The moon sets
Technical details: shot through the bedroom window as a 7-frame HDR on a monopod. The monopod and the window account for the blurriness – not a single frame was sharp. The colors came out nicely, though.
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Moonset over Anchorage
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010Evening HDR in CS5
Saturday, June 5th, 2010
Evening HDR
Just a test shot that I thought I’d post. I may be putting up a couple more over this evening. Testing CS5′s “Merge to HDR Pro” function, comparing it to Photomatix Pro. This one is an excercise in rescuing a screwed up frame: I had the color balance set to tungsten when I took this, so everything was hyper-blue. Arguably still is, but that’s the HDR saturation effect. Click to continue »
Then and Now
Thursday, April 22nd, 2010Some people have noticed that we recently had a dump of snow in mid-April, and it appears that they think that this is late in the year for such antics. It isn’t late: it’s not all that unusual, in fact. The subject did cause me to think back, wondering what it was like last year at this time.
In retrospect, I suppose it’s not that different from now. We still have snow on the same trails, but only slightly more. The streets are about as bare as last year, perhaps slightly less. Click to continue »
Urban Camping in Anchorage
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009well, kinda. Normally, “urban campers” are the homeless. In this case though, I’m referring to a friend of mine in anchor-town (ed. fine, I’ll explain: local slang for “Anchorage”). He went camping this weekend in an area that is definately wild, but could still be considered part of town.
Check out his post, and especially his photographs. When’s the last time you’ve seen a moose carcass like that? Awesome!
While you’re at it, check out his site. He’s a local realtor and I’m sure he’d love some feedback. And if you’re in the market for a home in Anchorage, I’m sure he’d love the business!
Clouds in the sky
Sunday, June 21st, 2009
Clouds in the evening - 10pm
Look at the angle of the light on the clouds to the right. It’s at quite an angle, and yet it’s not yellowing. You know, the yellowing that you see as it gets closer to the golden hour? Not yet – it’s too early. This is 10pm last night. It’s probably two or three hours away from a colorful sunset.
There were great textures though, and the sky was unusually clear. These clouds are probably over the inlet or, at the closest, over the open fields at Elmendorf Air Force base.
Classic for my situation, I noticed them almost too late – I had to pull out my good 80-200 f/2.8 lens & handhold at f/8 (1/250th sec.) to get this. This is fully zoomed out (200mm), so there’s an effective zoom of 300mm.
Photographing snow
Thursday, June 4th, 2009Alternate title: embarrassing myself in front of the pros.
I read an opinion online (probably on Fark) that Texans are a unique breed. They’re overly proud of themselves – not for what they’ve done or what they can to, but because of where they live. As if they have an overly-inflated sense of value ’cause their state is big. And the only people worse than Texans, according to this opinion, are Alaskans: convinced that they’re something special because they can somehow survive in a giant, frozen state.
There’s some truth to this. For the better part of the last two decades, I could easily leave state (well, to anywhere other than Hawaii) and say “I’m from Alaska.” The response: instant fawning. Usually you become the life of the party, making up crap about how hard the winters are (they’re not usually hard in Anchorage, just long – it’s usually far worse in the midwest).
Don’t do this with a well-travelled person. Like I did, with Moose Petersen. Yes, I made an ass of myself to the moose, but I learned something in the process. Imagine this conversation:
Me: so, I’m from Alaska.
Moose: yeah, so?
Me: um, so we have a bunch of unique lighting up here and I was wondering…
Moose: No you don’t.
Me: Um, nevermind, I’ll go away now.
Moose: You had a question. Ask it.
Me: um, I was wondering… how to properly shoot… snow?
Moose: who cares? Snow is snow, it’s white. If you blow it out, who gives a rip? Everyone knows what it is?
Me: I’m going to slink away now…
Well, that’s pretty much what happened. Wording has been changed (feeble memory and all that), but there are some important lessons in there. I walked away with these thoughts:
- Seriously, who cares about properly exposing snow? I mean, unless it’s the primary subject. Even then, who cares? Duh.
- Who cares that I’m from Alaska? Moose doesn’t. Shoot, his photographer base camp was in Anchorage last year and it easily looked like one of the tamer places he’s been.
- Don’t try to out-cool Moose. He camps with bears. I avoid biking trails where bears occasionally wander.
Since this conversation, I’ve read at least two articles since our exchange where the mighty Moose has talked about properly exposing for snow.
One final B&W
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009Well, for now. The same day that I took the photo of the mountains across Turnagain arm also yielded the photo below. This one didn’t come out as well as I would have liked, but it does have something of that light, old-timey feel. I like that.
In post-processing, I did actually do a bit of burning to the shadows of the trunk, and dodged the details back in to some of the branches. When working in black & white, I usually stick to that – I feel it’s closer to the original techniques in the darkroom.
Bird Creek Tree in B&W
Boken behind branches and buds
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
Bokeh around buds of a tree
Bokeh – the big spots in the background. Yesterday I was at my folk’s place, playing around with my SLR and the big 18-200mm lens. Noticed when I tried to pull off a macro shot that the bokeh was wild.
I’m not normally one for doing bokeh – it can be beautiful in the hands of a master, but I’ve seen a lot of gimicky things. Thinks that I’d doubtlessly love to play with, mind you – but don’t feel honest to me.
This pic is different. I noticed the effect and worked with it until I got what I wanted. Then the wind blew & spoiled the composition. Three times in a row.
A more patient photographer would have waited, but I was without tripod. So consider this good enough: a sample of boken, and a reminder: just a week ago, this tree just barely had leaves on it. Pretty amazing how quickly the flowers came out.
A Black and White image from Monday
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
I think this is Bradley Peak, on the far site of Turnagain arm
Monday, driving home: had spend dinner with my folks at the Bird Creek campground (it’s all of 20 minutes south of Anchorage).
It was about 9pm – golden hour was just beginning. For some reason, the color version came out extremely blue and flat, despite the angles and the shadows. So I dropped it into Photoshop and opened NIK Silver Efex. A basic conversion, but I added some noise, burned in the top edge a little, and slapped on a red lens conversion.
Instant drama.
It was interesting, this reminds me of Ansel Adam’s famous shot of the half-dome. In his book Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, he mentions that he used a red filter on that image.
Brilliant colors
Monday, May 18th, 2009
Anchorage in the evening, last Friday. 9:20pm. Still quite a ways from sunset.
The picture to the right is typical of Anchorage, this time of year. Or rather, the light is fairly typical. We’re not so far north that we get sunlight 24×7 (plus it’s too early yet), but we do have direct sunlight until nearly 11pm (officially, we already get over 20 hrs of sun per day). But due to the angle, we end up with relatively weak sunlight for large parts of that.
To a photographer, that gives us a few advantages. The golden hour, for example: it lasts well over an hour. None of the hurrying to take a shot in 15 minutes, like we see so often when we make it to Hawaii. The tradeoff on the golden hour: the light often isn’t as brilliant and saturated, like you see in places further south. So yesterday was an exception.
While on the topic of benefits of northern light, one of the things I’ve noticed: in more temperate areas, there is a definate period of time where the sun is directly overhead and light is either too harsh or just unflattering. You still get that here, but even in the middle of summer the sun isn’t directly overhead. No, it’s always at an angle, which means there’s very little time where you can’t do landscape photography. Or even outdoor portraits with natural light – the sun is that low most of the summer.