sighted, overlooking practical applications. If I'm out shooting a landscape, and a bear, deer, elk, pine martin, bird, moose shows up and all I want is a little catch light in the eyes, do I have the luxury of being able to dig into a bag and pull out a flash (miss the shot timing and/or scare them away witht he movement)? Or can I trust that an external strobe is charged in the days or weeks since I've used it last? Do I want to carry the rock-like Canon 580EX when I go backpacking? No, no, NO! Or could a pop-up be better than nothing in those fractions of a second before a shot might be lost? There are times when the clunkiness of an off-camera or shoe-mounted flash is acceptable, other times when the next best thing would be far better than nothing. This is another great example of where you'd probably get a very poor indication from traditional top photographers on what the majority of your actual customer base might actually find useful. I'd even accept a flush-mount built-in flash instead of nothing; just make sure that it has a daylight color temperature.

Modes: give me a Sports mode that shoots in RAW for random wildlife appearances (also Portrait and Night Portrait, also respecting my RAW setting). I don't want to have to reinvent them using custom modes C1-C3 (I also don't want to give up RAW results, a full frame sensor, ISO 6400, etc. either).

Night photography is one of the big incentives your customers have to upgrade to the 5D mark II or its replacement. Consider a wide variety of night applications and improve or add relevant features:
- Let me set exposures longer than 30 seconds, in-camera. 30 seconds is not long enough before requiring the camera to be used in Bulb mode. Why were cameras limited to 30 seconds in the past? Probably because film suffered reciprocity failure. That's gone, so drop the limitation. For evening seascapes I'd like to be able to produce three bracketed exposures, with the shortest at 30 seconds and at least one exposure at 2 minutes, so if that's the middle exposure the longest one would be 8 minutes. I want to be able to use that 10 minutes to do something else (shoot my backup camera); don't make me stand there and time (or delay the interval between to program my intervalometer to time) 3 different Bulb exposures!
- Add a "Full Moon" AEB mode. While I'm optimizing my AEB sequence to cover the foreground, midground and background, let me turn on a mode to automatically add one reasonably close exposure for the full moon. I currently have to fake this by working in one mode such as Aperture for the landscape then rotating the mode into manual mode for the moon, but that introduces a time delay during which the moon moves, and for night exposures it is unacceptable to have to touch the camera (jostle the camera and tripod) between exposures which are intended to be merged later.
- Build the intervalometer into the camera. It's in Nikon's D7000, it was in the Canon Powershot G5, so where's yours now Canon? External cables cost more, take space, add weight, and they are prone to failure.
- ISO 12,800 and/or 25,600, and better low noise performance at ISO6400
- Make sure you keep the dual Digic processors, and that noise reduction even on long, high ISO night exposures can be completed within a fraction of one second after the shutter closes.

Video features and performance: Canon seems to currently have an edge over Nikon in video features across much of their product line. Rumors claim that video development is progressing separately from still image features, and this may lead to two separate camera models. I feel this would be a strategic mistake to lose the competitive advantage of having a camera that does both. The video features on the 5D mark II were very well received by the market, and If you paid a little more attention to features and usability this lead could be maintained:
- stereo microphone, with better wind screening
- Make video mode more usable: sound level meter, etc.
- Higher ISO video shooting

Improve handling of dust, and do so in our typical workflow! Current approaches for handling dust (shaking sensors and so on) are very inadequate. Postprocessing is a critical point in the process to add value:
- That's great that Canon has the concept of capturing Dust Delete Data and at least in theory can use that data to reduce the appearance of dust spots in Canon's Digital Photo Processing (DPP) software. But on days when I have 600 separate images to process from a day, or if I have a 1200 image timelapse sequence, where exactly do you expect DPP to fit into a typical workflow? How would I transfer the data to efficient workflow tools like Lightroom? I produce 16-32GB of images per day in RAW format, I can't add intermediate TIFF files of 120MB each (a total of over 400GB of data per day). DPP should be implemented as a plug-in for Lightroom, possibly for Photoshop as well.
- there is a need for a timelapse editing tool, which preferably could be integrated into Adobe Lightroom as a plug-in, which would adjust long term trends in exposure across dozens of photos.

Other improvement requests in the next generation:
- Higher resolution (not the most critical requirement though... don't sacrifice improvements in high ISO / noise performance!

Revolutionary Improvements
My iPhone is a computer with 32GB storage.
- Smart Phone Control - Offer an interface to enable iPhones, iPads and Android devices to control my camera (I suspect that third party solutions exist, but it is strategic for you to fully understand the uses, needs, and future potential of this type of application). Bluetooth wireless?
- Apps - Look at the rich market for "iPhoneography" post-processing applications. Enable users to add third-party apps programs which can facilitate and perform non-destructive postprocessing, and to transfer RAW files over to Lightroom with those changes non-destructively applied in my Lightroom catalog. This enables the entire iPhone developer community to add value to your camera. There is little limit to what the imagination and resources of such a developer community might produce. Again, it may be strategic for you to be very closely involved in facilitating such applications.
- As prices come down, an iPhone-like computer and display could be built into the camera.

It's Time for Digital Cameras To Depart from the Film Model

2011-08-28T13:24:00.000-07:00

Digital cameras are computers, ones which lack even a basic predictable response to exposure. There, I said it. It's a weight off my mind. The opportunities offered by our image-capturing computers offers far more opportunities than problems. I'll explain in a moment, but first, let me give you some background.

I worked as an application engineer at the world's leading color printer company for years. I doubt a week went by when we weren't talking about imperfect color response in CCD imaging chips (in scanners at that time), differences across color space representations, additive vs. subtractive color, and the imperfect frequency transmission response of coatings, filters and glass. You'll probably never hear this from the industry leaders; no manufacturer want to reveal that the fundamental reality of their product is that it is imperfect. This isn't to way that cameras and today's post-processing isn't doing a relatively good job, I'm just pointing out that the reality of the situation is that entire process has small issues and attempted corrections, and as light passes through a filter, lens, is recorded on a CCD, stored in a RAW format, then interpreted by software for display on an LCD, converted to TIFF or RGB JPEG, and later printed on a printer, what is not well known or generally accepted in the general market is that there is no possibility of perfection, only a result which is good enough, as far as we can tell. In practice, things get worse from there, if you're overly obsessed with trying to capture exactly "what's there" when you trigger the shutter.

Let's take a simple case. Adobe Lightroom provides a great opportunity to compare adjacent bracketed exposures, and one of the main reasons I use bracketing is that when you change exposure even one stop on a digital camera, forget the theory you learned about stops of light. On a real digital camera, after correcting all RAW files to theoretically have the same exposure, a -1EV exposure will typically need one full "stop" of contrast increase in Lightroom to approach the color and contrast of the -2EV exposure. The 0EV exposure needs two "stops" of contrast increase. But the three exposures may need additional adjustment (increase black levels on the lighter exposures) to approach each other, and they may never be adjustable to become fully identical. So the bottom line is, even on my Canon 5D mark II which cost a few pennies shy of $3000 (after California sales tax), the concept of "one proper exposure" pretty much goes out the window. No doubt others have noticed this, but the greater photography community hasn't fully identified, accepted or acknowledged this yet.

The myth of "the perfect exposure" persists, and many photographers are reluctant to use bracketing (or at least to admit that they do), as if being a technician to obtain a decent exposure in one try were some sort of accomplishment or prize. Really? Sure, it saved film and cost in the past, but in today's digital world with immediate result previews, is being minimally competent really such a challenge or accomplishment, the pinnacle of achievement we should hope for? Are we not pursuing art, some final result? Is using a different or innovative technique frowned upon in other artistic mediums such as oil painting, or are the people who successfully break from tired techniques celebrated when appropriate? In the case of the single exposure photo, given the clear issues with digital sensor response, it's simply a holdover from a different era, an overly used technique that has now become a less than optimal approach. The prejudice and misconceptions on this minor procedural point are so bad in the industry, I hear that some major photo contests disqualify entries which show in EXIF that auto exposure bracketing was turned on. I've never seen that disclosed in any contest rules, so apparently they don't even disclose that judging prejudice (based on technical and experiencial ignorance in digital) before accepting your entry fee! Is it really so taboo to overcome the fact and reality of non-linear response to light in digital sensors? Ignorance is bliss among Luddites; protect the illusions of the old analog paradigm of photography at all costs.

The solution? In some respects, the performance characteristics of digital cameras don't really matter much. Fortunately humans lack the basic capacity of color memory, so you can produce whatever you think is realistic, and neither you nor anyone else will ever know any better.

There are other reasons why it's unfortunate that digital photography is simply trying to mimic the operation of an analog camera. Consider that practically all of the acknowledged leaders in the photography market, in every nook and cranny of the business, from product designers to CEOs to the most prominent and successful photographers, started their careers in film. Change means risk; assuming (even pretending) that digital photography is simply a new way of performing analog photography is safe for everyone involved. They maintain their job security. Everyone's happy. Consumers don't know any better... they're getting a better camera... without the per-frame costs of film (although we're consuming storage and computers at an alarming rate instead).

But today's digital cameras are like the first IBM Selectric typewriters... put a computer inside, to simply emulate a previous manual device. Hooray, we can go back and correct letters within the past 40 typed! Isn't life good? It took another decade or more before computers developed enough to put document design into end users' hands, but now individuals can design entire books at home.

Today's cameras are already computers, so we don't need to wait for technology, the main barrier is inertia, the laziness of established companies lacking imagination and true innovation. Any manufacturer can work towards empowering today's very different buyers and users of cameras. But this is best started with the assumption that they can, perhaps must, break the old analog camera design rules, and introduce revolutionary new and much more effective image-capturing tools and techniques. What the Mac was to text-based personal computers, what the iPhone is compared to traditional cellphones, a re-imagined digital camera could be when compared to film cameras. This leads me into my next topic, where I'll provide some examples which strike me as pretty obvious to digital camera users who really put their digital cameras through their paces today: what Canon should have put into the Canon 5D mark III.

How is Eminem Relevant to Landscape Photography?

2011-08-26T12:33:00.000-07:00

Someone asked me recently why I like Eminem (+Eminem Marshall Mathers, the best-selling artist over the past decade). She listens to country music... where to start? His first few albums were entertaining, with some funny lyrics, and even funnier music videos, often parodying celebrities and other public figures. But his later work became deeply personal, reflecting challenges he faced in his life. His lyrics are dense, intelligent, and they often resonate deeply as I pursue photography.

The best opportunities in landscape photography often last for a matter of seconds. From a given sunset I may have dozens of good shots, but often only one image rises head and shoulders above the rest, even compared to adjacent frames captured seconds earlier or later.

Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity
One moment
Would you capture it or just let it slip?

You have to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right conditions, and when you are, you'd better have the required skills (knowledge of your camera's features), and at least for for 15 or 20 critical minutes, stay laser-focused on the task at hand.

You better lose yourself in the music, the moment
You own it, you better never let it go
You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow
This opportunity comes once in a lifetime

Are you a spectator of sunsets who happens to shoot photos, or are you completely focused on getting the right composition and exactly the right exposures, including a dark enough one so the outline of the sun won't be blown out when it's in the composition? Is your lens clean to minimize spots of lens flare? Take yourself seriously. Be prepared, then when those precious critical moments arrive, focus on the task at hand with every shred of concentration you can muster.

To be perfectly honest, travel can be tiring; I'm not always completely motivated or focused. Fully appreciating that reality forces me to confront the fact that moments, days, weeks and months tend to slip inexhorably by in our lives without being fully experienced, let alone best utilized in support of our life or creative goals. Instead of succumbing to the mental medication of TV (or the Internet), I resolve to take full advantage of rare opportunities when they come up (weather, sunrises/sunsets, moon rises, meteor showers, the book project i'm working on). Each is a moment in time and space, never to be repeated. I either make productive use of them, or not. My success, the path I'm currently choosing for my life, depends on it.

Success is my only m@#@&#$!& option, failure's not
I cannot grow old in Salem's Lot
So here I go it's my shot.
Feet fail me not
this may be the only opportunity that I got

My success depends in part on how often and how successfully I take advantage of the cumulative opportunities that are available in a given month and year.

You can do anything you set your mind to

The key portion of that parting statement is the "you can do": what you set your mind to can't stay in your mind. Your desires must translates into deliberate and competent action. I need to keep my sensor and lenses cleaner. What can you "do", in the planning or execution of your photography, to more efffectively move yourself forward towards your goals?

My Blog is now Available on Your IPhone/IPad/Droid!

2011-08-24T17:11:00.000-07:00

Stay current on the latest updates to my blog using the PhotoVerse app. It costs only $0.99, and it includes feeds from many photographers as well as sites broadcasting photography industry news.

Photoverse is a utility application developed by Photographers for Photographers. Photoverse collects information from multiple news sources and blogs related to photography, pools them and presents them to you in an easy to read scrollable list.

It is a great way to keep tab of the latest happenings in Photography.

HDRs: Good, Bad, or Something Else?

2011-08-24T14:40:00.000-07:00

Select the photo above to visit the Picasa album: "HDRs in 2011 So Far"

HDR, "High Dynamic Range" photography has been around since at least 2003 when HDRsoft released Photomatix 1.0. It has become popular in recent years as some photographers try to overcome sensitivity limitations in digital sensors, and as other photographers use it to make their results look more dramatic. But will HDR succumb to a backlash, as over-saturated images did when Photoshop became widely used, or will it find a permanent place in photography's bag of accepted processes? That may depend on what your aspirations are. If you want to call your work "art" you can do what you want and see whether someone will pay you for it. If you'd love to work for National Geographic, you'd be wise to heed their requirements for their photo contests:
"Minor burning, dodging, and color correction are acceptable. High dynamic range images (HDR) and stitched panoramas are NOT acceptable." They go into more detail in their statement on digital manipulation.

As Ansel Adams developed his approach to photography, it had become very trendy for other photographers to hand-color their black and white prints. Color was new to photography, and the dramatic enhancement that color could add to an otherwise boring result gave many photographers a lot of attention. But over the long run, if a gimmick is what your'e relying on, and everyone has access to that same trick, your work will get lost in a sea of similarly altered results. How many of those photographers who clearly enhanced their photos do we know the names of today? Ansel Adams went in the other direction, working for hours in the darkroom to ensure that his artistic interpretations of a scene were presented in a realistic-looking way.

I've posted a lot of HDR photos to the new Google+ social networking platform recently to research how my use of HDR has changed over the past few years. I used it over 50% of the time in 2008 yet my Spring 2011 album shows the other side of the story, how my use of HDR has dropped below 5% as I follow Ansel's lead to pursue more realistic results. Time will tell whether history repeats itself and today's digital manipulations go the way of hand tinting, but I figure it's always useful to maintain skill in both the realistic and unrealistic camps, so at least whatever look you choose for a given image is a deliberate one, not simply the result that certain software imposes. I'd like to have enough control that I can compose images as an artist and share the light that I experienced, not spend my time as a technician, a captive to a limited repertoire of effects which fail to accurately convey the nature of the place and destroy the quality of that light!

Some people take a strong stance for or against HDR. My take on it is somewhere in between. Like many people I do get weary of seeing some of the most dramatic departures from natural-looking results now that the novelty of that look has worn off, but at the same time I find HDR useful in producing a small percentage of my images.

Some people have said that Ansel Adams surely would have embraced Photoshop and/or HDR, since his photos definitely did not seek to capture a simple reflection of how a scene looked when he saw it:
"You don't take a photograph, you make it."

On the other hand, as far as most viewers could tell, his results were plausibly realistic. Judging by his words, I think he would have certainly explored HDR, encouraged others to do the same:
"I hope that my work will encourage self expression in others and stimulate the search for beauty and creative excitement in the great world around us"

Ansel probably would have chosen to use HDR in a reality-supporting way, which may be new concept for some of the biggest proponents of HDR who advocate its more-than-reality potential.

Which direction should you choose? Sorry, I'm not a fan of "shoulds". I'd advise you to try a lot of different things, then choose your own path. But bear in mind if you enter photo contests that many of the most prominent photographers in the industry started in film, and some of them haven't even adopted digital yet. The over-saturation of Velvia film is fine with them, but they'll be turned off if they think you've applied even the exact same amount of saturation to a digital image. Typical results from HDR software could cause an even stronger negative reaction. Double standard? Sure. Just the way the world works sometimes? Absolutely. The bottom line is, do what you can, and when you develop a following of fans do what you want, keeping in mind the intended audience for your work.

If you've never tried HDR, you can download a copy of the latest Photomatix software to try at www.HDRsoft.com. Play around with it, and have fun! Search my blog for "technique tips" to see some my prior advise on how to prepare images for HDR processing.

Here are a couple of non-HDR images to show what you can do with standard image editing tools such as Adobe Lightroom:

Create a Timelapse Video of a Meteor Shower

2011-08-13T16:03:00.000-07:00

Geminid Meteor Shower Timelapse, December 2010 from Jeff Sullivan on Vimeo.

The Perseid Meteor Shower runs from July 17 - August 24, with peak night occurring around August 12-14. When shooting night landscapes and trying to catch meteor showers, I like taking long exposures one after another, so you catch anything which flies through your camera's field of view. If you shoot continuously for a while and catch a couple of hundred exposures or more, you can even assemple those shots into a timelapse video.

Lets do a little math to figure out how your still shots will transfer to video. When deciding how long to shoot, bear in mind that this is a timelapse video, so in playback as video everything is dramatically sped up. Each frame is a 5 to 30 second shot, but video is 24 or 30 frames per second. To make the meteors last more than 1/30th of a second, you may want them to be present for two frames of video, and assemble your video at a relatively slow frame rate of only 12 shots per second, so in video formats that play at 24 to 30 frames per second, the meteors show up for at least two frames. Fortunately our eyes and minds are quick enough for us to perceive the meteors with some persistence even though they show up for only 1/12th of a second.

On a dark night your exposures may be 30 seconds or more, so at 12 frames per second the video displays 6 minutes of shooting time, and an hour of shooting will give you 10 seconds of video. With the nearly full moon last night, there was enough light that I was able to reduce my exposure time to 5 seconds. I set an external timer (intervalometer) to take the next shot one second later, so I took one very 6 seconds, or 10 shots per minute. So if I'm using the slow frame rate trick to make the meteors more persistent, I'll end up with almost one second of video per minute of shooting!

If you'd like to explore timelapse photography yourself, download the free VirtualDub software which can convert a sequence of JPEG files into video, and check out the forum on www.Timescapes.org for discussions on techniques. You'll need a tripod of course, and your sequence of still images will turn out best if you use a remote switch that has an intervalometer (timer) function.

5 Chrome Extensions That Improve Google+

2011-08-13T12:28:00.000-07:00

5 Chrome Extensions That Improve Google+

Google+ has only been around about 6 weeks. It's getting rave reviews, for a number of reasons:

1) The "circles" concepts enables posts to be highly targeted, so you send information to exactly who will want it, and you receive less uninteresting material as well.

2) Less threat of your data/photos being misused? Google has had time to learn from Facebook's careless treatment of personal data and the negative reaction to Facebook's apparent intent to sell your photos for random, who-knows-what use.

3) It's much easier to connect. I've been on Google+ 2 or 3 weeks and I already have far, far more interaction over there, on a platform far smaller than Facebook.

4) Twitter with photos and no 140 character limit, Facebook without the 400 character limit. Just say what you need to say.

They're trying to grow gradually so as not to bog down the service so it can be hard to register, but each user has an allocation of 150 invitations, so let me know if you need one (I'll need your email address).

If you're already on Google +, look ma up. Here's my standard Google+ URL:
https://plus.google.com/107459220492917008623/posts

Once you're on Google+ you can register for a shorter, easier to type and remember redirect like this one, using Google Plus Nick:
http://gplus.to/JeffSullivan

South Lake Tahoe Fireworks Ranked #6 in America

2011-08-10T12:45:00.000-07:00

July 4 Fireworks, 2011

I've seen fireworks displays in at least a few dozen locations in America, over cities, mountains, the ocean, and lakes. This Summer I saw the best I've seen yet, in South lake Tahoe. Ranked #6 on the top 15 by AOL, (July 4th Fireworks: 15 of the Biggest Shows in America Ranked), it offers some of the most interesting and innovative burst patterns I've seen. The pace is great, choreographed to music playing on a local radio station. Click on teh photo above to see examples. I'll try to add a video clip when I find time to convert it to MPEG.

I'm testing different ways of posting my Picasa photo albums to my blog. The image at the top of this post is linked to the photo album, while just above this paragraph is a slideshow created using Flash (which seems like a better way to share it, but Flash may not display on Apple devices).

Perseid Meteor Showers in August

2011-08-05T10:33:00.000-07:00

It's that time of the year again! The annual Perseid Meteor Shower is underway. This year the peak nights of the shower will coincide with a full moon. This will obscure all but the brightest meteors, but there are still some decent opportunities for photography. Try early morning hours over the next few nights, after the moon has set. Even when the moon is in the sky you can shoot North-facing shots to face away from the moon and capture the brightest meteors, as well as star trails around the North Star, Polaris.

The meteors will appear to come from the radiant constellation Perseus, not far from Cassiopeia (a giant W you can spot more or less opposite the North Star from the Big Dipper). Get out someplace dark and clear, and enjoy the show! Best viewing hours are 11pm - 4:30am as the Eastern half of your sky rotates around to the leading side of the earth as we hurtle through space at 69,360 MPH around the sun (574,585 MPH relative to the Milky Way, another 1,339,200 MPH relative to other galaxies).

The moon sets at 11:30pm tonight, then roughly another hour later each night, so get outside in the early morning hours and watch the show, and capture star shots while the stars remain bright in the moonless sky.

Read down a few posts on my blog to see tips on capturing Milky Way or star trails photos. To maximize your odds of capturing some bright meteors, simply trigger your exposures as fast as your camera will go. I use an external "intervalometer" timer/trigger to start the next exposure one second after the previous one. By capturing dozens or hundreds of exposures in a row, you can capture many meteors over the course of many minutes or hours.

The photo at the top of this blog entry is a link to a whole album of Perseid Meteor Shower photos from past years. Go check them out for some inspiration or ideas!

Create a Timelapse Video on Your Digital Camera

2011-08-01T14:46:00.001-07:00

Lunar Moonbows in Upper Yosemite Falls from Jeff Sullivan on Vimeo.

Timelapse videos are easy to create on your DSLR. There are many software packages which will facilitate the process, some better than others, but I'll describe the simple and relatively low cost workflow that I currently use. You'll need software on your PC which can convert a sequence of JPEG files to timelapse video. I use VirtualDub (free download) to create an AVI format video, then I use MPEG Streamclip (free download) to convert the huge .AVI file to a much smaller (albeit lower quality) MPEG-4 for online use. Here's the process from shooting to finished video:

Clean your camera sensor. It is hard enough to remove dust from one image... picture having to do that 300 times. Even copying dust removal from one image to the others, the data changes over time (from shot to shot), so it really won't work well across the whole sequence. It's far, far better to remove the dust up front. Clean your camera sensor!.

Put your camera on a sturdy tripod. Install a fully charged battery and a blank, freshly-formatted memory card which can handle several hundred images.

Compose your image expecting to lose some of the vertical information if you'll convert the sequence to HD video with a narrow HD shape (16:9 aspect ratio).

Manually focus your camera and switch off automatic focus. If you forget to do this, your camera will insert delays in the sequence as it hunts for focus, making the playback jerky at best. Worst case, your camera may lose focus and you'll end up with a whole lot of blurry images.

Make some test shots to determine best exposure. If practical, set exposure manually so it won't change from shot to shot and cause flashing (flicker) as different exposures come up during playback. If the light will change a lot during shooting (sunrise and sunset), you can use automatic exposure, but then the exposure during the video is artificially stagnant, and you'll need to to "deflicker" the timelapse to reduce flashing from frame to frame when producing the video. You will learn some very interesting and important things about your DLSR in this process! When your DSLR changes the exposure up or down 1/3 stop from shot to shot, simply "fixing" the exposure during editing will not result in similar-looking images from shot to shot! Even adjacent images taken a fraction of a second apart may have different white balance, and a slight exposure change also affects contrast, color saturation, and so on. Once you've gone through the process a few times your whole approach will change and you'll try to maximize quality and consistency in-camera, not during editing.

Shoot several hundred images in a row. You can make the timing from frame to frame consistent using an Intervalometer Trigger (external timer), or you can simply hit the shutter release over and over (perhaps use the display of the prior image on the camera rear LCD as your cue to trigger the next shot and keep them at a fairly consistent rate). Remember that your finished product will be 30 frames per second, so you'll need 300 images for each 10 seconds of video. I recommend shooting in RAW format so you can adjust the exposures during editing, especially if you shoot at sunrise or sunset where the light will change over the course of your timelapse.

Read your camera's files into your editing software and crop them to the 16:9 aspect ratio of HD video. Remember that you have far more resolution in your DSLR than you need for HD video, so you can perform a "digital zoom" and focus on only a portion of your original camera image. Software strong in batch editing such as Adobe Lightroom (free trial available) will enable you to apply a consistent crop, exposure adjustments and even spot removal across the entire sequence of images. You'll also want to impose one consistent white balance across the entire sequence. Some video processing software (such as Adobe Premiere I believe) will even let you specify a starting crop and a different finishing crop, then calculate a zoom and pan across your sequence of images.

Save your files in sRGB JPEG format at 1280 x 720 resolution for video to be used on sites like YouTube or Flickr that only allow smaller 720p HD format video, or save them at 1920 x 1080 resolution for 1080p video to be uploaded to sites such as Vimeo. If you'll use the VirtualDub software, it will want you to point to the first image in the sequence then look for a sequential numbered file, so if you used automatic exposure bracketing while shooting you may be editing and saving every third file, but you can rename them sequentially so VirtualDub can order them properly.

Read the sequence into VirtualDub. It's important to notice when trying to import them that in the dialog box where you're looking for the first file to select, the file format has a drop-down menu which enables you to specify that it should look for an image sequence in JPG format.

Add filters as desired, in the order that you want them to apply. For example, Virtualdub can crop and resize larger JPEGs, perform sharpening at the new lower resolution, and you can search for and install a third party "MSU deflicker" filter to improve image consistency from frame to frame across the whole video. Check your frame rate and for maximum quality (but shorter result) change the default 10 frames per second to 30.

Save the video in AVI format. That's a very high quality format, so it may save a file of a gigabyte or more! Enjoy this high quality file on your computer (or read it into video editing software to burn it to Blue-Ray DVD).

To create smaller files for online sharing, read your .AVI file into MPEG Streamclip. Save to MPEG-4, playing with quality vs. file size tradeoffs until the results are what you want.

Upload your results to your favorite video sharing site. That's it! It takes a little more planning to pull off well and a little more time to produce the finished result, but you can produce some amazing videos.

For more information on shooting timelapse sequences, I recommend browsing the discussion forums over on www.Timescapes.org.

Note: although Adobe Lightroom has a retail list price of $300 to buy, Adobe offers a free trial.

This is an updated re-post of my November 2010 blog post since the link to the original timelapse video on Flickr appears to have broken. Instead I've posted links to videos on Vimeo:

Pfeiffer Beach Winter Sunset from Jeff Sullivan on Vimeo.

HDR-Friendly Workflow, Using Adobe Lightroom for Realistic Results

2011-07-27T17:02:00.000-07:00

Vanishing Water, originally uploaded by Jeffrey Sullivan.

A question came up a while back about workflow for HDR, and using a common editing program like Adobe Lightroom with it. I use Lightroom on all photos, and Photomatix 4.0 for HDR on a few with particularly challenging lighting conditions. Here's the approach that works extremely well for me.

I shoot in RAW and find Lightroom to be an excellent way to process files for many different shooting scenarios. The key is Lightroom having been designed from the start to facilitate operating on multiple files, such as its ability to copy development settings from one edited file and apply them to any similar images in the batch you're editing. It's also easy to use, so you don't need a bunch of obscure keyboard commands and you don't need to record scripts like Photoshop users always seem to be doing to create a given effect. At the highest level, my approach is this: for the images that I consider HDR potentially useful for, I simply perform the most basic adjustments like white balance adjustment, dust removal and some noise reduction, then convert these low noise, color-corrected images to JPG prior to performing HDR techniques. Using JPG images as input to the HDR process is exactly the approach recommended by HDRsoft for their Phototomatix software.

To cover the entire workflow from shooting to finished file in more detail, first I shoot automatic exposure bracketed images nearly all the time... not to get the best exposure, but to get the best contrast and color with an acceptibly low level of noise. One dirty little secret of digital photography is that sensor performance is not consistent across different exposures. What I'm trying to say is that three different exposures cannot simply be exposure-corected and turn out identical, even in the most basic sense like contrast and color. Just as was the case with film, the darkest exposure will almost always look best in color and contrast, the most likely to be good straight out of the camera (with minimal brightness adjustment), but it will require some "darkroom" adjustment of exposure, brightness and so forth, and in the end it may have too much noise in darker areas of the image. I do ahve a high success rate though, and at the very least it provides a reference image to try to edit the next best exposure to look like. It won't always be as straightforward or easy as you might hope, but at least you have a nice high bar to shoot for. Test this for yourself. Try shooting 3-shot exposure bracketing sequences in challenging sunrise and sunset lighting conditions, and adjust all three to see which looks best. Play with different bracketing and exposure compensation settings to see what works best on your camera.

On my Canon 5D mark II my default spacing is +/- 1 1/3 stops between exposures, but I also bias the whole sequence 2/3 stop darker (using exposure compensation at -2/3EV). Therefore I end up with exposures a -2EV, -2/3EV and +2/3EV. My Canon 40D doesn't quite have the same dynamic range nor does it have noise levels so low, so I may use -1/3 exposure compensation and shoot an Automatic Exposure Bracketing sequence of +/-1 stop. Either way, I examine the results and adjust my approach to the shooting conditions.

Having multiple exposures and the ability to choose HDR later if I like is a benefit, but I've found that by having better single exposures and rarely having blown out areas, especially in my best, darkest exposure, I can rely on HDR a lower percentage of the time simply to get a useful result. In fact, not having to rely on HDR as a crutch in my typical daily workflow frees me up to consider it in much more selective cases, to achieve much more advanced goals like mixing together long exposures of different lengths. (A range of shutter speeds is particularly useful with flowing water, to blend in different textures.)

Knowing that I'm using HDR for texture affects my shooting choices. For example, I may tune my bracketing sequence to provide three specific textures to flowing water. The speeds I require very depending upon how fast the water is moving (waves vs. streams vs. waterfalls), with different ranges of shutter speeds useful for different water speeds (such as different waterfall heights).

So my workflow starts with a RAW file in Lightroom receiving basic adjustments and getting saved to JPEG. Then Photomatix 4.0 does some initial processing and shows previews of how the result will turn out using something like 8 different techniques. This new feature makes it easy to pick one of the more natural renderings, one of the more unreal ones, or take over and fine tune the settings to get what you want. When done with the HDR processing, I save a 16-bit TIFF file.

As good as Photomatix 4.0 has become for facilitating your pursuit of a certain style of result, I still find it critical to run the TIFF file back through Lightroom for fine tuning. While HDR changes exposure around a scene in the highlights and shadows much like our eyes might, our brains reconstruct the scene in our minds with full impact of the bright shadows and dark shadows. HDR has no such interpretation step, so it can leave an image looking far too "flat". Approaches such as Tone Mapping are an attempt to restore some emphasis to the edges of light and dark areas, but such an approach with a single strong tool like that often leaves an image overcooked. Instead, try applying your changes very lightly in your HDR tool, then go to a full-featured editing tool to use its full power to restore a realistic look.

In Lightroom go to Library mode, simply hover your mouse over the folder name where the new TIFF files were saved, and (on a Windows PC) your right mouse button will reveal a menu with the Synchronize Folder commmand which will go find your new files and import them into Lightroom so you can make fine tuning adjustments to color, contrast, vignetting and so on.

If you do the best you can post-processing the HDR in Lightroom and like some of the characteristics of the result but still don't think it's entirely realistic, you still can use that to your advantage. Go produce your best single exposure edit in Lightroom on a single file, then bring both the HDR and single exposure result into layers in Photoshop (or Photoshp Elements), and blend them. I experiment with that maybe once a year when I get access to the latest Photshop trial software, but I prefer to spend my time shooting rather than in fromt of a computer, so Photoshop isn't in my workflow (or installed on my newest computer) at the moment.

For anyone not using Lightroom yet, you can download a copy at Adobe.com and use it in free trial mode for 30 days. The latest Photomatix 4.0 is useful to revisit if you tried or currently use a prior version. It's available at HDRsoft.com (it adds watermarks to your images, but if you buy a license later you can easily remove the watermarks, at least from the processed TIFF files output by Photomatix).

I have an HDR set here where you can see how various combinations of Lightroom and Photomatix have produced various results over the years: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffreysullivan/sets/72157622008543219/

Now that HDR has been on the market for a few years, it seems like there are many people who didn't like its early output, and there are others who did and use it all the time. The assumption seems to be that you either like HDR or you don't, it either worked for you or it didn't. There's a third camp of users who were able to wrestle HDR into submission and use it lightly in a realistic manner when useful, and perhaps create somethign wild from time to time as well. My opinion is that Photmatix 4.0 is far enough ahead of past versions in functionality and ease of use that it is worth a try, regardless of what you may have thought of HDR software or results in the past.

In Search of a Magazine Cover Photo

2011-06-08T18:37:00.001-07:00

Other Worldly, originally uploaded by Jeffrey Sullivan.

A couple of weeks ago Outdoor Photographer Magazine issued a call for potential cover photos. Always up for a challenge, I first created a quick set on Flickr of vertical landscape shots to sort through. There were some good candidates, but I really wanted this, so I decided to keep the cover in mind as I pursued night shots in the Eastern Sierra this week.

My first stop was Mono Lake. I arrived at 9pm, just as the stars were coming out and the Milky Way was starting to peek over the southern horizon. It was the night of the new moon, so with little ambient light to illuminate the foreground, I brought a selection of flashlights to provide light on the tufa rock formations. I used my typical 30 seconds at f/2.8, ISO 6400 dark night exposure, but I added a small amount of fill light. My LEDs were too blue on the light-colored tufa towers, and direct incandescent flashlight beams were too bright and created too much contrast. I was able to resolve this by moving around during each exposure and reflecting light off of nearby tufa towers, and if none were available, even using my face and hands as portable, positionable reflectors. Cup your hand, and the light is even controllable in general directions! I shot a variety of stills and star trail sequences, finishing with the shot above which allows enough room for a magazine title, articles and so on.

So one decent shot down, I moved to the Buttermilks, where I had a North Star star trails shot in mind. I arrived at 2am, but someone was parked there, camping where I was going to shoot! By the time I moved to another campsite, there was no way I was going to get up in 2 hours for sunrise... I slept in!

I was generally headed toward Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks, so in the morning I explored 4WD roads and checked current conditions in the Bishop Creek drainage, then moved on. I arrived at the Alabama Hills, again just in time for night shots.

I scouted out some locations and angles for night workshops, but the clouds were just thick enough to interfere with the production of great Milky Way or star trail shots. By midnight I moved to a decent sunrise location and called it a night.

The next morning I woke at my usual 45 minutes before sunrise (4:45am this week), and the clouds were broken but still blocking the sunrise color. Lacking any particular reason to get up, I stayed in my PJs and waited to see how things developed.

A while later shafts of light started illuminating Mt. Whitney. Game on! With no time to change, I just ran around in my PJs, switching lenses to catch a variety of compositions as the light evolved. I caught at least one dramatic but relatively simple composition of Mt. Whitney that should work well for a cover.

Even with the bust the night before, I felt that I had two solid contenders in two days... a decent start.

I continued south towards a southern hook around the Sierra Nevada and turned toward Kennedy Meadows and a scenic shortcut. The road was closed, and the forecast said it would be raining and snowing over in Kings Canyon for the next few days. Rain and wind was forecast locally as well, but I wasn't going to ditch the trip after two days, so I headed out into the Mojave Desert.

The next morning delivered nice sunrise color, and as I moved around a dry lakebed catching various compositions, there was also a short section of rainbow! The sunlight was really nice as it arrived as well. Third contender, maybe even a fourth.

That night the wind was howling. I literally turned on my lights at one point to see whether someone was rocking the vehicle back and forth as some sort of joke. My SUV was getting sandblasted, and my lenses would too... no shooting tonight.

The next day I took shelter in a coffee shop and went back out in time for another nocturnal adventure. Just as I was approaching a railroad crossing, a train stopped across the road! Google Earth confirmed no reasonable detours. I'd wait, maybe sleep, until the train moved.

Two hours later, it creaked and groaned out of the way, and I was back in business. I shot some moonset shots and started a star trails sequence.

I went to the other side of the car to set my alarm for sunrise, to avoid having light pollution in my shot. I heard something in the gravel on the side with my camera, so I walked around the back to see what was up. I nearly tripped over an animal, which startled and ran, which startled me nearly out of my shoes. I turned on a light, but never saw what it was... judging by the noise, probably a fox or small coyote.

As i started the timelapse I had seen the moon's light shining on some rocks witht he Milky Way overhead, so I headed over to see if they still had any remaining glow on them. They didn't have much if any, but it still made a nice concept, and I could simulate it with light painting. I tried it a few different ways and Bingo! Next candidate on the card.

The Milky Way was really nice, so I decided to leave the camera running all night. It captured 400 frames in the 3+ hours before dawn light washed out the exposure. That yields a whopping 13 seconds of timelapse video: http://www.vimeo.com/24802819

Far Away from Jeff Sullivan on Vimeo.

Checking the weather forecast the next day I finally gave up on the idea of going to Kings Canyon. So I returned to the Alabama Hills, but although I arrived as the moon was tucking down behind the Sierra Nevada after midnight, I was too tired from the drive and the cumulative lack of sleep.

On the following nights the moon would be too bright and stay in the sky too late for Milky Way shots. Time to call the night photography quest a wrap! To round out 5 entries, I ended up choosing two from the trip, a recent Yosemite star trails shot, and added two seascapes from my portfolio for variety. Done. On to the next project!

Producing Milky Way Images

2011-05-25T16:23:00.001-07:00

Milky Way, originally uploaded by Jeffrey Sullivan.

Many digital cameras these days can do surprisingly well at capturing images at night. Their sensors are more sensitive than your eyes, especially at capturing color at night.

Photography has always involved multiple steps, with exposure being only one part of the equation. In the days of film, the darkroom enabled additional influence to be applied during development, and then again during printing. Unless you were using a Polaroid camera, there was no such thing as "straight out of the camera." Maybe you trusted someone in a drug store to do your developing and printing for you, but that wasn't an optimal situation and that certainly doesn't mean that no adjustments were made. For the most part, the entire concept of "straight out of the camera" is a myth that is best set aside as soon and as thoroughly as possible.

Today with digital cameras your darkroom is on a computer, implemented in software. Milky Way shots are a great example of images that you won't get the most out of until you get in the habit of spending 5 minutes in your digital darkroom to complete the photographic process.

If you find a dark place outdoors to shoot and you can make out stars and the lighter, more dense band of the Milky Way, a little postprocessing can get you a lot further. As with my previous blog post you need to shoot on a tripod, using manual aperture and manual focus. Having your long exposure noise reduction turned off is not critical since we're dealing with single exposures for Milky Way shots.

Shoot with your widest focal length lens to minimize star movement in the field of view, have it opened to its widest aperture to minimize exposure time. You may still have little enough light that you shoot at the longest exposure time (generally 30 seconds) or you may need to shoot in "bulb" mode for a longer time in order to get enough light. Always shoot in RAW mode so you have far more adjustment capability in post-processing software.

Shoot near the date of a new moon, so there is as little light pollution as possible. The last thing you need to know, probably the most important thing during planning your shot, is how to predict when the most intricate, dense, bright center of the Milky Way is in the night sky! In Summer the sun is up roughly 2/3 of every day, but the Milky Way crosses the sky in the night. The center of the Milky Way is towards the constellation Sagittarius. You can look up the dates when Sagittarius is high in the sky, and that's when the Milky Way is most intense: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/mjpowell/Astro/Sgr/Find-Sagittarius.htm

In simple terms, it highest around midnight around July 22, two hours later per month earlier (2am in May), two hours earlier per month later (10pm in August). So really your best shooting will be on days near the new moon dates, and preferably within 7 weeks or so of July 22.

So lets assume you go out on the right night, shoot south towards Sagittarius, capture a RAW file with some stars showing, and maybe you can barely make out the bright stripe of the Milky Way and its slightly more dense center.

Well, if you were in a darkroom... how do you lighten the Milky Way while keeping the background sky dark? The simple answer is dodge and burn... selectively darken some areas while lightening others!

In Adobe Lightroom (download a 30 day trial if you don't have it already, AFTER you collect some images to process) use the paintbrush tool (under the Develop module) to select and lighten the area around the Milky Way. Use the paintbrush tool to darken the sky everywhere else (this makes both the Milky Way and the stars pop).

to do even better, you can also increase contrast while performing these functions, further darkening background light levels, including noise. Adjust exposure and brightness so the fainter stars in the Milky Way get brighter while background and noise gets dark. You can increase saturation slightly on the Milky Way, but increasing contrast has that effect already, so you might not need to.

Don't worry too much about how much noise your camera produces... after you adjust contrast and brightness, just crank up the noise reduction. After all, there isn't generally much detail to lose by doing that. In Lightroom for dark, noisy photos I try to max out noise reduction at 25 or maybe 30, but lately for night skies I've been going into the 60s.

Lightroom can also selectively adjust saturation and brightness of individual colors. If you shoot too close to sunset and "blue hour", or during a too-bright moon that is too full (and creating blue night sky), it can be handy to darken a blueish background sky to help separate that from the stars (just did that on a star trails shot). On the other hand for dark new moon skies, like you should have if you're planning ahead for Milky Way shooting, there is little or no light scattering turning the sky blue. A lot of the Milky Way stars have a slight blue tint though, so selectively raising brightness of blue can help separate them from dark background and any noise.

It's a balancing act between white balance, adjusting individual colors, and tweaking the brightness and especially contrast of the area the Milky Way covers, but you can find a reasonable compromise pretty quickly. Once you do fairly well adjusting one shot, Lightroom enables you to copy your develop settings and apply them to additional photos.
There are other subtle tricks of course, but I save them for workshops. If I continue making good progress towards completing my book, I'd like to offer some night workshops this Fall.

Creating Star Trail Images

2011-05-25T13:28:00.001-07:00

Yosemite Star Trail Reflection, originally uploaded by Jeffrey Sullivan.

With today's digital cameras it is surprisingly easy to create star trails images. At the highest level, all you do is run a sequence of night star shots through a star trails program and enjoy the result. As is often the case, the challenges come in the details.

You'll need to capture images covering 30 to 60 minutes or more. A sturdy tripod is essential. You can trigger exposures manually, but that's tedious and not fun to do for an hour at night. Ideally you'll have a remote trigger that can lock down to fire off sequential shots, or even better, an intervalometer which takes shots at certain intervals which you define.

You'll need to focus your lens on an object at infinity, and leave the focus mode set to manual so it won't hunt for focus in the dark. The focus ring of your lens probably continues past that point to compensate for differences as temperatures fluctuate, so note where this is, or if your lens has continuous focus ring with no visible scale, focus your camera during the day, switch it into manual, and carefully tape the focus ring with removable painter's masking tape.

You'll want to take sequential shots close together so the star trails to be continuous, so turn off your camera's long exposure noise reduction.

You'll also want a consistent exposure, so put your camera in manual exposure mode.

Cameras have different sensitivity to light, and the moon phase and local light pollution can affect your exposure, so you'll need to run some tests to determine what settings to use for your individual shots.

With no moon in perfectly dark skies I use f/2.8 at ISO 6400 for 30 seconds. Don't have f/2.8 or ISO 6400? No problem, lengthen your exposure time. If you have f/4.0 and ISO 1600, you'll double the time for the aperture and then another 4X for the two stop loss in sensitivity to 1600, so your exposure time could be 4 minutes. Your actual time will often be less due to some ambient light from the moon or light pollution. Take lighter and darker shots to ensure that you've identified an exposure which isn't too bright or too dark.

Once you have the basic exposure figured out, take that exposure over and over until you reach 30 to 45 minutes or more total. Leave as little time as possible between shots.

For this example I used about 80 shots of 30 seconds each, covering 40 minutes. I used the free StarStaX software (www.StarStaX.net) in "lighten" mode, where the lightest pixels are kept as images are merged, creating the trails as the stars move from frame to frame.

Unfortunately in Yosemite Valley the cars driving by also create lasting light trails. To remove them, there's also a "darken" mode which keeps the darkest pixels, eliminating the car headlights.

This also eliminates the star trails, but by using layers in Photoshop and blending that center portion of the darkened sequence into the lightened star trails sequence to get a star trails image without the car lights.

Go give it a try!

What's a "Cliche'," and Are Such Images Worth Pursuing??

2011-04-12T16:30:00.001-07:00

Cloud Shadow by Lone Oak, originally uploaded by Jeffrey Sullivan.

I've recently received comments on a couple of my vineyard and lone tree photos that they were "cliches."

I don't view that as negative feedback; I've been pursuing illustrative photos for a photo travel guide. Cliches? Bring 'em on! Over-shot viewpoints? Heck yeah, I'll provide detailed directions! As we all dig deeper in the field of landscape photography at our own pace, it's easy to forget that not everyone has the classic shots in their portfolio, and even fewer of their friends, family or fans have have ever seen them. So rather than assume any certain required level of quality or originality in the reader base for my book, I have to provide something for everyone... the now-classic views, the more original compositions available a few steps further from your car, and the totally unique views that I've never seen anywhere else. Something for everyone! So much of my current work is illustrative/documentary. Hey, if I can save you 5 gallons of gas and help you focus on the best locations at any given time, the book will pay for itself very quickly, or hopefully, many times over. Add the variables of seasons, weather, sunrise/sunset, weather, night and astronomical events, and photographer intervention (light painting), and even the most trite viewpoint can offer unique possibilities. I intend to provide the most interesting, diverse, and truly useful guide ever. Will I succeed? Who knows; readers will be the judge. But in my experience I have observed that people rarely exceed their goals, so to provide the best guide possible, I have to shoot for the moon (often literally), and see how close to that ideal the end result cam come. I'll probably never recoup my investment in time and travel, but if I'm going to put my name on it, at least it'll be the best darned photo travel guide that I can possibly produce!

The book aside, a huge percentage of the market for photos is for ones that are "good enough." Not art prints, just stock photography of a representative shot of Half Dome and dozens of other landmarks. I don't currently participate in that market, I value my control over my images way too much (and frankly, microstock has driven the value of such shots way too low), but I want the shots in my portfolio in case I ever decide to pursue that "least common denominator" demand. If someone wants a "one stop shop" for Yosemite images, I want to be able to fulfill that need.

The classic national park viewpoints are often there for a reason. They offer stunning views. If you want that image for your portfolio, don't worry about others' approval, go for it! In the context of your broader portfolio it may fill a valuable role. Only you can decide what you'd like to cover. Shoot for yourself.

Figueroa Mountain Wildflower Report: April 6, 2011

2011-04-10T11:22:00.001-07:00

Figueroa Mountain Wildflowers, originally uploaded by Jeffrey Sullivan.

Figueroa Mountain was less impressive than I expected. Although here are many species blooming, the biggest patches are several of poppies and one small one of lupine in a recently burned area. For now at least, Figueroa Mountain is more of a flower portrait than a flower landscape destination. It's probably worth visiting if you're in the area, but with gas currently over $4.00 it may not be as attractive to visit if a long drive is required.

Laurent Martres to Publish California South Guidebook

2011-04-06T11:46:00.001-07:00

Where Winds Collide, originally uploaded by Jeffrey Sullivan.

Fans of the popular "Photographing the Southwest" series will be thrilled to hear that Laurent Martres will be publishing a new guidebook to the best landscape photography locations in California. Fans of my photography and workshops will be thrilled to hear that I'm the author!

The announcement was made last night on Laurent's Facebook page.

I'm averaging 5000 miles per month as I chase key astronomical events, seasonal conditions and weather events around the state. I'll be posting updates as I go to my blog, to my Facebook account and to my JeffSullPhoto Twitter feed.

Antelope Valley Wildflower Report 2011

2011-04-06T11:18:00.001-07:00

Antelope Valley Poppy, originally uploaded by Jeffrey Sullivan.

Like many place in California the wildflowers aren't as prolific as last year, but it's far form a poor season. You'll have to hunt for the best patches, but here's a sampling of what I found in the Antelope Valley area over the past couple of days.

Carrizo Plain Wildflowers Spring 2011

2011-04-06T11:05:00.001-07:00

Tidy Tips at Sunrise, originally uploaded by Jeffrey Sullivan.

Here's a quick photographic tour of conditions at Carrizo Plain a couple of days ago. Opinions on this year's bloom range from normal to "past peak" to "slow and coming," and all three may be true in places. Whatever the high level summary you want to assign, you'll work harder to find less compared to last year, but you can still find some great patches to work with if you put in the time and miles.

Note the new sharing options that will allow you to share this report with your friends on Facebook, etc!

Shell Creek Road Wildflowers

2011-04-06T10:55:00.001-07:00

Shell Creek Road, originally uploaded by Jeffrey Sullivan.

Here's a quick update on wildflowers this year. The ample rains we've received can be critical for wildflower growth, but in too much quantity or at the wrong times, they also result in a bumper crop of grass, which seems to crowd out the wildflowers. Let's give it a couple more weeks before we declare this a normal to weak year in this area. For now the color tends to be sporadic and modest, favoring photography of a plant or bloom instead of landscape-scope carpets.

Super Moon Dates

2011-03-23T09:00:00.001-07:00

Super Moon Dates, originally uploaded by Jeffrey Sullivan.

On Saturday, March 19 I drove up one of my favorite dirt roads in the Eastern Sierra to catch the "super moon" rising over the Sweetwater range. The road was muddy slippery, and I'd soon hit the snow level form recent storms, but I only wanted to get a few hundred feet higher to a point where I'd get a panoramic view and some gnarled juniper trees that I could include in my compositions.

The weather was mixed, mainly cloudy but with some promising breaks that should let the moon break free from time to time. As I reached the snow, I was following some tracks, wider than my Ford Explorer, apparently made by a pickup truck. Hopefully it had broken trail all the way up the road to the one cabin up there, or at least as far as the overlook a mile or so ahead that I was trying to reach. The road became significantly steeper as I passed an old mine site and stamp mill, and my tires started to slip so I switched into 4WD. The snow quickly got got deeper and deeper as I ascended, until the tracks from the larger truck ended. I tentatively broke trail for a few more feet, sinking into the wet, soft snow now maybe six to eight inches deep around my tires. I could probably continue up for a while more, but the problem would be coming down. When you descend in snow, it tends to build up in front of your tire until your ties break free completely, and you find yourself suddenly riding a four-wheeled, four thousand pound toboggan. Been there, done that. Even if I could break a good trail going up that I could follow down with less snow buildup, the mud underneath was an additional risk. One slip a few inches off track on this hill would send me into the snow, then most likely sliding uncontrollably downhill.

The other problem was that if I continued and the snow got deeper, turning around would be problematic. Even if I could start a multi-point turn without completely losing contact with the road, it wouldn't take much of a slip to put a wheel into a snowy ditch or off the edge of the road towards an abyss (and on the first "point" in the process, I'd be facing uphill in perhaps a foot or more of snow).

I wrestled down my thirst for adventure and pinned it to the floorboards with one foot as I eased back down the hill with the other foot nursing the brake pedal. There'd be other opportunities to catch the moon, and to go play in the snow.

I retreated to a lower elevation and caught a few shots in fading light under mainly cloudy skies.

I drove a bit north as darkness descended on the Eastern Sierra, but the light was growing to the east. The moon might break free from the clouds as it rose! Well, it sort of did. Like most full moon dates, the "super moon" of March 19, 2011 (the closest the moon has come to the earth for 18 years), was occurring too late after dark to capture any detail in the landscape, or even in the clouds is was emerging from. The skies were never fully clear so the detail on the moon was fuzzy even at 400mm (and even with additional cropping to make it look like at least 600mm). So the moon was generous enough to come out for a few minutes and play, but as I was playing around with different lenses and camera bodies to see which could capture the sharpest image, it slipped back behind the clouds for the night.

The results? Well, the longest lens combination I have at the moment is a 70-200mm f/4 plus 2X doubler which yields 400mm at f/8 (but this configuration disables autofocus, grrr). Putting that setup on my Canon 40D provides a "lens factor" crop to make it an effective 640mm lens. But the 40D is 10 megapixels vs. 21MP on my 5D mark II, so the physical resolution of the sensor is actually nearly identical. I get roughly the same result in my 5D mark II after cropping. To try a lens with autofocus I put on an old Sigma 28-300mm. By that time the moon was already pretty fuzzy behind the clouds, so I can't really compare the results, but I know from experience that the Sigma is a very soft lens.

So I captured it, sort of, on the full "super moon" date, but it's JAPOTM... just another picture of the moon. I checked again the next morning, when the moon would be setting close to sunrise, but this week's storm was busy dropping 100 inches of snow on the Sierra Nevada, so no luck there.

This isn't the end of the story however. A super moon is simply a full or new moon that occurs on the day when the moon is at the perigee, or closest point, of its elliptical orbit. As the moon makes its slow 27+ day orbit around the earth, it has two perigee points in its orbit, so there are two chances every month, and there are multiple so-called super moons every year. Here's where you can plan to be out to catch super moons... a Web page where the guy who coined the term super moon published dates for 2011 and beyond: www.astropro.com/features/tables/cen21ce/suprmoon.html

Remember though that the best dates to photograph the moon tend to be the sunset moonrise the day before the full moon, or the sunrise moon set the day after the full moon. So technically you'll be a few hours off of the actual super moon date, but you'll have a great opportunity to shoot the moon in its closest, largest state, looming large as it peeks above the landscape.

What's the Point of a Photograph? (Part I: The Capture)

2011-03-22T12:03:00.001-07:00

East Meets West, originally uploaded by Jeffrey Sullivan.

It's a simple question, and to most people, the answer may seem simple, obvious, and automatic: "to take a picture of something!" While that's a great way to get a quick snapshot of some thing, if that's all you're thinking about when you trigger the shutter, a simple snapshot is all you're likely to get.

One of the first things we notice in an image is the presence of any flaws in the technical process of capturing the image. But getting distracted with technique in shooting or editing may challenge your ability to focus on a more compelling opportunity: the opportunity you have to present something specific in an intentional context which affect your viewers in some way. Perhaps you want to teach or convey a message, perhaps you want to entertain or inspire, or perhaps you simply intend to document and illustrate the subject in its surroundings. You may want to shy away from the added responsibility of being accountable for any such intent, or think that your photos are "just for yourself," but if you're reading about photography (as you are now), if you're posting photos online, if you like to get positive feedback on your images, don't cheat yourself; admit that you want your photos to elicit some reaction, and your chances of achieving that goal are far greater if you admit and embrace that intent up front.

The first thing photographers need to conquer is not the camera, but their apprehension, their fear of failure. Everyone has insecurities to some degree, even the most successful people in the world (they probably have them worst, because they feel more pressure to meet external expectations). But try thinking of it this way... one of the most important secrets of good photography is that there is no such thing as good photography. As Ansel Adams put it "There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs." Learn and practice the beginners' rules for good photography, then by all means, break them every chance you get. The good photos will stand out, and I'll bet that they succeed not just in spite of breaking the "rule of thirds," but because they break it.

This brings up another useful approach for successful photography: you can make your odds of capturing a good picture go up with practice and development of knowledge and skill, but no one captures a keeper with every release of the shutter. In many if not most genres of photography, the photographer is not in complete control of everything that happens on the far side of the lens. So let go of your desire to control. Let go of perfectionism. Accept that most of your shots will not be your best. It's far more productive to assume that it's a numbers game... some percentage of your tries will turn out well, so dive into your next 100 shots to get the one that stands out from the rest. The beauty of this approach is that the other 99 are still extremely useful: you learn from them. The following day you may have 2 great shots per 100, the following month you may have 5, the next year 20. But never assume that perfection is your goal; that will only prevent you from shooting enough variations to get the truly stunning ones. This ability to shoot and learn from volumes of shots at practically no cost per shot is one of the key advantages of digital photography, and it's exactly what makes learning and access to better results so accessible to so many people these days.

But be careful and keep in mind that shooting numbers of photos isn't about the numbers, what you're doing is still about the subject of the photo. Try different compositions, try different camera settings, try different filters, whatever. By all means pay some attention to technique and settings, but all the while remember to dedicate a healthy share of your attention to your subject, and to your intent for it. Which of your various approaches turns out to be the most successful can be determined later, in the darkroom (even if it's a digital one).

Catch A Near-Supermoon Moonset at Dawn Monday

2011-03-20T12:59:00.001-07:00

Eclipse Moonset at Mono Lake, originally uploaded by Jeffrey Sullivan.

The so-called "supermoon" event came when the full moon rose yesterday, while the moon was the closest it has been to the earth in 18 years. Remember though, the moon takes over 27 days to complete its orbit of the earth, so it's still very close for the next few days. Fortuantely for photographers, the days after a full moon are great for catching the full moon in the sky as sunrise arrives.

For example, at Mono Lake tomorrow (Monday morning March 21), the moon, still 97.6% full, is scheduled to set at 7:47am after a 6:59am sunrise. The apparent moonset however, when it dips behind Mt. Dana, will be around 7:16am (at an azimuth angle of 247 degrees, a direction slightly north of southwest). So the moon will be prominent in the western sky during the best sunrise light (roughly 6:30 to 7) and as the alpenglow from the emerging sun creeps down the face of Mt. Dana and the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada towards Mono Lake.

While the term "supermoon" has been invented specifically to apply to a full moon coinciding with the perigee of the moon's orbit (the point of its 27.322 day orbit closest to earth) on Monday less than 2 days after the full moon, the moon will still be close and large.

For Mono Lake specifically, there one one potentially unfortunate aspect of the particular lineup of this full moon set. At 6:30am when a few dedicated photographers may be in place at the South Tufa site and shooting back towards Mt. Dana from the farthest cove, the moon will be directly in line with the beaches leading back to where the trailhead from the parking lot arrives at the lake. Any additional photographers arriving late for twilight/sunrise shooting will walk directly into the shots of the folks who were there on time. If they're shooting timelapse sequences, usable results could be difficult and time consuming (if not impossible) to salvage.

So if you do go to Mono Lake, please try not to storm in with flashlights blaring, and resist the temptation to walk thoughtlessly right out onto the scene and shoot your way down the shore. Instead stay far to your right, away from the lakeshore, and move quickly to join the other photographers at the far side of the second cove. The route is pretty easy to see on Google Earth or The Photographer's Ephemeris (even if you've never been to Mono Lake before, you can see a path curving to the right behind a large tufa tower at the end of the first cove). A little courtesy will go a long way towards making all of our shots more useful. Of course the more people who arrive, the more clueless or self-absorbed, narcissistic ones who will wander recklessly into and out of everyone's shots. Once a dozen or more people are onsite, things pretty much degenerate into chaos (and I've seen 60+ people show up for Fall sunrises here). Your best defense when shooting west will be to minimize dry land in your foreground, and shoot mainly over the water where it'll be more difficult for people to interfere with you. The former island on the left in this shot however is now a peninsula, so in some cases it may be next to impossible to completely negate the impact of the crowds.

How Many Online Friends Can One Maintain?

2011-01-14T13:15:00.001-08:00

Crescent Moon Over Cave at Sunset, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (pls see msg in profile!).

Over time Facebook friend relationships can get stale, so even with hundreds of contacts your Wall updates may only be seen be a few dozen people. It's critical to know how to keep relationships alive on Facebook. Similarly, your contacts (friends and fans) may have only a fraction of their contacts active, so it can be useful to advise them how to keep relationships relevant.

Also useful to consider is that a "Like" only posts a text message on that contact's wall. For photographers, an infinitely more valuable action would be for that contact to "Share" the link, so it is accompanied by a thumbnail photo and a sentence or two of text. (I'd really like to find a free or inexpensive photography Web site template which offers all common share options such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc., as well as integration of text updates such as external blog posts.)

I find that some of my most popular posts turn out to be ones which are personal, not related to photography, putting a personal face activity that otherwise might be perceived as too impersonal and too self-promotional. We're social beings; we thrive on interaction and community. Facebook seems to try to reward users who contribute towards two-way community-building behavior.

Looking into the human side of this topic, apparently there's a limit to how many close social relationships you can manage. That number is surprisingly small (and Facebook is aware of this, so their algorithms may be designed with a similar limit in mind):

After 150, Facebook friends are meaningless
http://www.physorg.com/news183791343.html

There may be an important distinction however between friends that you know and "Facebook friends" and fans, who you may not have the time and cognitive capacity to keep up with socially, but who might still appreciate following your contributions and updates, including your latest artistic works. So "friend" away online, but don't expect to keep up with everyone individually, and it's not reasonable to approach this medium expecting others to keep up with everyone either.

I'm super-busy with travel, writing and photography at the moment so I can't devote the time I should to maintaining contact with my friends and fans, but I do try to create some content daily and have it propagated to sites such as Flickr, Facebook and Twitter, to reward the people who do hang in there and follow my activity.

Hopefully once my book is on track to be published later this year I'll have more time!

Owens Valley Rainbows (Timelapse Video)

2010-12-31T09:25:00.000-08:00

Owens Valley Rainbows (Timelapse Video), originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (pls see msg in profile!).

Rainbows I found in the Owens Valley on October 5, 2010 while scouting conditions for the Fall Colors workshop. The rainbows move across the landscape as the sun moves across the sky.

Best viewed in high definition over on Flickr!

Last 36 Hours to Send Me PhotoBlogging Around The World!

2010-12-30T09:41:00.001-08:00

Hagia Sophia, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (pls see msg in profile!).

Only 36 hours left in the voting for the Blog Your Way Around The World contest. I'd love to bring you more sights like this from around the world! http://www.blogyourwayaroundtheworld.com/blogs/view/1238

I'll place images from the trip on a site where you can order prints. Proceeeds from the sale of those prints will go towards charities and conservation organizations relevant to each of the areas visited.

I found the contest late, so every vote counts... tell your friends on Facebook, Twitter, etc! It'll take a miracle, but who knows... maybe a church or two would mobilize their members to support the charitable nature of this quest?

Meteor and Milky Way over the Sierra Nevada

2010-12-29T11:27:00.001-08:00

Meteor and Milky Way over the Sierra Nevada, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (pls see msg in profile!).

A single image from a several hour, 438 frame timelapse I'm working on, taken while backpacking last Summer.

Flickr isn't accepting the HD video files I've been trying to upload this week. Vimeo.com only lets me upload one high definition file per week (I don't have a revenue stream for video to justify upgrading to unlimited), so I'm not sure when I'll a high resolution copy available. In the meantime however, you can see Vimeo's severely downgraded preview:

Sierra Nevada Milky Way Timelapse from Jeff Sullivan on Vimeo.

If this embedded player doesn't seem to play it well, try viewing it directly over on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/18260497. For low resolution previews that Vimeo downconverts from HD, I don't recommend full screen viewing.

It looks a lot better on my laptop of course, where it actually runs slower and you can see more details such as the meteor, a satellite, and so on, so I may slow down the frame rate on the next version of this that I create.

If you like my coverage of places and events, send me around the world to capture more images and timelapse videos for you to enjoy! Blog Your Way Around The World -
http://www.blogyourwayaroundtheworld.com/blogs/view/1238 The voting deadline is December 31.

Total Lunar Eclipse over Saguaro National Park

2010-12-25T21:40:00.000-08:00

A massive storm was hammering the entire West Coast this lunar eclipse approached, so I decided to drive as far as I had to to get out from under the clouds. One 2000 mile round trip later, here's a timelapse video spanning several hours. During the total eclipse the moon turns very dim and red, coloring the clouds and the landscape below.

Update: The copy I uploaded here to Blogger was converted poorly to a low resolution copy, so I deleted it. For best results at the moment, watch a preview of my lunar eclipse timelapse video over on YouTube: http://youtu.be/26aXK2vg6EI.

I've also uploaded a timelapse video covering several hours of the Geminid meteor shower from 2010, condensed into a few seconds. I successfully uploaded an HD copy to Vimeo, so this is the best resolution and quality timelapse video of any event that I've been able to present to the public so far: http://vimeo.com/18185456

Here's one of my still images from the lunar eclipse:

All I Want for Christmas is... A New Life!

2010-12-24T17:40:00.001-08:00

All I Want for Christmas is... A New Life!, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (pls see msg in profile!).

Outdoor/adventure photography is a challenging field. You're only as good as the depth of your portfolio and the compelling nature of your latest images. Those of you I've interacted with know that I don't ask for much... I prefer to contribute rather than ask, but this is important enough that I'm going to ask a huge personal favor. If you've enjoyed my images (or like what you see in my Flickr photostream and Favorites set if you've never seen my work before), please consider taking a moment to giving me the holiday gift of a vote... to send me on 8 adventure travel trips so I can build my portfolio as a travel/adventure photographer:
http://www.blogyourwayaroundtheworld.com/blogs/view/1238

For many years I've admired adventure photographers such as Galen Rowell, and this is an excellent opportunity to follow in his footsteps. Winning this contest will be expensive (the winner must cover thousands of dollars in travel expenses), but such an opportunity could make my photography career, so it will be a worthwhile investment.

The site requires registration, but they won't spam you. Winning this contest could literally be a life-changing event for me. Thanks in advance for your consideration and support!

Happy Holidays!

Jeff Sullivan

Total Lunar Eclipse Dec 20-21 2010

2010-12-21T13:05:00.001-08:00

Total Lunar Eclipse Dec 20-21 2010, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (MyPhotoGuides.com).

Here's one of my early shots from the lunar eclipse last night. I'm still in Tucson and have to drive 9-10 hours today, so I won't get around to working on the timelapse today.

On my primary camera, a Canon 5D Mark II, I shot a timelapse sequence of the eclipsing moon moving through the sky, as thin clouds moved overhead and the light turned red from the moon's darkened face:
I can't wait to see how it turns out, but I have a LOT of driving to do first.

Phases of the December 2010 Total Lunar Eclipse

2010-12-20T20:03:00.001-08:00

Setting Crescent Moon, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (MyPhotoGuides.com).

It's coming in only 2.5 hours! I finally arrived in Tucson, Arizona roughly 46 hours after I got on the road yesterday (I spent most of the first 16 hours crawling in 4WD on snowy Sierra Nevada roads to get my kids home, then all the way down to Bishop before the snow and chain controls ended).

Looks like it'll be partly cloudy here with thin, hazy clouds, but compared to California it'll be nice to be able to shoot at all.

A few quick notes on timing, lenses (field of view required to get a timelapse), and so on:

Dec 20/21...................Time...........Moon.........Moon
Eclipse Phase.................PST.........Azimuth.....Altitude
Partial Eclipse Begins:....10:33pm...SE....122.5........70.2
Total Eclipse Begins:......11:41pm.........174.3........77.9
Greatest Eclipse:..........12:16am.........209.4........76.4
Total Eclipse Ends:........12:53am...SW....233.7........71.4
Partial Eclipse Ends:.......2:01am....W....255.7........59.1
Penumbral Eclipse Ends:.....5:04am.........282.5........23.3

Best Sunrise Light Starts...6:28am.........292.8........7.6
Sunrise.....................6:58am.........296.7........2.4
Moonset.....................7:13am...NW....298.8........0

Notes:

Partial Eclipse, Field of View:.10:30-2am..133.2.......20 degrees
Use 16mm lens to follow, +8, -12 degree shallow arc moon path.

Total Eclipse Field of View:.11:41-12:53am..59.4.......-6.5
Use at least 20mm lens to follow flat-ish downward arc to moon's path.

Moonset in best pre-sunrise light:........6:28 - 6:58am........3.9........-5.2 200mm, downward diagonal
Sunrise to moonset (daylight):........6:58 - 7:13am........1.9........-2.4 600mm, small downward diagonal

The cameras I'll be shooting with simultaneously:

Canon 5D mark II:
24mm f/1.4, 50mm f/1.4 - Night landscapes with full moon in penumbral dim state
21mm (16-35 lens) - Entire total eclipse (sequence for still shots, timelapse video or phase composite photo)

70-200mm - Moonset in best pre-sunrise light
70-200mm - Sunrise to moonset, "golden hour" daylight

Canon 40D:
70-200mm + 2X - Telephoto shots of moon in various eclipse phases
16mm = 105 deg. - Entire visible eclipse (sequence for still shots, timelapse video or phase composite photo)

The lens equivalents noted are the minimum needed, and since I'll want to have the option to crop to a 16:9 HD video aspect ratio for a timelapse video, I'll actually shoot the wide shots wider to allow for a generous margin of error.

Total Lunar Eclipse Workshop Mon, Dec 20 (Last Chance 'Til 2014)!

2010-12-19T09:30:00.001-08:00

Sunrise Meteor!, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (MyPhotoGuides.com).

I've been poring over maps, examining moon rise and set angles on Google Earth maps, calculating what lenses might cover various phases of the total lunar eclipse Monday night, and anxiously checking weather forecasts.

This will be the only total lunar eclipse until 2014, so to me it's worth an investment of time and effort to witness and to shoot. It might even be worth renting a lens for. Unfortunately, the entire West Coast looks out of the question due to weather, so I'm heading to Southern Arizona. I still have to cross the Sierra Nevada twice in the blizzard today, then I'll have a 15 hour drive to Arizona (maybe 20 hours total, if I'm lucky). On the plus side, capturing the lunar eclipse over a tall saguaro cactus could offer some stunning possibilities, not to mention sunrise and sunset.

If you're as crazy as I am and dying to get shots of the eclipse, I'd like to invite intermediate to professional photographers to join me in a workshop. What do I mean by intermediate to professional? I'm not offering the typical degree of hand-holding, this is a working trip for me, but for experienced photographers I can save you days of research and I can help you line you some nice sunrise and sunset shots in addition to improving your chances of capturing nice eclipse photos and/or timelapse sequences. During an eclipse the exposure of the light coming off the moon changes dramatically, and it's helpful to have others nearby to compare exposure information with.

All I ask is that you have some night photography experience, a tripod and remote trigger (wireless or corded, even better if you have an intervalometer timer-trigger), and that you can work around your camera at night without letting any light leak forward into the shot. That last point is very, very important. It gets extremely dark during a total lunar eclipse, and a timelapse sequence of the entire event can be ruined by one stray flashlight or headlamp.

Oh, and one more thing I ask... a moderate workshop fee... $99. We'll set a time and place, meet around sunset, and shoot through dawn. Anyone heading back towards California after that is welcome to join me in searching for favorable light and weather over the following day or two (no guarantees that the weather will cooperate, which is why I'm not offering it as an official workshop add-on, but unsettled weather is the most dramatic visually, so I'm very excited about the forecast). Possibilities include Imperial Sand Dunse, Anza-Borrego State Park, the Salton Sea, Mojave National Preserve and Death Valley (a huge range, but the National Weather Service will help narrow down the choices). The Grand Canyon isn't out of the question geography-wise, but it's currently directly in the path of the storm, so a low probability (and it's snowy and very cold).

If you need to check airline flight availability and cost, the closest airport will be Tucson. If you'd like to extend your trip, I can offer some suggestions if you'd like to shoot within a few hours of there for an additional day or two. The weather there is forecast to be a low of 46 degrees, 70s during the day.

Whatever you decide, best of luck to you on your weather and your eclipse shots!

Early Results from the Geminid Meteor Trip

2010-12-19T01:07:00.001-08:00

Pre-Dawn Glow, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (MyPhotoGuides.com).

It may be days or weeks before I get enough time and an appropriately capable Internet connection to do my Geminid Meteor Shower trip justice, but I can direct you to a collection of the favorite images that I've run across so far:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=262459&id=346430679644

Light Painting Photo Featured on Flickr's Blog

2010-12-18T19:30:00.001-08:00

RGB UFOs, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (MyPhotoGuides.com).

http://blog.flickr.net/en/2010/12/16/your-best-shot-2010-painting-with-light/

This light painting was featured on Flickr's blog along with several others to celebrate the best photos of 2010. Welcome Flickr blog readers, and thank you Flickr!

This image was created on the Badwater salt flats in Death Valley National Park. I had a flashlight with three colors of LED light. During this single 30 second exposure I lit each color for close to 10 seconds while waving my arm around up and down (which traces a sphere, like a pumpkin).

The Badwater salt flats are particularly good for light painting, since there's minimal light pollution and the white surface reflects light well.

Death Valley offers a number of interesting landscapes for light painting... go explore!

Total Lunar Eclipse Coming Monday, Dec 20!

2010-12-18T13:35:00.000-08:00

Total Lunar Eclipse Coming Dec 20!, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

The full moon enters the earth's shadow during a lunar eclipse. The next one will occur December 20, 2010: http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/OH/OH2010.html

This eclipse will be well suited for viewing from North America, particularly the West Coast, with the darkest portion of the eclipse happening at 12:16am Pacific Standard Time.

I'm working out detailed shooting strategies for the following scenarios, so I can decide which ones to shoot and which lenses I'll need to capture each at maximum resolution:

- Moonrise in "golden hour" daylight before Sunset:
- Continued moonrise in best post-sunset light
- Night landscapes with full moon in penumbral dim state
- Telephoto shots of moon in various eclipse phases
- Entire visible eclipse (sequence for still shots, timelapse video or phase composite photo)
- Entire total eclipse (sequence for still shots, timelapse video or phase composite photo)
- Moonset in best pre-sunrise light
- Sunrise to moonset, "golden hour" daylight

I've spent a few hours figuring our rise/set and eclipse angles so I can select a general site, specific shooting positions where I can incorporate landscape elements into the shots. The moon will cover a tremendous amount of sky on that night, rising in the northeast and setting in the northwest. To shoot from moonrise to moonset he site will need to have shooting opportunities covering roughly 240 degrees, almost 3/4 of a full 360 degree circle.

I'll make the final decision on site later this week once I can see a 10 day weather forecast, but I'm leaning towards a Southern California desert location to reduce the odds of having interference from weather.

Put Sunset Full Moon Rise Dates on your 2011 Calendar

2010-12-09T12:59:00.001-08:00

Mono Lake Sunset Dream, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (MyPhotoGuides.com).

Most of the time the full moon is too bright for you to take a landscape photo and preserve detail on the moon. However, there's one situation where the moon can be bright, crisp and full, yet you can include it in a landscape photo: when it rises around sunset and when it sets around sunrise.

Each month the full moon rises around sunset and sets around sunrise, and generally speaking, its rise and set times change an hour or so for each day you get away from the full moon day. So to catch the full moon in the sky while it's still daylight, look at the sun and moon times for the day before the full moon. Consider landscape shots where you can shoot eastward towards the rising moon. You can even look up the exact moonrise angle on a satellite photo of the site your'e considering on Google Earth using a program (free for your laptop/desktop PC, small fee for iPhone) called The Photographer's Ephemeris (TPE), and plan exactly where to place your tripod so you'll get the moon lined up exactly how you want it vs. natural or manmade objects between you and the horizon.

To catch the full moon in a generally westward direction, the same process applies but look one day after the full moon and check for the moon rising just before sunrise.

The Sun moves quite a bit from Summer to Winter, so to go even further and select destinations when the lineups work best, you'll be able to note on The Photographer's Ephemeris what the bearing (compass direction) is from your favorite viewpoints to landmarks in the distance, and you can plan on being there when the moon will be in exactly the right place.

All of the times and angles vary somewhat as you move across your region, so simply to give myself a ballpark idea of how the sunset moonrises work out for 2011 I picked Modesto more or less in the middle of California:

Times for Modesto, CA:
................ Sunset... Moonrise... Bearing
Dec 20... 5:13....... 4:23.......... 59.2
Jan 19... 5:12....... 5:26.......... 68.2
Feb 18... 6:48....... 6:41.......... 86.2
Mar 18... 7:12....... 6:26.......... 89.9
Apr 17... 7:40....... 7:43.......... 108.7
May16... 8:06....... 7:45.......... 116.6
Jun 15... 8:25....... 8:37.......... 119.6
Jul 14... 8:24....... 8:03.......... 115
Aug 13... 7:58....... 7:44.......... 101.5
Sep 12... 7:15....... 7:09.......... 85.5
Oct 11... 6:31....... 6:07.......... 76.1
Oct 12... 6:30....... 6:37.......... 71.2
Nov 10... 4:56....... 4:48.......... 64.7
Dec 9... 4:44....... 4:12.......... 61.4

Now I can plan where I'll be for each sunset moonrise, and look up the more accurate numbers for sunset and moonrise in those exact locations... and now you can too!

The same process can be used to place and shoot crescent moons, which are atractive because they also rise and set near sunset/sunrise, and the thinner ones don't put off so much light that they'll screw up your night shots.

Examples of landscape shots including the sun and moon, some planned in advance using TPE, may be found in the Moon and Sun set on my Flickr photostream.

Maybe you won't be inclined to go to as much trouble as I do to plan your shots, but nevertheless, if you plan on getting out on these dates to shoot around sunset, you could have the added bonus of a full (and not overexposed) moon to include in the shot!

Geminid Meteor Shower Coming Dec 12-16, 2010!

2010-12-09T10:54:00.001-08:00

Geminid Meteor Shower Coming Dec 13, 2010, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

I've dug up this old meteor shower timelapse to remind people of the Geminid Meteor Shower is coming December 13, 2010. The most dense showers tend to be visible after midnight as we rotate around to the front of the earth as it travels through space, so for a nice preview, try Sunday night Dec 12 after midnight (which technically will be Monday). The moon will set around 12:39am on the West Coast, further enhancing viewing conditions.

NASA tells us that the Geminid Meteor Shower will be the best of 2010, with the best viewing occurring on the night of December 13-14. I hope to be out shooting on the three nights beginning on December 12, 13, and 14.

This timelapse video above is from the Orionid Meteor Shower in October 2009. (Check a few posts back on my blog for details on how to produce a timelapse from a sequence of photos.) For best viewing you must go to Flickr to view this, select HD to view it in high resolution, and click the icon towards the lower right to view it full screen. Enjoy!

All in all that Orionid shower had a pretty disappointing showing of meteors. I woke up to go out the second night, but it was below freezing with 20 knot winds, so given the results on the first night I decided not to go sit out in the potentially sub-zero wind chill for an hour or two!

Photographing Big Waves? Check the Surf Forecast!

2010-12-06T11:18:00.001-08:00

Off the Charts!, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

We've all seen nice images of waves crashing on the coast, and it's a pretty safe bet that you can find large waves after storms pass through coastal areas. But what you may not know is that models have been constructed to predict wave height in advance! Surfers and divers often consult these predictions, and photographers can use them as well.

Waves include wind-generated "windswell" which can come from winds or storms in multiple directions. Current prediction models such as NOAA's Wavewatch III wavemodel can forecast waves coming from up to six different directions simultaneously, all interacting to create the waves you see onsite.

Here's an example of a surf forecast for the Big Sur Coast:
http://www.stormsurf.com/cgi-bin/4cast.cgi?ID=enp.46028

Here's a map you can use to select other California coastal locations: http://www.stormsurf.com/buoy/mht/ncalz.html

Based on the forecast, I'm going to make a point of pursuing large waves along the Big Sur this Thursday. I'll let you know how it turns out!

Cut Light for Long Daylight Exposures

2010-12-05T09:32:00.001-08:00

Garrapata Dawn light, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

We've all seen those nice one or two second exposures which make waterfalls look silky. Select your smallesta aperture, set your ISO sensitivity low, and perhaps add a circular polarizer to your lens to reduce light, and those exposures should be within range. But have you considered longer daylight exposures and similarly abstracting other moving subjects such as waves?

On a recent trip to California's Big Sur coast I was shooting long pre-dawn exposures and I decided to continue with long exposures for as long as I could. I started with my wide and midrange lenses closed to their smallest aperture f/22, I gradually reduced ISO sensitivity to Low (ISO 50) as the light increased, and I added a polarizing filter to cut light. As the sky lightened I added a 3 stop graduated neutral density filter to reduce light coming from the sky.

As the day continued to brighten I continued shooting but added a 3 stop neutral density filter and eventually I changed to a 70-200mm lens to further reduce aperture another stop to f/32. I had started with a Hoya Pro1 circular polarizer which only reduces light 1 1/4 stop, so I also used a darker polarizer which cut 2 stops of light. With the polarizer plus the ND and GND filters stacked I was cutting 8 stops of light in the sky and 5 elsewhere, on a camera shooting at f/32, ISO 50.

To continue in bright, direct sunlight you'll need to settle for shorter exposure times or go further to cut the light such as with a 10 stop ND filter. But a 10 stop filter is a pretty specialized tool that might not be on the top of your wish list, so in the meantime try shooting near dusk and dawn with your smallest aperture (most likely on your longest zoom lens), stacking the light-cutting filters you already have on hand.

A few things I should mention though... if you try long shots like this, it's critical to use a sturdy tripod, a remote shutter release or your camera's self timer, and don't forget to turn your camera's image stabilization off.

As always, click on any image to see a larger copy.

Is it Facebook vs. Flickr, or Both vs. Google?

2010-11-19T15:13:00.001-08:00

Ancient Life of the Cosmos, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (Death Valley next!).

An article on the PhotoShelter blog "What Google trends Says About Wedding & Stock Photography, and Photo Websites" proposes that a drop in Flickr ratings on Google Trends may be due to an increase in the popularity of Facebook for photo sharing. I disagree strongly with the article's conclusions.

The drop in Yahoo-owned Flickr status in competitor Google's trend ratings was probably more due to internal workings of the Google search engine to stop referring Google image search results over to their competitor's site Flickr. I've seen this firsthand in my Flickr statistics. I used to get nearly 30% of my Flickr views from Google search users, now I get close to zero. Meanwhile my Google hits on Panoramio have skyrocketed to over 5 million views on a handful of images.

Facebook's ratings on Goolge Trends also pummeted, so the same engineered obsolescence is probably true for Google's referral to anything over on Facebook, since Facebook is now emerging as a competitor for Google's dominance over Internet eyeballs. Facebook's drop in Google's ratings is far too precipitous to be attributed to a simple familiarity with Facebook's name, as proposed in the article.

The existing fight between Yahoo and Google has expanded to include Facebook, as demonstrated by Facebook's announcement this week of an email service that aspires consolodate messages from all sources. Google is simply taking prudent steps to minimize the extent to which their site promotes their competitors.

The bottom line for photographers? Flickr will remain strong with Yahoo search users, Google-friendly sites will dominate Google searches, and Facebook is an island unto itself, albeit a really big island that wants to aggregate all your content.

For the moment Flickr is a site with robust sharing photo sharing features but a rabid paranoia of all things external, including standard social media platforms, so it's dangerous to try to interact around Flickr photos (post external links and they reportedly may delete your account suddenly and unexpectedly). So Facebook appears to be the only major player with a viable solution friendly to social media integration at the moment. Although their tools for photographers seem a little lacking at the moment, their pool of app developers are working diligently to solve that problem for them.

Create a Timelapse Video on Your Digital Camera

2010-11-19T11:28:00.001-08:00

Eastern Sierra Sunrise Timelapse, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (Death Valley next!).

I have a lot of timelapse sequences that I haven't gotten around to processing yet, but here's one from sunrise this morning!

Timelapse videos are easy to create on your DSLR. There are many software packages which will facilitate the process, some better than others, but I'll describe the simple and relatively low cost workflow that I currently use. You'll need software on your PC which can convert a sequence of JPEG files to timelapse video. I use VirtualDub (free download) to create an AVI format video, then I use MPEG Streamclip (free download) to convert the huge .AVI file to a much smaller (albeit lower quality) MPEG-4 for online use. Here's the process from shooting to finished video:

Clean your camera sensor. It is hard enough to remove dust from one image... picture having to do that 300 times. Even copying dust removal from one image to the others, the data changes over time (from shot to shot), so it really won't work well across the whole sequence. It's far, far better to remove the dust up front. Clean your camera sensor!.

Put your camera on a sturdy tripod. Install a fully charged battery and a blank, freshly-formatted memory card which can handle several hundred images.

Compose your image expecting to lose some of the vertical information if you'll convert the sequence to HD video with a narrow HD shape (16:9 aspect ratio).

Manually focus your camera and switch off automatic focus. If you forget to do this, your camera will insert delays in the sequence as it hunts for focus, making the playback jerky at best. Worst case, your camera may lose focus and you'll end up with a whole lot of blurry images.

Make some test shots to determine best exposure. If practical, set exposure manually so it won't change from shot to shot and cause flashing (flicker) as different exposures come up during playback. If the light will change a lot during shooting (sunrise and sunset), you can use automatic exposure, but then the exposure during the video is artificially stagnant, and you'll need to to "deflicker" the timelapse to reduce flashing from frame to frame when producing the video. You will learn some very interesting and important things about your DLSR in this process! When your DSLR changes the exposure up or down 1/3 stop from shot to shot, simply "fixing" the exposure during editing will not result in similar-looking images from shot to shot! Even adjacent images taken a fraction of a second apart may have different white balance, and a slight exposure change also affects contrast, color saturation, and so on. Once you've gone through the process a few times your whole approach will change and you'll try to maximize quality and consistency in-camera, not during editing.

Shoot several hundred images in a row. You can make the timing from frame to frame consistent using an Intervalometer Trigger (external timer), or you can simply hit the shutter release over and over (perhaps use the display of the prior image on the camera rear LCD as your cue to trigger the next shot and keep them at a fairly consistent rate). Remember that your finished product will be 30 frames per second, so you'll need 300 images for each 10 seconds of video. I recommend shooting in RAW format so you can adjust the exposures during editing, especially if you shoot at sunrise or sunset where the light will change over the course of your timelapse.

Read your camera's files into your editing software and crop them to the 16:9 aspect ratio of HD video. Remember that you have far more resolution in your DSLR than you need for HD video, so you can perform a "digital zoom" and focus on only a portion of your original camera image. Software strong in batch editing such as Adobe Lightroom (free trial available) will enable you to apply a consistent crop, exposure adjustments and even spot removal across the entire sequence of images. You'll also want to impose one consistent white balance across the entire sequence. Some video processing software (such as Adobe Premiere I believe) will even let you specify a starting crop and a different finishing crop, then calculate a zoom and pan across your sequence of images.

Save your files in sRGB JPEG format at 1280 x 720 resolution for video to be used on sites like YouTube or Flickr that only allow smaller 720p HD format video, or save them at 1920 x 1080 resolution for 1080p video to be uploaded to sites such as Vimeo. If you'll use the VirtualDub software, it will want you to point to the first image in the sequence then look for a sequential numbered file, so if you used automatic exposure bracketing while shooting you may be editing and saving every third file, but you can rename them sequentially so VirtualDub can order them properly.

Read the sequence into VirtualDub. It's important to notice when trying to import them that in the dialog box where you're looking for the first file to select, the file format has a drop-down menu which enables you to specify that it should look for an image sequence in JPG format.

Add filters as desired, in the order that you want them to apply. For example, Virtualdub can crop and resize larger JPEGs, perform sharpening at the new lower resolution, and you can search for and install a third party "MSU deflicker" filter to improve image consistency from frame to frame across the whole video. Check your frame rate and for maximum quality (but shorter result) change the default 10 frames per second to 30.

Save the video in AVI format. That's a very high quality format, so it may save a file of a gigabyte or more! Enjoy this high quality file on your computer (or read it into video editing software to burn it to Blue-Ray DVD).

To create smaller files for online sharing, read your .AVI file into MPEG Streamclip. Save to MPEG-4, playing with quality vs. file size tradeoffs until the results are what you want.

Upload your results to your favorite video sharing site. That's it! It takes a little more planning to pull off well and a little more time to produce the finished result, but you can produce some amazing videos.

For more information on shooting timelapse sequences, I recommend browsing the discussion forums over on www.Timescapes.org.

Note: although Adobe Lightroom has a retail list price of $300 to buy, there's curently a beta release candidate version 3.3c on Adobe Labs that you can use for free until December 2010. Then you can download the free trial of the production version and use that for another 30 days, so you're set through the end of January at least. Beta users often get a discount on purchase, so if you do eventually choose to buy you may get a lower price.

Leonid Meteor Shower is Underway!

2010-11-16T14:25:00.001-08:00

Leonid Meteor Shower is Underway, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (in Yosemite).

The Leonid Meteor Shower tends to be one of the best meteor showers of the year. With the moon setting at 2:50am this morning, I made it out by around 3:30am this morning to check it out. It was doing really well, with rates as I watched appearing to be as high as a meteor per minute. Of course not all of these fell in the field of view of my cameras.

The meteor per hour rate should increase for the next night or two. The best viewing of the Leonids this year is during darker skies after moonset, which here on the West Coast will be 3:30-5:30am tomorrow morning (Nov 17) and 4:30-5:30am the following morning (Nov 18).

The first image here was taken on my Canon 40D: 30 seconds at f/2.0, ISO 1600 with a 24mm lens (38mm effective). The second image was taken on my Canon 5D mark II using a 16-35mm lens, using 30 second exposures at f/2.8, ISO 6400.

Now that I know that this year's shower is reasonably robust, I'll try to get up earlier tomorrow morning and drive to a location where I can set up some nice compositions.

Catch the Leonid Meteor Shower Nov 17/18!

2010-11-13T08:11:00.001-08:00

Catch the Leonid Meteor Shower Nov 17/18!, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

The Leonid Meteor Shower, one of the best meteor showers of the year, is happening this week, peaking around November 17/18. The meteors appear to originate from the constellation Leo, which rises slightly north of east after midnight. Long, earth-grazing meteors should be visible coming out of the eastern horizon by 11pm or even 10pm. Download the free Google Skymap app to your phone to make identification of the constellation easy. The portion of the earth that you're standing on rotates around to the forward path of the planet hurtling through space (where it collides with more space debris) starting at midnight, so again the best viewing for long fireballs could start around 11pm or so looking towards the east.

On the downside, we get closer and closer to a full moon as the week progresses, so the darkest sky will be after the bright moon sets, but at least 90 minutes before sunrise. The moon sets at roughly 3:45 on the 17th, leaving only an hour of prime dark viewing before the sky starts to lighten around 4:45. The moon sets an hour earlier per day earlier. So while the meteor shower increases in intensity towards the 17th/18th, prime shooting conditions may favor trying a day or two earlier. So I'll probably start shooting 2:30am on the 16th before the 2:50 moonset and go through 4:45 to get a good solid 2+ hours of coverage. Adjust your shooting direction to accommodate the east to west movement of Leo as it seems to circle the North Star and rises towards nearly overhead and slightly northeast as dawn approaches.

Check the weather forecast and moonset times in your area to tune your approach. To find a prime viewing spot, travel northeast from cities to put the light pollution at your back. Good luck!

What's Important in a Landscape Photography Workshop?

2010-11-03T16:03:00.001-07:00

Shooting the Reflection, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

As I run around pursuing interesting locations and light for my own images, I've also been leading landscape photography workshops for a few years now. Sometimes I'm one of multiple instructors leading 20+ photographers, other times I'm taking semi-private tours for as few as 1-4.

Although the larger workshops are rewarding since I can help more people (I love to teach), landscape photography requires reacting quickly to changing light, so I really like the nimbleness of a small group. In a larger group there's always someone who wants to go off and find their own compositions, which I can entirely identify with, or someone who always wants one or two more compositions before moving to the next location (which I can also identify with), but that has to be balanced with the benefits of having a cohesive and highly mobile group which can respond to changing conditions.

In other words, shooting with fewer people enables me to lead a group at a pace that is much more practical and realistic for a working landscape photographer, and at the end of the day, that is one of the insights that I'd like to send them home with. Your technical approach such as camera settings is important, having an instructor who is intimately familiar with the region is critical, but if you get stuck in a large group led by a jaded longtime pro who simply stands a group of photographers in a line in one place for 30 minutes or more, you're really missing key aspects of the craft.

In fact, some instructors don't even shoot, claiming that they can give more attention to students that way. That's true in a very limited sense: they can help you with camera menus, composition, even shoot a shot or two through your camera to provide examples. But for a creative process such as photography, I don't beleive that an artist can fake being in a creative mode... anticipating light and compositions and arriving at just the right place in time to capture various compositions with enough variations to capture a few frames that are truly exceptional. You're either deeply in that creative zone with your customers immmediately at your side to experience and understand what you're seeing (and your entire process of how you've arrived there), or you're a passive bystander in technical/lecture/teaching mode. I beleive that an instructor can pop out of creative mode to describe what they're thinking and doing, then quickly step aside to put the customer in the same position to see what they're talking about, but I don't believe that an instructor in lecture mode can truly act and think as if they were actually creating. I consider the creative process to be part imagination, part experimentation, and part discovery based on feedback fomr your envisioned scenarios and the actual results of your actual perspective, composition, technique and exposure experiments. It requires feedback. If someone is actually teaching without a camera as well as they could with an actual camera in hand, then I'd conclude that they were never truly all that creative to start with. Landscape photography is in part a discovery process, not a formula which can be simply described then fully understood and adopted.

This isn't to say that only one type of workshop is fully productive or that large workshops are inherently bad. For students who are at an appropriate stage in their learning, practicing using camera menus and exposure adjustments plus some small composition changes may be perfect for them, limiting other variables. But I meet many photographers who have a lot of the basics down, who are looking for that next set of tricks to introduce into their techniques or workflow to improve their results and perhaps and broaden the range of what they look for and what they produce. For me those students are more fun to teach, and a smaller student to teacher ratio is appropriate so more attention can be paid to each student, and so the smaller groups can follow a more nimble, more engaged, and more creative shooting approach, particularly during the critical times of changing light.

So when I teach in larger workshops, my early advice comes across as "follow me," as I look for the students who are most interested and receptive to engage in a more immersive shooting style, moving from point to point and from composition to composition, envisioning the next shot and catching the best possible light at any given instant.

Have Your Photos Seen by Millions on Google

2010-11-03T10:28:00.001-07:00

Water Cuts Rock, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

Panoramio.com is a site which provided simple mapping of photos on Google Earth. Google eventually bought the company and now displays those photos to Google Earth users, as well as Google Maps and to people performing an image search by keyword on Google.

The new Stats function on Panoramio shows 198,000 views for this photo via Google (Earth, Maps, search). Apparently my 400 photos there, roughly 280 of them mapped on Google Earth, have had 4.9 million views in total! No wonder I get contacted by people saying "I saw your photos on Panoramio, and..."

Just add "/stats" after the URL of any photo or user URL on Panoramio to see some usage details. If it's your own account, you also see the most common referring URLs, so you can see how people are finding your photos.

It turns out that my photos there have 157,129 views in the last 30 days. Some fraction of those viewers want a print or to join me on a field workshop.

Give the site a try to introduce your own photos to new fans. I always recommend uploading only low resolution copies of your files to minimize the possibility of theft, and of course only upload photos which you're willing to disclose the location for, since you'll be placing them by shooting position on a Google Earth map.

Wind and Rainbows in the Eastern Sierra

2010-10-27T11:48:00.001-07:00

Rainbow in the Wind, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

The wind was literally ripping water off the wavetops in Mono Lake on Sunday. Gusts up to 80MPH were reported in the Eastern Sierra valleys, with up to 145MPH forecasted on the ridges.

Fall colors will linger on primarily in wind-protected areas.

Fall Colors Peak in the Eastern Sierra

2010-10-25T22:55:00.001-07:00

June Lake Loop Fall Colors, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

Fall colors peaked in many areas of the Eastern Sierra by last weekend. I enjoyed some of the most varied and saturated colors in years along the June Lake Loop on Friday. I returned on Sunday to find ample colors remaining, but the colors were faded and by the afternoon hevay winds had arrived and many of the trees were having their leaves blown off. Pockets of good color and some green leaves still to change do remain, and trees at lower elevations such as cottonwoods down by Bishop have a slightly later season, but many of the largest aspen forests have declined substantially after Sunday's storm.

Stereographic Projection of 360 Degree Panoramas

2010-10-19T13:09:00.001-07:00

My World in Autumn, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

If you want to try something completely different and have a lot of time on your hands, put on your widest lens and shoot a panorama which covers everything around you (including straight up and down). Run that through the free Hugin panorama software, and viola!

I have to warn you that it's a steep learning curve: it took me roughly 24 hours to produce this result (partially due to a nearly 1GB TIFF file initial result). Until I've done a few more the best option is to refer you to the many Flickr groups which have tutorials posted in the discussions: www.flickr.com/search/groups/?q=Hugin

For example, the group Create Your Own Planets www.flickr.com/groups/createyourownplanets/ offers tips on the shooting end. First you put on your widest lens, set one white balance, exposure and manually set focus (so the information in overlapping shots will be easier for the program to identify and blend). Then with the camera in portrait/vertical (sideways) orientation you rotate around and take overlapping photos in a circle (each one overlapping the previous one roughly 1/4 frame). You need to cover everything, so at 10mm you'll need to take at least 2 rows in a circle, one almost catching your feet and one almost reaching the sky straight up. Then you take one shot straight up, and one straight down. Tou do all of this while trying to have the camera always shoot from the same point (rotating around a point roughly halfway down the lens, which can be done best with a panoramic tripod head). Here's a discussion with more detail on the shooting:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/createyourownplanets/discuss/72157606038572766/ including a link to tutorials on this site: www.panoguide.com/howto/

Here's a discussion in that same group with 2 links to tutorials on the whole process, including software: www.flickr.com/groups/createyourownplanets/discuss/72157594556380967
Now I need to go read the tutorials. : )

Good luck!

P.S. - For extra credit, once you get the basic process down, you can try integrating the result into a video, like the opening sequence here, and the timelapse at 4:00! www.vimeo.com/12279966

Shooting & Postprocessing Fall Colors Images

2010-10-12T14:31:00.001-07:00

Parker Lake Fall Colors Reflection, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

Fall is one of my favorite times to shoot, as California's Sierra Nevada is decorated with colorful leaves: in the trees, on the ground, and alongside creeks and lakes. Aspen leaves are flat and shiny, and they point and rotate in virtually any direction, so in my approach a primary shooting consideration is the reduction of color-killing glare. Whether the lighting conditions are sunny or cloudy a circular polarizing filter, properly rotated to darken the image (the visual effect when you cancel out the glare), will enable the full color of the leaves to shine through and get captured by your camera's sensor. In fact, I drive around with polarized glasses on (in all seasons) so I'll recognize more potential shots. There can be issues with polarizers producing uneven results in solid blue skies if you're using wide to ultrawide lenses, so you may have to shoot a given scene with the polarizer on and off so you can select the best one later, and so you'll have the option of superimposing the two images and using Photoshop layer masking to use the Fall colors from one image and the blue sky from the other (more trouble than I currently go to, but a valid option nonetheless).

Optimizing your camera's capture of the color is only the first challenge however. Once you view your RAW file in your favorite editing program, you often find that the camera failed to capture adequate contrast and it assigned an automatic white balance which dramatically changed color as well.

That was my experience as I viewed photos of Parker Lake which I took during the Mountain high Workshops Fall Colors session last week. The yellow aspen at the far end were changed to a dull orange-brown, and the gren was overly dull as well. One however I shot of the attendees and lake from behind the trees when I first arrived, and the Fall colors on the far side turned out a lot brighter and more yellow, more like what I remembered from being there.

To restore that yellow to my other Parker Lake shots, first I tried a few white balance settings... changing from As Shot to Auto and Daylight, and possibly even bumping the color from there towards cold (blue) or warm (orange). Your mileage may vary based on your camera's sensor, so what I actually ended up with is irrelevant; the process is more important.

What really did the trick however was to go into the Develop tab/menu and where the color sliders are in the right column under the HSL / Color / B&W heading, first I set the sliders to Luminance (brightness) and made the yellow trees brighter, then I changed the sliders to Saturation and I gave just the yellows a bit of an increase until the trees matched the other photo with more natural color. I did a similar thing to a lesser degree to the greens, which also seemed duller than what I saw onsite.

Two additional adjustments that can often imporve the outcome are Develop - Presence - Saturation (of course, although if I use it at all I prefer to keep it minor and subtle, under 5%), increasing contrast (which you'll see improves color on most images taken at -2/3 EV or brighter... i.e. most exposures), and Library - Saved Preset - Punch, which seems to perform something analogous to a local content-aware contrast adjustment (it either improves the result or it doesn't, so I'm always ready to Ctrl-Z undo it).

I'm not sure what caused the camera to go so far off on the color for that sequence of Parker Lake shots, perhaps the green algae and brown mud on the lake bottom, but the corrected version seems much more natural to me. I've upload both the behind-the-trees shot and this adjusted reflection shot so you can see how the edits turned out on the reflection one.

If you don't have Adobe Lightroom, you can download a free trial, which will be active for 30 days from your first use. Adobe also periodically posts Beta versions for public use (you have to find the Beta download section of their site), which tend to work (with some bugs) for months.

Since I started using Lightroom I no longer have a copy of Photoshop CS installed on my latest laptop, and I hardly ever use Photomatix any more. Lightroom is simply more efficient to use, and it produces excellent results.

One of the key features I use a lot are software GND filters under the Develop (look for a little GND-looking icon near the top of the right column). I often use Cokin GND filters when I shoot, but additional fine tuning is extremely helpful.

A huge productivity boost comes from Lightroom being able to copy editing functions from one photo to many others from that shoot
(Library - right click over photo - Develop Settings - Copy). Since I bracket exposures, I can edit one dark one, one medium one and one light one, then copy those basic edits onto dozens of similarly exposed photos, then simply pick the best results to make some additional minor optimizations to. I even copy dust spot removal from one photo to adjacent ones, then simply adjust a few spots where the content in the new shot requires cloning from a different place (easy to do, difficult to describe... it'll make more sense when you try it).

Lightroom also helps you become deeply familiar with your camera's results. For example, without other experience I'd expect that a 0EV exposure might provide an excellent compromise as the image to work with and edit, and I've heard that a slightly overexposed image would offer more detail (a larger file size), but through using Lightroom and editing three bracketed exposures side by side, I've found that for my camera a 2 stop underexposed image often offers the best color and contrast, so at a minimum I'll edit the darkest file for reference, then see if I can get the middle exposure to look as good. Sometimes the middle exposure gets close if I increase contrast, but often I still choose the darkest one as the best (with a little extra noise reduction). I should mention that my most common bracketing and exposure compensation settings are: bracking of +/- 1 1/3 stop, biased -2/3 stop, resulting in exposures of -2, -2/3 and +2/3 EV. I should add the disclaimer that those settings do seem camera dependent... some of the workshop attendees' cameras seemed to perform better a 0EV, without the -2/3 stop compensation (which works well on my Canon 5DII).

The two things would like to have from Photoshop are adjustment layers / layer masking and free downloadable actions (such as one which enables you to make a star trails shot from multiple 30 second night shots). In some rare instances I might enjoy panoramas/stitching and content aware fill, but I prefer the shooting end of the creative process, not editing, so I tend not to get around to postprocessing which requires a lot of time. It's either easily and quickly available from the in-camera result, or I simply move on to work with another image.

For more tips, search my blog as follows:
http://activesole.blogspot.com/search?q=technique+tips

Photographic Technique: Iterative Composition

2010-08-27T11:05:00.001-07:00

Shooting Process: Kearsarge Lakes Evening Reflection, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

When I see an opportunity to capture a nice reflection I may capture a quick shot of the reflection to have one before the light or water surface changes, but then I spend time walking around looking to "upgrade" and add a more interesting foreground like this one, where the logs provide "leading lines" whch further draw your eyes to the subject. It'd still be nicer with some colorful sunset clouds of course, but less than optimal weatehr is all the more reason to ensure that your compositions are strong and make your images work as well as possible, whatever the weather.

It's certainly well worth the few extra moments of forethought and exploration while you're shooting. Your percentage of strong images will go way up when your shooting process is more thoughtful and deliberate than see, point, and shoot. It all starts with your mindset and intention; when an opportunity presents itself you deliberately set out to make the shot, and reshoot it after making it better, resisting the urge to simply take one.

Sure there are details along the way that can help, but it all starts with your intention and your shooting process.

I'm not presenting this as a perfect shot by any means, but it's better than the others I shot immediately prior, and it was about as well as I could have done without wading around in ice cold water and muck to fine tune the composition (subject placement, lines, angles, etc) even further. After exploring this shot to this extent I simply decided at the time that with three lakes within a couple of hundreds yards of me, searching out other locations, foregrounds and results would be a better use of my limited time as the sun continued to set.

For more technique tips search this blog for "technique" or "technique tips". To practice this, join me this October for one of our two field workshops in California's Eastern Sierra:
Mountain High Workshops: Fall Colors in California's Eastern Sierra http://www.mountainhighworkshops.com/FallSierra.html

You may also use the NetworkedBlogs feature in the right column to follow this blog over on Facebook.

Photographic Technique: Exposure for Maximum Reality and Flexibility

2010-08-27T10:57:00.001-07:00

Garnet Lake Sunset, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

To increase your successful exposures and the percentage of yoru shots that successfuly capture what you saw, there are a number of things you can do while shooting to improve your odds.

It helps to understand that a camera does not "see" in the same way that our eyes see. A camera has one exposure for everything in the scene, while our eyes focus on one point, then change focus and exposure for the next point. so when we are present for an event like this, we see far more shadow and highlight detail than a camera will pick up. As with a camera, a photographic print reproduces the scene in a way that often won't enable your eyes to see or your brain to perceive the light the same way that they woudl onsite. To compensate for this and produce a more natural image and print, it's often helpful to increase shadow light when taking the shot (preferable) or afterwards when "developing" / editing it.

It is not always possible to perform the corrections while editing due to shadow noise, so it's better to optimize the shot as you shoot. All digital cameras worth shooting with (in my opinion) offer the ability to shoot and store files in the camera's native "RAW" format. While the common and smaller JPEG format offers smaller file sizes, it only stores 8 "bits" of data, or 256 colors per pixel. RAW formats offer either 12 bits (4000 colors) or 14 bits (16,000 colors), so when you go to adjust colors after shooting, such as simply lightening or darkening part of the image, there's far more of hte original scene's subtle information there to work with, and adjustments can be made in a much more subtle and natural-looking way as well, not having color or brightness simply make a massive jump to the next shade out of only 256 choices.

Once you have the camera set to capture RAW files, since digital files are free, I recommedn turning on yoru camera's Automatic Exposure Bracketing to take at least 3 exposures which you can select from later. I examine the results to ensure that the brightest exposure provides detail in the darkest shadows, and the darkest exposure preserves detail int he lightest areas. The middle exposure should be the best single exposure, at least in terms of being the best compromise between light and dark ones. All three exposures can be combined later in Photoshop using Layer Masking (they align best in the widest number of editing programs if you shoot on a tripod). Nikons can often shoot AEB sequences of 5, 7 or 9 exposures; it's your call how much data you want to store and to sort through later. In moast cases so many shots won't be necessary, but in some extreme cases having the extra information could prove very useful (hear that Canon?).

To obtain the best 3 exposures while shooting it is also necessary to adjust the whole AEB sequence up or down, using Exposure Compensation. I often shoot my three exposures with a spacing between them of +/- 1 1/3 stops, and with the whole sequence biased down (darker) 1/3 to 2/3 stops. This is not a "rule" it is just where I start. If I review the shots and the situation calls for it, I may expand the AEB spacing between exposures to the full 2 stops allowed by my Canon, and I may bias the whole AEB sequence up of down the full 2 stops allowed as well. For example, night star/Milky Way shots tend to need far more light than the camera estimates, while shooting a rising full moon often requires that one exposure be many stops darker to preserve detail on the moon itself, with tends to be much brighter than the surrounding landscape. If the automatic bracketing still fails to handle a wide range of light in the scene, you can use Aperture Priority (Av) mode to capture and optimize results for most of the scene, while setting your Manual (M) mode to be many stops away to capture the most challenging subset of the light (such as the bright full moon well after it rises and the surrounding landscape has gotten much darker).

Then there's the content of the shot to consider... while shooting. For a shot with a reflection like this, the part of the scene that is easiest to correct is the reflection, which will be close to 3 stops darker (8X times less light) than the direct view of that same object in the scene (in this case the orange clouds). Yet our eyes and brains perceive the direct light and the reflection as being the same intensity! To bring the exposure of I used a Cokin #121 3 stop graduated neutral density filter, which I positioned to darken only the portion of the scene from the horizon up (where the far side of the lake meets the mountain).

That adjustment while shooting was a great start, but some fine tuning of the light is still necessary in software, and I highly recommend Adobe Lightroom for that, since it offers three levels of fine tuning:
- software graduated neutral density filters which can correct for your hardware filter not being exactly right for the light present
- a "fill light" adjustment which can brighten shadows across teh entire scene
- a selection brush which can be used for burning and dodging selected items or regions of the image.
If some of the operations such as fill light start to make the image look less realistic, increasing contrast may be required to restore a natural look. I like to start with slightly underexposed exposures which already have high contrast and (in my experience) the most realistic color. There are always exceptions, but I don't find that the brightest exposures can be adjusted to look just like, or as good, as the darkest one. I'd strongly prefer to use the brighter exposures with less noise and more shadow detail, so I'll often edit 2 or all 3 exposures, but I simply find that the "keeper" is often still the darkest one. In that case it helps to have a camera with a sensor which delivers images with very low noise in the shadows.

So even having software that can do some of the adjustment, the physical GND filter is still necessary to do as much of it in the camera as possible, to avoid having too much noise in the shadows as you level out the light somewhat, just like our eyes would if we were there viewing the scene onsite. Similarly, having the physical GND alone is a great start but won't get you to the best possible result without software that has a software GND function plus some way to perform additional dodge and burn. And this all assumes that you shot and optimized 3 exposures on a tripod, with the files saved in RAW format.

Once you have these basic exposure tools and practices down, you can free yourself to focus on more strategic and creative things like composition, and to add creative elements such as motion/long exposure or light painting.

Perseid Meteor Showers

2010-08-25T17:26:00.001-07:00

Perseid Meteor Over Mono Lake Tufa, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

My next photography adventure was heading out to shoot the Perseid meteor showers. After a realtively weak showing at the first night at Mono Lake, in part due to the large amount of dust in the air there (great for sunrises, not so great for seeing stars or meteors rising over the eastern horizon), I drove down to the higher and clearer Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest.

This time I had spoken to Tom Lowe several times in the weeks leading up to the event and I decided not to wait to capture the crescent moon setting over the crest of the Sierra Nevada before driving up to the Patriarch Grove at 11,300 feet. Several other photographers on Flcir who had expressed an interest in shooting this event had communicated that they would not be making it after all, but photographer Jean Day was expecting to join us. As luck would have it, her truck was up on a jack with a flat tire, shortly after Schulman Grove, still 10 miles and at least a half hour to 40 minutes short of my destination.

Even worse, someone who stopepd to help had overextended the jack, breaking the handle in the process. I had both cans of Punture Seal and an air compressor built into my minivan, but my jack was too short, so I shot the crescent moon descending behind some communication towers while we waited for an adequate jack.

After several people stopped we eventually were able to get the truck down off its jack, and drive, inflate, drive, inflate our way to highway 168 before the leak in the tire got too bad to reinflate. Fortunately we had been able to flag down a flatbed tow truck on its way to another call, who would now be looking for her as he drove out. Jean urged me to get back up there and shoot, so I headed back up.

To make a long story short, I was off to a late start, but I found a shooting location which would not get lit up by late arrivals, and set my camera and intervalometer timer loose to capture hundreds of consecutive 30 second shots.

Olmstead Point Dawn Full Moon Set

2010-08-25T16:11:00.001-07:00

Olmstead Point Dawn Full Moon Set, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

In late July I positioned myself to catch the full moon rising at Mono Lake. It had rained during the day, but as I sat on the porch of the lcoal coffee shop waiting to see how the weather woudl turn out, it was clearing up nicely for sunset, and hopefully the moonrise. One of the nice things about photography is that the people really into it are a pretty relaxed and sociable bunch. I ran into filmmaker Tom Lowe at a coffee shop in Lee Vining, and he was heading out to Mono Lake as well. A young woman with an accent had shared the table and power for her laptop, and not knowing the area, when she heard we were going to a nice sunset location, she decided to follow along in her car.

We drove south out of town, and as I turned left onto a shortcut, Tom missed the turn and kept going towards the standard highway 395 to highway 120 route towards South Tufa. The woman, Rotem Retter from Israel who had come to the U.S. after serving in the Israeli Defense Force, made the turn. By now a large rainbow was forming in the remaining showers over the Mono Basin, so I stopped at a turnout near another photographer's car. This turned out to be Ron Wolf. We had seen each other's work on Flickr, but had never met.

As I continued on, I decided that the clouds would obscure the moonrise, but they were well posisioned for shooting sunset at South Tufa. I called Tom with the update, but by now he was already set up elsewhere, and decided to stay put.

The clouds were fine for sunset, but as i had suspected, they were too thick to allow the rising moon to show through. This is why it's critical to try to shoot as many sunset full moon rises as possible in a given year... there are only a dozen or so to start with, and weather will obscure many of those!

No problem... I could still catch the moon set at dawn. After having the June 26 partially eclipsed moon set at Olmstead Point behind a nearby ridge before it woud have set on the horizon, I decided to shoot this moonset there as well, so I could find a better shooting position that would enable the sunrise to proceed further as the full moon set.

It turned out even better than I could have planned. The sun was sending light rays over the Eastern horizon, while the moon acted as a gaint reflector, sending more of the sun's rays radiating back from the Western horizon.

I had high expectations for this sunrise, or at least high hopes. After all, I had looked up the moonset and sunrise times a week or two in advance, checked sun and moon angles for various locations in The Photographer's Ephemeris to select my shooting location, gotten up at 3:55 over by Mono Lake to make it here in time, and to place the foreground hill out of the way for the moonset I decided to hike up the granite slope across the road instead of down to Olmstead Point. To do this landscape photography thing right, it's a far cry from just arrive, point and shoot!

"A lot of people think that when you have grand scenery, such as you have in Yosemite, that photography must be easy."
- Galen Rowell

I continued to shoot as the clouds and light changed, and there were some majestic juniper trees on the hill which added nice foreground subjects. But I was done by 7am or so, with no plans for the day.

As with the prior sunset Rotem had decided to check out my shooting location, and having hiked Mt Dana the day before, she was eyeing Mt. Hoffman today. I had no plans for the "boring" mid-day light, and the trailhead was only a couple of miles away, so this time I tagged along.

After we moved food and scented items fomr our cars to bear boxes, we got an early enough start to reach May Lake while I could still catch a reflection with minimal wind.

The entire hike is only a 6 mile round trip, but the trailhead is at 8710 feet and you end up at approximately 10,850, so it's a healthy climb. I'm never particularly fast lugging 10-12 pounds of camera gear plus 3 liters (another 6 pounds) of water, but it's an enjoyable hike with a nice view.

Unfortunately there was a fire somewhere which cast a haze in the air. With the distinct possiblility of afternoon thunderstorms, after some rest and chatting with other hikers on top, while protecting day packs from persistent marmots wanting to steal food, it was time to make a hasty descent.

Don't Tread On Me

2010-08-25T15:57:00.001-07:00

Don't Tread On Me, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

I was on my way down from shooting a sunset on Monitor Pass in when I came across a rattlesnake in the road. I rarely see rattlesnakes in the Sierra Nevada, but they're vital to helping control rodent populations and reducing the risk of bubonic plague and hantavirus, so I helped ths one off the road. Sadly, it was injured, perhaps by some ignorant motorist who would prefer a slow, painful death from black plague? I've never had a rattlesnake strike at me or act offensive in any way.

Instead, they warn me of their presence, and move in the opposite direction at the earliest convenience. They're shy, reclusive creatures and avoid us whenever possible. I always feel priveleged at having seen one.

"I recollected that her eye excelled in brightness, that of any other animal, and that she has no eye-lids—She may therefore be esteemed an emblem of vigilance.—She never begins an attack, nor, when once engaged, ever surrenders: She is therefore an emblem of magnanimity and true courage.—As if anxious to prevent all pretensions of quarreling with her, the weapons with which nature has furnished her, she conceals in the roof of her mouth, so that, to those who are unacquainted with her, she appears to be a most defenseless animal; and even when those weapons are shewn and extended for her defense, they appear weak and contemptible; but their wounds however small, are decisive and fatal:—Conscious of this, she never wounds till she has generously given notice, even to her enemy, and cautioned him against the danger of treading on her.—Was I wrong, Sir, in thinking this a strong picture of the temper and conduct of America?"
- Benjamin Franklin

Little Lakes Valley for Dawn, Tenaya Lake for Sunset

2010-07-29T19:54:00.001-07:00

Tenaya Lake Pollen Lines, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

I'm going on so many hikes, it's getting hard for me to follow me! I know, I'll go on my blog and see where I've been... Doh!

OK, so painstakingly reconstructing my movement by photo timestamps it now comes back to me... after Minaret Lake I shot Rock Creek/Little Lakes Valley for dawn, then made my way back to Mammoth to talk to Ranger Mike about destinations. He had photos from all over on his PC, recommended a bunch of places, and issued me a permit to hike to Gardisky Lake up near Saddlebag so I could shoot back towards Conness Peak at sunrise. It didn't turn out that way, but I'm getting ahead of myself... let me start with Rock Creek.

The Mosquito Flat trailhead at the end of the Rock Creek road has a hikers' walk-in camp at the end... all you need is a wilderness permit to stay there. That puts you right there to do a short hike before dawn to get up the lakes as the alpen glow starts to light up the peaks. It's a lot easier to pull this off in the Fall, when the sun comes up later! Anyway, you can start a few hundred yards up the trail (and some bushwhacking to the south) at Long Lake, but I usually go a mile or so up to the first lake on the trail There's an even better lake another mile up, but who wants to get up that early? Either way plan to arrive roughly 30 minutes before the published sunrise time, as the sun will stike these tall peaks 10-15 minutes before sunrise. For the more subtle alpenglow before the direct sunlight, allow yourself that additional 15 minutes. Make sure you also make allownaces for your fitness level and your degree of acclimation to the elevation around 9000 feet (another reason to stay overnight nearby... it makes the hiking easier). One really nice feature about Little Lakes Valley is that the mos tinteresting mountains to shoto are far enough to the south that you're not shooting directly away from the sun, and your shadow doesn't get in your shots after the sun rises. You can shoot your way up the valley for hours.

To make a long story short, one brunch, coffee / Internet stop and wilderness permit later I was off to Yosemite. The weather didn't seem interesting enough for a great show at Cathedral Lakes that night, so I headed over to Tenaya Lake.

The west end of the lake offers a variety of interesting foregrounds and a nice view of the granite ridges over the east end, so I headed there. The wind died right on schedule as the sun dropped and the light warmed. I crossed the outlet creek to shoot from the crushed granite beaches, but evan with heavy repellent the mosquitos were too persistent, so I retreated with a few nice shots already captured.

In Search of Cathedral Peak Reflections

2010-07-28T18:58:00.001-07:00

Cathedral Peak Summer Alpenglow, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

I started the day up near Saddlebag Lake to shoot a sunrise timelapse sequence on a nearby ridge. Then I hiked in to explore the lakes up by the old mining camp of Bennettville, hiking out in time to move to Tuolumne Meadows for a Cathedral Lakes sunset hike.

I arrived at Cathedral Lakes early enough to scout out both lakes. I arrived at Lower Cathedral Lake to find a enthusiastic welcoming committee of ravenous, probably disease-ridden, blood-sucking bugs. The few surviving human visitors to this lake were beating a hasty +retreat, doing what will be forever etched in my mind as the "Cathedral Lake dance," an awkward combination of jogging, arm-waving, stream-hopping and loud expletives.

Spotting a reflection of Cathedral Peak accompanied by an unreal, seemingly metallic cobalt rending of sky blue in the inky tea-colored waters of a nearby stagnant pool, I decided to make some use of the rock-like camera gear which for the past 3.5 miles had only served as ballast in my daypack. Aware of the risk of picking up some rare and exotic plague from the parasites spawned in this pool of decaying primordial goo, I blithely pulled out a small vial of insect repellent to keep the little pests at bay. The repellent was 100% DEET, which I knew was roughly 3.4 times stronger than the maximum effective concentration of 29% as determined by Consumer Reports. It's not possible to repel mosquitos any better than 100%, and I might grow new organs and evolve into some awkward new life form from excessive toxic chemical exposure, but perhaps I could keep the little buggers 3.4 times farther away and reduce my odds of becoming a curiousity at the Centers for Disease Control.

The chemical haze only served to confuse the little creatures, which continued to bump into my arms and legs, sing in my ears, dicover patches of unprotected flesh around my eyes, and (the last straw) congregate on my camera and in front of the lens.

I made quick work of the mosquito pond, checked the map for a possible direct route to the upper lake, and struck out to find a game trail that would lead me over the polished granite cliffs between me and my next destination.

I arrived at the upper lake to find mosquitos slightly lower in numbers, but no less annoying, so I kept moving farther up the westward granite slope to get farther and farther from their home. Eventually I ended up on a large and more or less flat rock way up the slope, killing time before sunset by killing mosquitos, and counting the ones resting on my camera and tripod (up to 12).

The wind picked up however, so I had to move down to the lake to increase my odds of finding some calm water to get the reflection that I had gone up there for. Fortunately the wind calmed down for a few minutes right when I needed it to, so I was able to catch a few good shots before making the long, dark hike back out to the trailhead at Tuolumne Meadows.

Second Try at Minaret Lake

2010-07-28T18:44:00.001-07:00

First Light on The Minarets, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

After getting shut out on my attempt to make a visit to this lake realtively easy from the adjacent canyon, I returned a few days later to make the long, hot 7.5 mile hike up from the bottom, via Devil's Postpile National Monument. This time I camped in the monument ot be able to drive my own vehicle in, which greatly simplified logistics (and enabled me to use a bear box to safely store food away form my vehicle, an option which was lacking on the prior week's trip when the ranger station advised me to park at Mammoth Mountian and take the shuttle in).

It would be a 15 mile round trip, so I budgeted two nights in case I might want a layover day to go explore nearby lakes.

In the end however I decided that I wanted to make sure tha I got to Yosemite and Cathedral Lakes more, so I hiked back out the daya after arriving, and headed back to the Tioga Pass/Saddlebag Lake area to catch sunrise and get ina hike to the old mining camp of Bennettville before making the Cathedral Lake hike in time for sunset.

Quick Overnight to Twenty Lakes Basin

2010-07-28T18:18:00.001-07:00

Early Morning at Conness Lake, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

The subtraction of Minaret Lake from my John Muir Wilderness trip left me with an extra day on my hands. On the exit day from Devil's Postpile National Monument I headed up to Rock Creek to catch Little Lakes Valley at dawn while the peaks had snow on them, then I headed up to Saddlebag Lake at 10,000 feet to catch the boat taxi down the lake to the Twenty Lakes Basin. The mosquitos were thick and aggressive, as was becoming a theme for the season. I had just enough time to catch a couple of Brook Trout or dinner, make camp, and prepare for an early sunrise (sleep).

By dawn I made my way up to Conness Lakes, and I worked my way to one of the upper lakes to catch one with snow and ice still on it. Descend, break camp, hike out, catch the boat taxi, and off to the next location!

The Trail Succumbs to Snow

2010-07-28T17:56:00.001-07:00

John Muir Wilderness Sunrise, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

Descending from Garnet lake to Shadow Lake, the mosquitos were becoming more numerous and persistent, so it was a fast trip. Taking a right turn up the canyon, I completed the roughly 5 mile trip to Ediza Lake. There was no access to the northside of the lake and there still quite a bit of snow on the north-facing and east-facing slopes, so campsites were difficult to come by. The wind was strong, but the mosquitos were stronger. I had a brief moment of relative calm winds and water to catch some reflected light on the far shore, then I retreated to the safety of the tent to prepare for dawn, which fortunately arrived calm and clear. It wasn't cold enough for the snow to re-freeze solid, and I hadn't carried crampons or gaitors on this trip, so I decided not to traverse the snow and pass up past Iceberg Lake, and to put off a visit to Minaret Lake.

Gem on the John Muir Trail

2010-07-28T17:16:00.001-07:00

Early Morning Light at Garnet Lake, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

Next on the itinerary was Garnet Lake. Following the John Muir Trail from Thousand Island Lake to Garnet Lake was an easy two miles and change, so I had time to shoot a few pictures at Ruby Lake along the way, and to catch some Brook Trout for dinner once I arrived. Fortuantely a guide-led tour of hikers arrived to help finish dinner so I could run off to catch sunset.

It wasn't clear whether or not sunset color would punch through the clouds, but in the nick of time the sun came through and the skies really lit up. I had a few short minutes to run around and see how many compositions I could capture. There were far more than I could do justice to, but I knew that I was bound to have a couple of keepers.

I returned to camp to enjoy some nice "blue hour" light, with a faint echo of sunset light from the distant horizon still painting the bottoms of the clouds.

For sunrise I moved further west along the northern shore of the lake, enjoying the changing light on Banner Peak and on the lake's islands.

Starting Backpacking Season with a Bang

2010-07-16T16:52:00.000-07:00

First Morning Dawn, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

I was determined this Summer to do a fair amount of backpacking to reach some of the most scenic portions of the High Sierra. Although trail accessibility was delayed somewhat by a healthy Winter, I was determined to get up to a few lakes before the snow on the surrounding peaks was entirely gone. For the first trip I decided to do a loop out of Devil's Postpile National Monument starting on July 10, from Agnew Meadows to Thousand Island Lake, Garnet Lake, Ediza Lake, and possibly cross-country over to Minaret Lake. Much of the trip would be in the vicinity of 10,000 feet in elevation, so I built an extra acclimation day into the schedule.

I could only get a wilderness permit to enter on the Pacific Crest Trail, so I'd start off with an eight mile day rising a couple of thousand feet. That portion of the trial was exposed, hot, my packing wasn't as Spartan as it should have been, and I was carrying five days of food, so it was a long haul. Obtaining the wilderness permit, taking the requirted bus shuttle into the park, and the hike itself led me to arrive jsut before the sun went down. There was wind on the lake, so I'd have to wait until morning for the best conditions and light. Fortunately the dawn conditions didn't disappoint, with the snow-clad Banner Peak reflecting in the still waters of the lake, an angular cloud providing additional light-catching capability and interest.

During the day I navigated cross-country up to a nearby ridge to catch a view over Sullivan Lake and down to the June Lakes Loop. I ruturned in time to catch alpenglow in the sky over a small iceberg.

Fortunately the skies that night were clear and no moon was visible, so the starts were incredible: bright and endless in number. The lake was calm, so the Milky Way reflected clearly in its waters. With a start like this, I couldn't wait to see what the next days would bring!

July 4th Weekend

2010-07-07T15:59:00.000-07:00

Fireworks Over Lake Tahoe, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

Even landscape photographers take a day or two off from time to time, but that doesn't mean that we can't still take our cameras along! On Saturday I enjoyed fireworks and a BBQ at a friend's house overlooking Napa Valley, then headed up to Lake Tahoe the next night to enjoy fireworks there as well. Before the fireworks began, I spent some time exploring the prolific lupine growing along the shorline.

Twisted Trunks: The World's Oldest Living Things

2010-07-06T17:36:00.001-07:00

Twisted Trunks: Light and Dark, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

As my kids and I were flying around the Eastern Sierra last week, it came up that they hadn't visited the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest. It's an amazing place, and given the heat of the Owens Valley that week, an elevation of 10,000+ seemed like an even more attractive place to be.

In addition to being interesting for their exotic shapes, bristlecone pine trees are very long-lived. One nicknamed "Methuselah" was measured via a coring tool to be 4789 years old in 1957, so it should turn 4842 this year. In 1964 another specimen "Prometheus" was determined to be over 4000 years old, but the coring tool broke, so permission was given to cut it down. It turned out to be at least 4844 years old when it was killed.
We reached the Patriarch Grove after sunset, but we still had enough light to get some shots.

My daughter found this unique "wooden arch" etched into one of the tough old trunks.

The next morning we woke up in BLM's Grandview Campground at an elevation of roughly 9000 feet, and we found a scorpion outside the tent... right next to our shoes!

Dawn of Opportunity

2010-07-06T15:45:00.001-07:00

Dawn of Opportunity, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

My memory gets a bit hazy on the details as I dragged myself through a sequence of relatively sleepless days, but eventually I woke up early enough to shoot a timelapse sequence of the sun rising over the Bodie Hills off towards the horizon.

The Bodie Hills are among 14 areas being considered for National Monument status. Many of them are rarely-used areas of BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land, which enables you to go use them to your heart's content with minimal restriction. National Monument status could close them to maost use, except in developed campgrounds. You'll then be charged for the "improvements" (the sound of adjacent generators and drunken rednecks blasting country western music... sorry, just my recent experience in campgrounds during the past 2 weeks...), they'll probably charge National Monument/National Park $20-25 fees instead of the BLM's mroe typical $2-3 (when there's a fee at all), and the added attention will ensure that the lands get far more trampelled and whatever endangered wildlife allegedly needs "protection" there will be more challenged and endangered than ever before.

Don't worry though, there's a group of people in Washington who believe that their sole purpose in life is to obstruct anything that the President does (never mind that meeting in the middle is often the healthiest approach for citizens of the country), so eleven lawmakers have introduced a bill to block the administration's ability to create monuments. I'm clearly no knee-jerk supporter of converting these lands to monuments, but I have huge reservations about blocking the ability to create them when appropriate (and when that symbolic move won't actually cause worse problems). Isn't the two-party system supposed to result in rational, middle-of-the-road compromises which actually make sense? Why do we seem to have a recent rise in extreme polarization and rampant dysfunction? Is it simply a case of "because it works" (to make politicians bribe-rich), combined with a gradual erosion of adequate controls to punish people when there's excess?

We didn't venture into the Bodie Hills on this trip though. Instead we stuck along highway 395, heading up to Big Meadow near the town of Bridgeport to meet with Tom Lowe of www.Timescapes.org. We found a nice patch of iris growing in an irrigated pasture (replacing the ubiquitous sagebrush in the area), we explored some side roads where I shot some "sundog" rainbows in the sky, and we watched some large young hawks sitting in a nest on a power pole, while "Mama hawk" circled overhead, watching us.
We finished the day back in the iris field, with Tom filming my daughter walking in the warm light of the setting sun.

Foresta Lupine at Dusk

2010-07-06T14:31:00.001-07:00

Foresta Lupine at Dusk, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

After photographing the lunar eclipse over Half Dome from Olmstead Point, I drove down to Yosemite Valley with the intention of staying there for the night and shooting "moonbows", lunar rainbows from the light of the full moon shining in the spray of Yosemite Valley's massive waterfalls. In spite of getting in line roughly 45 minutes before that morning's same-day campsite release at 8:30am, Yosemite holds back too few campsites to meet demend and I was unable to get a campsite that morning. Although my name was then placed on another list for reservation cancellations which would be released at 3, again I showed up and the supply dramatically failed to meet the demand (Yosemite removed a campground in 2001 following a flood, and failed to replace the lost sites or develop others, so sites are reserved months in advance and anyone who can't plan that far in advance is simply out of luck).

You've seen the weather that I encounter though... I often get lucky. Just as I was about to leave the unappeased crowd milliong about the campground reservation office, a woman walked up to me and offered to sell me her campsite for that night. She had bought it on Craigslist from soneone else who couldn't use it!

To make a long story short, my kids took me on a tour of the "Indian Caves", we returned and had the campsite set up by 6pm or so, had completed dinner by shortly after 7, but the sky was blue and clear, and I was too tired to go out for an alpenglow-only sunset. I went to the tent to take a nap, setting my alarm to get up late at night to go shoot moonbows. The alarm went off, I was too tired to get up, and I went back to sleep.

The next day packed up camp, took care of some adminstrative things via wi-fi in Curry Village, and headed up towards Foresta to see how the lupine were doing.

First stop was Cascade Creek, which is in shade this time of day, to capture long exposures. Next we explored the lupine fields at Foresta during a relatively colorless sunset.
Without no campsites available in Yosemite Valley, we aimed for the Eastern Sierra, where at least the Forest Service (under the Department of Agriculture, not the dysfunctional Department of the Interior)) provides a far better match between campsite demand and availability (and they allow siteless primitive camping as an option so site availability is not an issue).
Along the way the moon rose, so I paused to capture the moon rising behind trees on the ridges. I also paused to photograph frogs singing in my favorite pond near Tioga Pass.

Late, late, late at night, I had survived my campsite shortage and bureaucrat-imposed exile far from Yosemite Valley, and I had set up camp by 2:30am in the Eastern Sierra.

Aggressive Black Bears in the Sierra Nevada

2010-07-06T11:45:00.001-07:00

Black Bear Territory Dispute, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

Typically black bears in California's Sierra Nevada are considered relatively harmless. Yosemite National park for years encouraged campers to chase them out of their campsites, as if they were large, furry stray dogs. The legality of bear hunting in adjacent national forests encouraged bears to teach each generation of cubs to be wary of humans.

The death of a bear by stoning at the hands of a boy scout troop in recent years encouraged Yosemite to retract their policy of having campers aggressively defend their campsites from bears. Expanding designation of wilderness areas has further decreased human aggression towards bears, resulting in the doubling of bear populations since the 1980s, and greater competition for food. A greater number of much bolder bears pursuing a limited food supply has resulted in an absurd numbers of vehicle and home break-ins by bears every year.

The management practices in Yosemite National Park alone have resulted in roughly 1000 vehicle break-ins by bears per year there since the late 1990s. Yosemite management focuses on the positive and notes that bear incidents are down, but as you check into campgrounds in Yosemite Valley you can still see that season's scorecard, with the numbers passing the 600 and 700 mark every Fall. Yosemite officials blame visitors, urging them to remove food from their vehicles, but even after decades of having this problem Yosemite has failed to place an adequate number of metal "bear boxes", and they've even where a few have been provided such as Curry Village, management has failed to adequately distribute them around the parking lots to encourage and facilitate their use, revealing the problem as being as much due to egregious mismanagement as anything else.

There have also been a number of attacks on humans by bears, including one last week in a campground in El Dorado County. The count was approximately a doxen from 1980-2003, but there were only 3 in the 10 years from 1983-1993, seven from 1993-1996, and with attacks in 2007, 2008 , 2009 and 2010, the rate remains troubling. Bear attacks also occur in other states such as New Mexico and Colorado, and the Sierra Club is now recommending that everyone who enters bear country carry pepper spray designed for the long distance shots needed to repel bears. Bear spray has been proven to be more effectve than guns. Protect yourself.

Lunar Eclipse Moonset from Olmsted Point

2010-07-06T11:25:00.001-07:00

Lunar Eclipse Moonset by Olmsted Point, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

Using the free program The Photographer's Ephemeris to predict the path of the moon during the lunar eclipse as starting over Half Dome and ending a few degrees to the North on the horizon, I set my camera up to capture a timelapse sequence of the event. It will take a significant amount of time and effort to produce the video, but I did take a couple of shots around sunrise that I can share.

Following Sierra Clouds Over Tioga Pass

2010-07-06T10:30:00.001-07:00

Clouds Over Tioga Pass Pond, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

After pursuing a large storm parked over the Eastern end of the Mono Basin for a while, I turned my attention towards getting up into Yosemite National Park to shoot the lunar eclipse late that night. Fortunately upon arriving in the Tioga Pass area I was treated to some nice broken clouds that would make shots taken long he way more distinctive.

My first stop was alongside Ellery Lake, where the light was fantastic but challenging, since cameras do not "see" in the same way that we do. Our eyes change exposure constantlya s we look around a scene, and there is no way that we can fully reflect both the "levelling" of exposures that our eyes perform and yet retain the full range of brightness and contrast that we also perceive in the overall view. In this case I simply chose to use Adobe Lightroom's Fill Light to make the shadows more accessible, and to decrease Brightness to prevent highlights from being blown out. A few quick shots at Ellery, and I was back to my quest to get over the pass.

Tioga Pass sits at an elevation of 9943 feet. There are some ponds in the area that can provide some nice reflections, but the wind was just energetic enough to encourage me to pass them by this time. A couple of miles down the road however there's a larger pond which sits lower and is protected by trees, so the reflection of the couds, Mt. Dana, and surrounding forest was excellent.
There was still snow in places among the trees and the water was high, so there were some unique shooting opportunities to be found. However, there were three cars stopped already and 8 or 9 photographers who seemed firmly entrenched in some of the best shooting positions, so I carried my camera and a couple of lenses so I could work around them. That turned out to be an advantage in some cases as I captured some unique perspectives that I might not have taken the time to try had my camera been attached to a tripod.
I continued my exploration past Tuolumne Meadows. Tenaya Lake was too rough from wind to be particularly photogenic, but I found a small snowmelt pond which had a nice reflection of a ridge bathed in warm evening light. There were few clouds to catch sunset light however, so I returned to Tuolumne Meadows where some coulds along the Sierra crest could catch the light.

Storm Clouds Over The Mono Basin

2010-07-06T10:11:00.001-07:00

Storm Clouds Over Mono Craters, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

On this afternoon I was eager to head over Tioga Pass to Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park, but as I drove north from Bishop in the Eastern Sierra and entered the Mon Basin, there were some nice storm clouds building over Mono Lake. That's too nice of a photo opportunity to pass up, so I turned on highwya 120 towards Mono Lake's South Tufa access.

When I arrived at the South Tufa turnoff, it was clear that the majority of the clouds were well East of the South Tufa site, so I took a right fork in the dirt road to head out to Navy Beach, where I could place sand tufa formations in the foreground of my shots.
After taking a variety of shots I resumed my course towards Yosemite, but upon reaching the highway 395/120 intersection just South of the town of Lee Vining, a rainbow appeared over Mono Lake. If I could reach the Old Marina access point just north of town, I could adjust my position to place the rainbow over the tufa offshore there, and zoom in to get a ncie composition and to make the rainbow major elements in the photo. The rainbow came and went for a few moments, and then was gone. Fortunately I had arrived just in time to capture a frame or two with the image that I had anticipated.

Eastern Sierra Light Rocks Again

2010-07-05T23:25:00.001-07:00

Avocets at Sunset, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

I've been pursuing great light in the Eastern Sierra for many years. But it's only occasionally that you find an interesting wildlife subject willing to let you capture a few frames during that great light. So when I came across these American avocets feeding in brilliant orange sunset light, and they let me approach within a reasonable shooting distance, I had to shift focus from landscape to wildlife, or at least make the wildlife a key component in any landscape images I shot. So I focused on the avocets until the light faded signifcantly and their movements started to blur.

I was shooting with only one camera, so I didn't have much time or flexibility to switch between 200-400mm zoomed shots and much wider sunset landscape shots. So I chose to shoot the birds towards the sunset light, I did miss some incredible color on the clouds overhead and behind me.
Fortunately after the main light show subsided, there was still a lot of nice saturated blue light, and a subtle echo of sunset light re-emerged as well. I was able to productively shoot until nearly an hour after the "official" sunset time. All in all it was a great evening!

Sunset Trees Reflection

2010-07-05T22:21:00.001-07:00

Sunset Trees Reflection II, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

Sometimes the simple, minimalist shots resonate with us. This scene was found on one of the reservoirs not far From Truckee, California. The particularly wet/humid Spring we've been having has been great for broken couds at sunset, while moderate temperatures have minimized wind.

Shooting the Big Sur Coast

2010-06-16T11:10:00.001-07:00

Pre-Dawn Light on McWay Falls, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

If you're ever shooting on the Big Sur Coast, it helps to chat with the officers of the California Highway Patrol there. Aside fromresponding to accidents caused by the ocasional tourist who causes a truck to jackknife due to leaving her bicycle laying down on the road (true story), a lot of their time is spent interfacing with the public. They know every turnout and access point (and have participated in rescues people making their way to inaccessible spots), so they can help you spend your time there efficiently and safely

This waterfall, McWay Falls, is apparently one of two waterfalls dropping into the ocean in the continental United States, the other being Alamere Falls on Point Reyes.

This waterfall is accessed via the parking lot for Julia Pfeiffer State Park, but the park doesn't open until 8am, so I took this from a turnout up on Hwy 1, a few dozen yards higher than the standard path. The park also asks for a $10 fee for entry and parking!

There are some seriously quirkly rules and restrictions for accessing much of the coast, so I'll try to add notes as I add photos. For example, I blew off Pfeiffer Beach, a Forest Service access (due to all of those trees on the beach?), but unfortunately they've allowed a concessionaire to profit from Federal Recreation Passholders who bought the annual pass under the understanding that it would gain them entry to USDA Forest Service sites. They also close at sunset, not 30-40 minutes later when the sunset color is over, so it's virtually worthless to photographers who prefer to shoot in the best light(at least the ones who choose not to risk getting a ticket). I'll be sending the confused USDA bureaucrats some correspondence on that one... and I'll share the names with concerned photographers as well so your voices can be heard and your interests represented. Bureaucrats don't like risk, so I suspect they may show some flexibility if their users start raising a stink about counterproductive policies. Point Lobos State Park just up the road allows photographers to stay until 30 minutes after sunset, stilla bit tight but a far more reasonable compromise.

Topaz Lake Sunrise

2010-06-05T13:34:00.000-07:00

Spinning Top, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (actually indoors for a couple of da.

Topaz Lake is one of those places that I rarely plan on being at when the light is best, but I often find myself there anyway as I make my way between Tahoe, Mono Lake, and Monitor and Ebbetts passes.

On this morning I was there in time to watch a nicely shaped Sierra Wave lenticular cloud gradually light up from orange to pink to white, and I stayed long enough to watch the warm morning sunlight slide down the foothills to the lake.

The only thing I regretted was not carrying my fishing rods down to the lake, as there were large trout feeding, taunting me just within casting distance. The lake straddles the California Nevada border, and although I was standing in Nevada facing California, I later determined that my California fishing license would have enabled me to take a few casts. Oh well, the fish will only be bigger when I return!

Fiery Mono Lake Sunrise

2010-06-04T13:27:00.000-07:00

Fiery Mono Lake Sunrise, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (actually indoors for a couple of da.

I camped on a sagebrush-covered knoll overlooking Mono Lake with an expansive view so I could easily assess the prospects for a great sunrise early the next morning. As I had anticipated, the heavier storm clouds from the night before had broken up somewhat, leaving interesting clouds for the sun to light up but also leaving enough of an opening to the East to offer the promise of sending the orange sunrise light shooting in under them.

I moved quickly to get dressed and drive over to the South Tufa site with enough time left over to alk to the lake before the best light arrived. When I arrived, the parking lot was empty! The Sierra Nevada however already ahd a deep blood red tint on them, so there was no time to waste. I half walked, half jogged to the lake. It was tempting to start shooting immediately, but I watned to get a timelapse sequence going a couple of coves over, so I made my way over there as fast as I could.

Smoky Owens Valley Morning

2010-06-03T13:57:00.000-07:00

Pre-Dawn Meander, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (actually indoors for a couple of da.

This morning started with smoke from a forest management fire the night before having settled with the coldest air down towards Crowley Lake, so I decided to stay a little higher at first so I could shoot towards the Sierra Nevada without much optical interference. I visited an area of nice cracked mud patterns.

Next I visited a pond where I could find a nice reflection shooting towards the Sierra Nevada as they caught the rising sun.

I was fortunate to also find a pair of American Avocets performing a courtship dance.
Once the sun was up I moved over to a large pond where, wind conditions permitting, I might zoom in on a reflection featuring the backlit smoke against a minimalist horizon.

Next I moved to a very small vernal pool that I had shot at a year earlier under more cloudy conditions, but this time the shot would ahve a totally differnt feel, as I'd catch the snowy Sierra contrasted against a blue sky.

Your Favorite Landscape Photography Workshops?

2010-06-02T15:38:00.001-07:00

Oxbow Sunset, Grand Teton National Park, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

Which organizations or photographers have you experienced excellent field workshops with?

I love sharing my deep location familiarity and extensive technique experience with others, so I'd like to identify additional field workshop partners to work with!

Happy Birthday Mom!

2010-05-24T09:29:00.001-07:00

Happy Birthday Mom!, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

If I count those candles correctly, she's 22 years old!

If you attended the party, I'm starting to upload photos on my site www.JeffSullivan.BIZ, in a gallery here:
http://jeffsullivan.smugmug.com/Events/Barbaras-75th-Birthday-Party/12285030_Yp4nM#876905885_Gj6kB

Eta Aquarids Meteor Shower Peaks in Early May; Perseid Meteor Timelapse I Revised: Slower HD Video

2010-05-03T09:59:00.001-07:00

Eta Aquarids Meteor Shower Peaks in Early May; Perseid Meteor Timelapse I Revised: Slower HD Video, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

May 2, 2010 - The Eta Aquarids meteor shower, caused by debris from Halley's Comet, is happening all this week. "Meteor Mark" at MeteorBlog has a nice writeup on it:

www.meteorblog.com

"Since April 19th the Eta Aquariids meteor shower has been active. The shower will start to really heat up around May 3rd. The Eta Aquariids usually treats us to more than a full week of meteor activity. The shower will begin to get stronger and stronger as we near the peak on May 6th"

"The Eta Aquariids usually treats us to more than a full week of meteor activity. The shower will begin to get stronger and stronger as we near the peak on May 6th. Beginning with about 20 to 30 meteors per hour on May 3rd the shower will dazzle us on May 6th with up to 80 meteors per hour. The shower’s name is the Eta Aquariids and will appear to radiate from the constellation Aquarius. Viewers will be able to see approximately one or two meteors per minute."

Point Southeast near the horizon in a dark location to capture this one, perferably before the moonrise. If your camera can handle ISO 6400, try a 30 second exposure at f/2.8, or if you can use ISO 1600 with an f/1.4 lens, or simply use an external trigger or timer to lengthen your exposure.

Good luck!

Creating Timelapse Sequences from Digital Photos

2010-04-30T12:07:00.001-07:00

Zion National Park - Sunrise Timelapse, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

If you have a timer that can trigger shots at a regular intervals (AKA an intervalommeter function), you can have the free VirtualDub software convert your shots into a timelapse video.

Browse the forums at Timescapes.org for more details, but in the meantime browse my draft results in my Timelapse & HD Video set on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffreysullivan/sets/72157622147534372/

Grand Teton/Yelllowstone Landscape Photography Workshop May 31 - June 5

2010-04-26T09:41:00.001-07:00

Oxbow Sunset, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

Join me for a landscape photography workshop in Grand Teton / Yellowstone National Parks with Mountain High Workshops, May 31 - Jun 5: http://www.mountainhighworkshops.com/TetonYellowstone.html

Our workshops feature:
- Low instructor to participant ratio
- Processing instruction with Photoshop and other techniques
- Individual image evaluation and critique

Here's a flier with more details:
http://www.mountainhighworkshops.com/TYWannouncement.pdf

We've held workshops in the Eastern Sierra, Arches and Canyonlands national parks and Joshua Tree National park, and received excellent feedback as noted here:
http://www.mountainhighworkshops.com/testimonials.html

Hope you can join us!