New Guide Books to California and World Landscape Photography

"Photographing California - Vol. 1: North - A Guide to the Natural Landmarks of the Golden State" by Gary Crabbe is now available! I'm currently completing Vol. 2: South. Gary's new book is the latest book in the popular "Photographing the Southwest" series by Laurent Martres. Laurent is our publisher for these new volumes. Just released last month was "Photographing the World: A Guide to Photographing 201 of the Most Beautiful Places on Earth" by Tom Till. You can get free shipping from Amazon by ordering both books via the links in the column to the right.

Black Friday Deals for Photographers

Black Friday Sale - Adobe Lightroom 4 - $79.99 (regularly $149.99, 46% off)
This is what I use for 99% of my image editing, even for pre and post-editing star trails and HDR images.  I had been using the beta version of this software and found that my results were turning out better than they had in Lightroom 3, so I upgraded to version 4 in early August.

Black Friday Deal on Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 & Premiere Elements 11 Bundle - $69.95 (regularly $149.99, 53% off)
I recently bought the previous version 10 to get Premiere Elements to edit my time-lapse videos and set them to music.  I mainly use Adobe Lightroom for image editing, but it was nice to get Adobe Photoshop Elements in the bundle for occasional use of layers.

Other products:

Shop Amazon - Black Friday Deals Week

How to Set Up a Photography Web Site and WordPress Photo Blog

There are many free photography sites on the Internet you can participate on to interact with other photographers.  Perhaps you'd like to start a blog, where you can consolidate your images and stories in one place.  It's pretty easy to determine that WordPress is the standard for most blogs these days, and there are even free third party applications you can add to use your existing content on those popular photography sites.  You can set up a blog on WordPress.org for free, but when you try that, you quickly find out that they don't allow the installation of those useful third party tools you've read about.

Perhaps you'd also like to create a more comprehensive Web site as a place you can design and control to represent yourself.  But many Web site hosting companies impose storage limits and bandwidth limits.  Will they shut you down and demand more money if you upload too many photos, or your Web site is actually successful and starts to develop visitor traffic?

You can have both: a hosted WordPress blog and your own Web site with custom domain name.  You certainly don't need to buy two domain names and pay to host them separately.  But even if you already bought a hosted site to install a WordPress blog to, you probably installed it in the default way, which could make building a Web site around it unnecessarily awkward.  After trying WordPress.org then buying my own custom domain name www.JeffSullivanPhotography.com and installing WordPress, moving my Blogger blog over and setting up Google+ post to make blog posts over on my WordPress blog, I looked into adding a Web site as well.  At that point I finally figured out how I should have done it the first time, and I deleted and re-installed WordPress.

If you're considering what to to regarding a blog and/or Web site, over on wordpress.org they recommend three hosting companies.  The least expensive one, Bluehost, has a sale underway at $4.95/mo. for hosting unlimited domains, content and bandwidth.  Read some reviews of their service, use this link to check them out:
http://www.bluehost.com/track/jeffsullivanapproved
Disclosure: if you sign up through that link, I'll get a small "affiliate" credit (I have to buy gas and lenses somehow, the rocks and trees don't pay me).  I can do you a big favor in return, and save you the days I spent doing it all wrong, re-doing it, then re-doing it again.  Send me a message to let me know you signed up through my link, and I'll tell you what I learned about installing WordPress... the third time I installed it after trying and rejecting both the free WordPress.org version and a default hosted installation.  I can refer to you many useful add-on applications for photographers, which can help you move content over from Blogger, Google+, and so on.

I'm currently going through the toy box of third party tools, testing them and researching ways to integrate my content from SmugMug and other sites.  Stay tuned, I hope to have something worth showing soon, after Thanksgiving week if not sooner.

Will Video Watchers Really "Tip" To Avoid Ads on Vimeo?

Let's find out.  I turned on the new "Tip Jar" feature for this video on Vimeo:



What do you think, will people reward decent content not marred by ads, or is everything on the internet assumed to be free?

New Business Card for Night Workshops at Bodie

I should have my 2013 dates shortly.  I can't wait to go back!

Perseid Meteor Shower Time-Lapse / While The Sun Was Sleeping, Life Audience

For the Perseid meteor shower this year I shot mostly short star trails sequences, which make short time-lapse movies, so I added footage I hadn't yet shown from 2010 and 2011 and set it all to the amazing "While The Sun Was Sleeping" by Life Audience.

If I remember correctly, the first 8 clips are form the meteor shower, then I added various clips to fill out the time of the song.  I may have shown some of the clips before, but setting them to music is new for me.  I'm working on several more concepts and songs; I'm sure they'll get better and better as I develop experience on the post-production side.

Moon Rise Over Half Dome in Yosemite

Moon Rise over Hall Dome, Yosemite National Park

I've been pursuing moon rises behind Half Dome for many years. The weather doesn't always cooperate, but I've caught it from several different vantage points now, and I have a few more angles to catch it from on return trips.

This time there had been a couple of light snowfalls already in the Fall, so there was a nice dusting of snow and the beginnings of ice on the lakes as I crossed Tioga Pass.  Here's Ellery Lake with Ice and patches of open water.

The light wasn't great as I passed tuolumne Meadows, but upon reaching Tenaya Lake, I found a mirror surface reflecting trees on the far side.  You could get great pictures if you moved away from the families throwing rocks into the lake, and timed your shots to avoid the worst of the ripples they created.

Next I pulled into the Olmstead Point parking lot.  I was shocked at the quantity of people crowding the area so late in October.  I didn't stop.

Then I checked a few stands of dogwood trees tucked into groves of redwood trees, and found the dogwoods brightly colored and beautifully back-lit.

Proceeding for a lap around Yosemite Valley, Upper Yosemite Fall was completely dry, missing even the modest wetness you'll often see on the rock.  Most of the deciduous trees seemed a couple of weeks behind schedule turning color, like the aspen had been in the Eastern Sierra this season.  The oaks were lightening somewhat, but not far enough along to warrant a stop by Cook's Meadow.  I did spot some trees nicely back-lit against Cathedral Rock, so I pulled over.

A large van full of photo workshop customers passed by; I figured I'd catch up with them in a few minutes, either in the turnout opposite Bridalveil Fall at Valley View, or a short while later catching the moon rise. 

Unfortunately in this dry year even spring-fed Bridalveil Fall is nearly non-existent, breaking up into a thin mist partway to the ground.  Noticing the angle of the sun, I stopped to see whether there was enough water in Bridalveil to create a rainbow in its mist.  Sure enough, the rainbow was there, and the low water of the Merced River made a perfect reflecting pool to offer creative compositions including colorful Fall foliage.  Odd that the photo workshop passed it up (perhaps they caught it the day before).

By then it was time to go set up for moon rise.  Curiously, the photography workshop was still nowhere to be found.  Had they really left the park only minutes before one of the events of the year in Yosemite? 

Last year the only other person who had anticipated the moon rise in the position I had chosen was a guy from Seattle shooting on film.  Of course once the moon rose, two or three dozen people joined us!  This year, from another location, I first met someone from Cincinnati.  As it turned out, someone had gotten the word out online, so roughly 2 dozen people more people eventually showed up (and there were apparently a few more at the vantage point I had used the prior year).  

A started one camera at 105mm focal length to capture a time-lapse video of the entire moon rise, and I used a second camera to capture the initial emergence at 400mm then the rest of the event at 200mm.  It'll take me a while to get each sequence processed, but so far it's looking good!  There are even a couple of climbers you can see move slightly in the video, on El Capitan directly opposite the moon in this image.  

I've been pretty busy this year wrapping up my guide book to California landscape photography, but I'll offer Yosemite landscape photography workshops as time permits:
http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/yosemite-national-park-photography-workshops/

Update August 20, 2014: Thanks to the +Royal Observatory Greenwich  for including my image in their video about the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2104 competition! 

I'm always honored to have my work recognized by the Royal Observatory in London, home of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and the Prime Meridian... the place that every longitude, every GPS coordinate on the planet, is defined relative to!  See and share the video on YouTube.

Orionid Meteor Shower 2012 Time-lapse Video - Music by Life Audience

My timelapse video including footage from the 2012 Orionid meteor shower is up on YouTube, enjoy!  I included some weather footage as a lead-in to help fill out the length of the song used, then the night photography starts a little after the 2 minute mark:  http://youtu.be/BDeWDJLmEIc?hd=1

Here's how you can shoot your own time-lapse video of the orionid meteor shower:Create a Timelapse Video of a Meteor Showerhttp://activesole.blogspot.com/2011/08/create-timelapse-video-of-meteor-shower.html

Orionid meteor shower October 20 - 21, 2012

I've been out chasing every major meteor shower since 2009, and many minor ones, whenever the viewing conditions are favorable.  Some of my more successful night of shooting have been published as time-lapse videos: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6012D9822C1BA1E7

If you like the soundtrack, check out the rest of the album by Life Audience over on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/wave-particles/id427106760
I love it, and no, they didn't pay me to say that!

New Astrophotography Time-lapse Demo Reel

Considering watching or photographing the Orionid Meteor Shower this weekend?  Here's my latest footage of the Perseid, Geminid, Zeta Perseid and Arietid meteor showers to get you in the mood.

I was recently contacted by Kerstin Inga of Life Audience about the possibility of setting some of their music to some of my time-lapse footage.  I've accumulated a quantity of video over the past 4 years, and their song "While You Were Sleeping" from their *Wave and Particles* album seemed perfect for some of my astrophotography clips.  If you like the track, check out other songs from this album on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/wave-particles/id427106760

If you like night photography, my 2013 workshop schedule will be announced here on my blog soon.

This is the culmination of hundreds of hours and many long night of effort from everyone involved.  YouTube likes and shares are greatly appreciated by the artists.  Thank you very much! 


Note: To best see the meteors, watch this video on YouTube, first selecting a quality of 720P HD and then making it go full screen: http://youtu.be/6YOxo7uI8ns?hd=1

Bodie Night Photography Workshop: September 22 Results

There were dramatic storm clouds building in the afternoon as we scouted the town for interesting night shots.  By the time we assembled at the front gate to start our session, there were columns of rain falling all around the town from the larger, darker masses of clouds.  Lightning flashed behind us, to the south, followed shortly by the loud crash and rumble of thunder.  The lightning was close... After all this planning, would be get rained out, or would we be forced to take shelter from the bolts or lightning?  A lightning strike can exceed 100 million volts and 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit... if these dry, old wooden structures are still standing, the town must have a good network of lightning rods to direct the energy into the ground.

As we assembled our gear, we made adjustments to what we'd wear and carry to account for the possibility of rain.  Sure enough just as we started walking into the town the rain started coming down.  It was only 45 minutes before sunset, so the light was fantastic, illuminating portions of the town in warm light, and creating rainbows to the northeast.  

The rain continued intermittently until sunset, then stopped as the twilight "blue hour" started.  The clouds started breaking, revealing the moon, which had already risen that afternoon.  The clouds were backlit by the moon during blue hour, providing a subtle and diffuse light on the landscape beneath the dramatic clouds.

The clouds dissipated very quickly as twilight gave way to night, so we shed our damp rain gear and bundled up for night.  I changed out of some wet clothes only to drop a gallon of water while refilling my water bottle, only to launch 1/4 of that gallon all over myself and my camera as I caught it on the way to the ground.  I was clearly destined to go back out and shoot wet!

A few photographers started interval timers on extra cameras at the Bodie Methodist Church to shoot star trails and timelapse sequences, then we headed up to the Standard Mill for some shots up there.  The moon was now clear of clouds and illuminating the landscape nicely.  On the way back down to town, many workshop participants stopped with my co-instructor and Nikon expert Lori Hibbett at the Bodie Schoolhouse to practice shooting star trails.  I took the rest one building down to the Wheaton & Hollis Hotel to light up the inside from a side window.

Once people had the hang of star trails, many dispersed around town to find their own subjects.  I met some people over at the old 1937 Chevy for some light painting more star trails. It was definitely handy that Lori and I could be two places at once, so we never experienced that nightmare workshop scenario where 8-10 people try to crowd around one subject (or simply lining up and ignoring the importance of having something interesting in the foreground of your composition)!  

The seven hours we have in the park after it closes goes by incredibly fast, so it's good that we've been visiting the park for years and many shot concepts worked out well ahead of time.  We've shot multiple night sessions in Bodie now under full moon, partial moon and no moon conditions, so we have the night considerations pretty well down as well.  A couple of "classic" night views are developing, but we have enough new night shot concepts in mind to keep both of us busy testing them for many more workshops. I hope that you may have the opportunity to join us sometime.

P.S. - As I write this, two slots for our upcoming workshop this Saturday October 6 have unexpectedly opened up.  I've restored the PayPal registration button in the right margin here on this blog at www.MyPhotoGuides.com.  Hope you can join us!  Read down a few posts on this blog to see images from our June 2 night session at Bodie.

Fall Colors Progress in the Mono Basin Area

Using digital photos I've taken in the Sierra Nevada over the past 8 years, I'm working on a project to examine how Fall colors progress in various sub-regions of the Eastern Sierra. The area centered in this album is centered around the Mono Basin

I'm collecting in an album images taken during the Fall in that general area, from Mammoth Lakes through Bridgeport. This is a work in progress; I'll gradually add photos from other years/dates, but follow this link to see what I have so far:

https://plus.google.com/photos/107459220492917008623/albums/5789566211029414833

I've include other photos from the area in October because photography in this area is never just about one thing, even during Fall color season!

So far it looks like the images are mainly centered around the October 6-22 period.  

For the latest conditions in 2012, here are some links to Fall colors reports:

Mono Lake Committee Fall Colors Report
http://www.monolake.org/today/2012/09/26/late-september-fall-color-update/

Parcher's Resort Fall Colors Report
http://parchersresort.net/fallcolor.htm

California Fall Color
http://www.californiafallcolor.com/?p=2027

So far it looks like June Lake hasn't really started turning much yet, so we may need until that Oct 13-21 timeframe before this area gets really good.  Bear in mine that storms can wreak havoc on the leaves, so it's better to be a little early than too late!

Night Workshops at Bodie State Historic Park

Whether your interest is moonlit portraits of the old buildings, light painting, star trails, Milky Way images or night timelapse photography, we can cover a lot in the space of a few hours!

We will meet in Bridgeport for an early dinner (no host) before we head out to Bodie. Dinner will be around 4:00 pm Saturday to allow us time to meet, eat and drive to the ghost town.  We will be greeted at the gate by our guides for the evening.  After a brief introduction from the Bodie Foundation, we will start our evening of photography from about 6:30 p.m. on, with a departure time of 1:00 a.m..

These are the last night workshops we'll schedule for 2012, and registration will be accepted on a first come, first-served basis.  Credit cards can be used to register through the PayPal links in the right column, or if you'd prefer to mail a check, contact me.

September 22nd  

Workshop Fee:    SOLD OUT!

October 6^th

Workshop Fee:   SOLD OUT!

Although our planned night photography workshops for Bodie this year are full, if you have a group of several people eager to go, contact me and perhaps we can schedule a new date.

Did You Catch the Perseid Meteor Shower Last Weekend?

I assembled this timelapse footage form the 2009 event and posted it on YouTube, with links from Facebook and Google+, so people could plan to go catch it.  I was shocked to see 9 or 10 days later that it had over 85,000 views!



Later this year I'll be leading a workshop to help people capture an even better event, the Geminid meteor shower, from Death Valley National Park.  Now you can produce results of astronomical proportions!  We'll try to follow a mix of day and night shooting, visiting some of the unique locations I've found while writing a guide book to landscape photography locations in Southern California.  I'm also working on securing a space for classroom sessions, so we can include critical post-processing training.  As always, contact me for further details!

New Google+ Page for Workshops at Bodie State Historic Park

To help people find my upcoming photography workshops at Bodie State Historic Park, I've set up a Bodie Photo Workshops page on Google+: https://plus.google.com/b/116719515450184310739/116719515450184310739/posts
Stay tuned for date announcements, or contact me to get on a list to receive updates.

Find us on Google+

Prime Conditions for the Lyrid Meteor Shower This Weekend!

Meteor Over the Salt Flats, originally uploaded by Jeffrey Sullivan.

The new moon on Saturday will provide prime dark sky viewing conditions for the Lyrid Meteor Shower this weekend. That's good, since the Lyrid Meteor Shower tends to produce up to 20 meteors per hour, the best meteor shower of Spring, but not quite up to the activity levels of other showers from late Summer through the rest of the year. Don't be surprised though if activity levels are higher, flurries of activity as high as 90 per hour have been recorded.

As with all meteor showers, the recommended viewing hours are midnight through twilight, since your position on the earth will rotate over to the side of the earth leading through space, which intersects more more of the specks of dust and ice which produce the meteors. The radiant, or point in the sky which the meteors appear to come from, rises in the Northeast in the evening for people in the Northern hemisphere, so depending upon your position on the earth it may be more or less overhead and slightly north of you at midnight (a program like StarWalk running on a smartphone or tablet can show you the radiant point).

Find a place with dark skies, bundle up in a chair so you can lie back and see the sky, and check it out!

The photo above is a Lyrid meteor captured next to the Milky Way over the Bonneville Salt Flats near Salt Lake City, Utah.  For advice on how to capture still images like this at night, use the search box above to find my post on how to capture Milky Way images, and I wrote one on creating night timelapse videos as well.

West Coast: Step Out and See the Moon Rise Next to Mars

A few days ago I provided a blog post with key astronomical events for the month. The rising of a "full mars", directly at opposition from the sun and fully lit as viewed form the earth, occurred over the weekend. Tonight however you get a double treat: The nearly-full moon will rise just in time to be in the sky for sunset, and as the sky darkens you'll see the still-bright Mars very close to it.


Here on the West Coast I'm looking at a 5:40 moon set vs. the sun setting at 5:56, so the moon will have some time to clear the horizon before the sunset color gets most intense. Keep shooting though, since Mars will become more noticeable as the sky darkens further. The StarWalk app shows Mars just to the left and above the moon.


Good luck, and happy shooting!

Astronomical Events Coming in March 2012

Mono Lake Moonrise (Re-edit), originally uploaded by Jeffrey Sullivan.

To get the best possible results with my astrophotography, I try to plan ahead to shoot as many astronomical events as I can. Here are some of the opportunities you'll have in the next month:

March 3/4: Mars at Opposition.  Mars will be as close as it gets to the earth, and will rise in the evening as the sun sets.
March 5: Mercury may be visible shortly after the sun sets through March 12, but on March 5 it reaches it maximum distance from the sun.
March 7: The nearly-full moon will rise just before sunset. Mars will rise right behind the moon in the evening sky.
March 8: Full moon.
March 9: The nearly-full moon will set just after sunrise.
March 10 - 20: Venus and Jupiter Conjunction
March 12: Arguably the best day of the Venus - Jupiter conjunction, as Jupiter will be just above Venus.
March 21: Thin crescent moon rises shortly before sunrise.
March 22: New Moon. March 21-24 will be good nights for star trail photography!
March 24: Thin crescent moon sets shortly before sunset.
March 24-25: Conjunction of Venus, Jupiter and the crescent moon.

I'll be out shooting with 25-30 of my photographer friends in Anza Borrego State Park and Death Valley National Park in the March 2-10 timeframe, and soon I'll be announcing photowalks for April, May and June.  The best place to catch my announcements will be on Google+:
http://www.Gplus.to/JeffSullivan

Shoot Wildflowers in the California Desert?

Anza Borrego State Park, California

How would you like to join me for a photowalk in March... capturing images of wildflowers, narrow, winding slot canyons, eroded badlands, cracked earth on a dry lakebed, a palm oasis or two, and more? We'll practice landscape photography, macro photography, and night photography including star trails and light painting.

No commitment necessary yet, I'm just checking for interest so I can get a sense of group size to finalize logistics. I'd propose starting in Anza Borrego for a weekend, and you can see 64 sample photos in the album above. The trip can also be easily extended to the Salton Sea area if some participants want a more comprehensive expedition. If there's sufficient interest, I'll announce more details in the next few working days.

The Geminid Meteor Shower Peaks Tonight!

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

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

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!

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.

Mono Lake afternoon reflection (2009 HDR).

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.

Eastern Sierra morning golden hour light (2009 HDR).

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.

Ellery Lake near Yosemite (2009 HDR).

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

3-exposure HDR.  Mono Lake storm (2009).

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.

If you decide to buy Photomatix, you can get a 15% discount by using the coupon code JeffSullivan when you by it from its publisher HDRsoft: http://www.hdrsoft.com/order.php

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

You Can Shoot a Magazine Cover

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!

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

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.