SILVER CITY IDAHO, GHOST TOWN PHOTOGRAPHY, REVISITED

We revisited Silver City on Father’s Day exactly 5 years to the day from when I photographed this iconic Idaho “ghost town” for the first time.  My goal was to revisit some of my favorite subjects—this time using my Pro-DSLR for larger, higher quality images and to find some new features. But, mostly, I wanted to find the old rusting car that I photographed 5 years ago. 

People and nature conspired to deny my attempts to redo some of my favorite subjects. In the hotel where the neat old telegraph office resides they have blocked access to it with furniture and old equipment in addition to added inappropriate clutter on its counters.

Nature has a nasty habit of making changes; things grow, things die, all just plots to mess up our compositions!  It reminds me of the complaints of today’s photographers wanting to do images from where Ansel Adams photographed his famous image of the Tetons and the Snake River only to find that his view in 1942, with the Snake River’s nice “s” curves clearly seen in the foreground, is all but gone; obstructed by the growth of those pesky trees!

Thus, stymied at a couple outdoors redos, I was even more determined to find my favorite old car that I knew was up in the rocky hills overlooking the town’s Main Street. After 45 minutes of hiking—30 minutes in the wrong direction—I found it! 

So, here’s my new version of its suicide doors….

f11.0 @ 1/400 sec., ISO 400; Lens @ 140mm

I think this old car is the best piece of three dimensional art in Silver City. This view and crop has the anthropomorphic, face-like, effect I was looking for—complete with those sad eyes and the drooping door handles.

Moving on to the other side of the car…

f9.0 @ 1/800 sec., ISO 400; Lens @ 102mm

This is the original, unedited, version. I don’t like the big steel grate (covering the mine pit) on the left hand side of the image, but I really like the rocks above that area the I wanted to maintain the negative space on that side so I did some edits…

After a Lot of Edits

After a lot of Photoshop using the spot healing brush to remove that steel grate (and then touch-up to remove obvious clones!) and remove the piece of chrome sticking out of the rear side window I put the image into NIK’s Color Efex and used the Indian summer preset to create a burnt fall look in the bushes. I think all that greenery was too happy and didn’t match or support the mood I want here!

Speaking of cars in the dirt…

Here's our Jeep...

Here’s our Jeep Cherokee after the long drive up the rutted, bumpy, rocky, “road” to Silver City. I had almost as much fun off-roading to Silver City as I did doing photography there! It’s an interesting contrast to see the old mining town buildings with solar panels on their roofs. If it wasn’t for that technology Silver City would probably be a true ghost town. I did find some new subjects….

f9.0 @ 1/800 sec., ISO 400; Lens @ 200mm

What photographer can resist peeling paint on old wood. What caught my eye though were those colorful power line insulators in the window.  Sometimes even I do pretty pictures….

f10.0 @ 1/500 sec., ISO 400; Lens @ 85mm

Everybody up there has an outhouse…This one is a 5-star accommodation!

What was your “Father’s Day” adventure…’Til next week…

Author: Jerry W. Venz, PPA Master Photographer

Training site: http://www.LightAtTheEdge.com

Client site: http://www.TheStorytellersUsa.com

BLACK AND WHITE CONVERSIONS FROM OLD AND NEW COLOR ORIGINALS

I’ve been creating black and white images for over 40 years, and like photographers of my age, I started with processing my own film and hand printing B&W on a variety of the classic papers by Kodak, Ilford, and my favorite Agfa—like Portriga Rapid.

This blog is about “converting” to B&W so, of course I’m talking about the digital process since back in my film days there was NO converting. We decided in advance, based on our subject, wether we were going to use color or B&W film and then printed them on their like media. I had criteria for the use of B&W and color films. And today I have exactly the same criteria for when to use B&W in digital as I did for film.

The Best B&W images have:

1. Directional light (that means shadows)
2. Good Blacks and Whites
3. Texture and/or detail
4. A strong center of interest

So, let’s start with something old…

Monument Valley Cloud Burst

It’s a nice scene, but it was clearly beyond the dynamic range, as you can see in the color image below, of what Kodachrome 64 could record. I don’t have dramatic shadows here and some of the clouds are already overexposed. Since I don’t have a high-end film scanner I used, at the time, my best DSLR—my canon 5D Mk II with a canon 100mm, f2.8, Macro lens and photographed a bunch of my favorite slides, from 40 years ago, on a light table.  (If your interested in just how I did this I will put a link at the end of this blog to my YouTube channel with a how to video.) They turned out nice and I produced RAW files of on average 22MB and Jpgs with on average 12MB to work with in post. 

Here’s the original color image….

Kodachrome 64 Original

Post processing to a B&W conversion…

• Used NIK’s HDR Efex single image tone mapping (deep 1) to pull out the sun rays and the cloud burst on the right hand side of the image; this also helped cloud detail.
• Used NIK’s Silver Efex Pro-2 for B&W; used the Full dynamic harsh preset modified to my taste.
• Used NIK’s Define 2 for noise reduction.
• Cropped off some of the bottom and burned that in as well.

It turned out pretty well. I got the drama I wanted by pulling out the details that were barely visible in the color slide and by deepening the darks in the image it brought a three dimensional quality to the scene that did not show in the color version.

Moving on to a digital color image I think the following image illustrates how color, as eye candy, has impact, but does not always hold your interest for long….

 f11.0 @ 1/350 sec., ISO 400; Lens @ 26mm

This image, after the initial impact, has little to offer; it’s really, quite literally, flat! Not only is the subject flat, but so its the lighting.. So, looking at the vertical stains on the locomotive’s sides I knew that was something I could enhance with tone mapping….

B&W with HDR Efex

Now we have texture and Lots of Detail all over the image creating the Illusion of depth where the color version had none. 

Post Processing the Image…

NIK’s HDR Efex, single image Tone Mapping, using the Deep 1 preset with tweaks, to bring out the blacks.

B&W conversion using ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) grayscale. Tweaked the yellow, orange, and red sliders to further enhance details.

These are just two of the many ways to create B&W images from your color originals. If you want more complicated methods they’re easy to find, with a search, but you won’t necessarily get better results. It depends on a lot on the quality of the color image you start with.

As promised, here is the link to my YouTube video on slide duplication with a DSLR:  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3CyAq84vzw

’Til next week…

Author: Jerry W Venz, PPA Master Photographer, Craftsman

Training Site: http://www.LightAtTheEdge.com

Client Site: http://www.TheStorytellersUsa.com

TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHY; TIME ON LOCATION = BETTER RESULTS

As a professional photographer I don’t do tours through iconic locations like those whirl-wind bus tours (“If it’s Tuesday it must be Belgium”, yeah, that movie!). If I’ve targeted a great subject area I want to hang around for at least two or three days to check angles and lighting. One of the most important things I must know is if a particular subject is going to be best at Sunrise or Sunset. So, I’ll usually plan to photograph the subject at both sunrise and sunset and then return again to photograph it at the best time. This is simply what I call “good coverage” of a subject. 

So, when we went to the Isle of Capri, Italy, I did my research and picked a hotel on the Mediterranean side of the island so our view would be of the famous Faraglioni Rocks and the sea. That put me in the position to easily capture this famous view at any time of the day. 

Here’s my first version of the rocks…

f22.0 @ 1/250 sec., ISO 400; Lens @ 42mm

This was done about a half-hour after sunrise on May 5th. During the week we were there it rained only at night giving us nice clouds and blue sky in the mornings; perfect photography weather!

I liked this image, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. I wanted something more dramatic; more like a sunset in look. But, of course, an actual sunset wasn’t going to happen on theses rocks because the sun was setting behind me on the other side of the island. 

After our excursions to the other side of the island the next day I made a point of getting some images of the rocks at a different time of day.

Here’s a bigger view…

f16.0 @ 1/125 sec., ISO 400; Lens @ 19mm

The weather was marvelous and kept producing terrific clouds, so I went vertical to capture those cloud layers. I converted the image to B&W with a little tone mapping for cloud enhancement.

A few days later we took a shuttle to Annacapri, the big side of the island, and did the chair lift ride to the highest point on the island, Mt. Solaro, at 1932 feet. With the clear atmosphere we had a great view and I got the Faraglioni rocks again in a really big view.

f19.0 @ 1/180 sec., ISO 400; Lens @ 19mm

It seemed that almost everywhere we went there was another view of the rocks!  On our fifth day on Capri we booked a jet boat to shuttle us to Sorento for the train ride to Pompeii, so I got up early for another Sunrise attempt of the Faraglioni rocks….

 f16.0 @ 1/125 sec., ISO 400; Lens @ 24mm

This time I got up a half hour earlier than the first time (five days ago) and I went up to the roof of our hotel for a higher perspective. This time I captured the “Sunset Glow” I was looking for!  It was a great start to what was to be a fabulous day of photography in a place I’ve always dreamed about documenting in an artistic way—the doomed city of Pompeii. But that is another story…

’Til next week…

Author: Jerry W. Venz, PPA Master Photographer, Craftsman

Training site: http://www.LightAtTheEdge.com

Client site: http://www.TheStorytellersUsa.com

GETTING THE LOOK OF WILD ANIMAL PHOTOGRAPHY AT THE BOISE ZOO

As a professional photographer, I’ve never been anything but disappointed and frustrated with my results when doing animal photography at a zoo. My goal has always been to create animal images that could pass for photos taken in the wild. I had heard great praise about the San Diego Zoo and its enclosures, but when I visited their zoo back in 1995 I found that I could not get images of the animals with clean or natural looking back grounds.  It wasn’t until we moved to Idaho in 2009 and got involved with Zoo Boise, by donating to their silent auction fundraising event called Zoobilee, that I again entertained the idea of animal photography at a zoo. Still it wasn’t until 2017 that, wanting to try out a new camera for action photography, I attended the free vendor appreciation day at Zoo Boise to try to achieve my goal of natural looking wild animal photography in a serious way. 

I already knew that I wasn’t going to be doing any images of animals showing any landscapes, so I went with my 70-200mm zoom as my main mounted lens. 

Isolation of my subjects was paramount….

f6.3 @ 1/1250 sec., ISO 800; Lens @ 200mm

What further isolated the giraffes was the very directional light of the setting sun (it was about an hour before sunset). So, with the direct sun on them and not on the background my exposure on them made the background go very dark, which pretty much eliminated their enclosure as a background. The biggest challenge here was capturing them as they ran, at top speed, back and forth the length of their enclosure and then paused briefly to frolic, like necking teenagers, then separated again and ran off! I had to go to 800 ISO to get to a shutter speed (1/1250 sec.) that could stop their exploits as I hand held my camera and panned with the action.

When they calmed down….

f6.3 @ 1/2000 sec., ISO 800; Lens @ 200mm

I did get a nice portrait of one of them against a colorful background in lieu of the enclosure.

Then onto the lions den….

f5.0 @ 1/160 sec., ISO 1600; Lens @ 200mm

This was taken THROUGH the large window overlooking the lion’s enclosure. Usually, a polarizing filter would be needed here, but since the window here was fully covered (top and sides) with a structure that shaded the glass there were few reflections for me to worry about. With a much lower level of light here I went to 1600 ISO and still got great results from my new camera.  This was an easy capture; the only thing I had to watch for was the lion’s OPEN eyes, so I could get that nice catch light in the eye.

Late light and the zebras….

f5.0 @ 1/160 sec., ISO 3200; Lens @ 200mm

Now it’s only a half-hour before sunset and these zebras are in full shade and I’m composing through the leaves of some trees next to the fence that separates us.  I’m now at 3200 ISO and their images still looked really good. I just converted these to B&W because my subjects were….Black & White!

I’m really happy with my results at the Boise Zoo. It’s a nice little zoo with decent looking open enclosures in the giraffe area and the animals looked good.

Looking back on my early attempts at zoo photography I must say that the problem was not that those other zoos were so bad in 1995, I just wasn’t ready. This photographer has learned a lot about how to photograph difficult subjects in challenging situations over these past 24 years, which make it possible to photograph my vision!

Challenge yourself….try photographing in your local zoo and have some fun.  ’Til next week…

Author: Jerry W. Venz, PPA Master Photographer, Craftsman

Training site:  http://www.LightAtTheEdge.com

Client site: http://www.TheStorytellersUsa.com

GHOST TOWN FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY - SILVER CITY, IDAHO; Part 1

I’ve been doing fine art photography of ghost towns and old cemeteries for over 40 years. One of the best ghost towns I ever photographed was Bodie, in the high country East of Yosemite National Park, off Highway 395. But, that was 40 years ago before it started falling apart; now they’re having to prop-up some structures. It wasn’t until I moved to Idaho that I discovered a rich new (to me!) territory of subjects to really enhance my fine art portfolio.

Because of all the mining that took place here in Idaho there are a lot of ghost towns in the mountains—mostly North of Boise. But there is Silver City, one of the best ”ghost” towns just South of us, that is well known for it’s many intact buildings, operational hotel, bar and restaurant. It looks like it’s been coming back to life. At just over 63 miles from Meridian it takes about 2 hours to get there; the last few miles are on a narrow, rutty, dirt road. We went there in June with friends in their 4x4, crew-cab pickup and had no problem. In the winter though the road is impassable except by snowmobile. 

I think Silver City is better than Bodie in many ways. There’s a lot of variety in its buildings and they are still standing without supports. There is a really nice cemetery and the topography is far better; the town is nestled in some hills so there are elevation differences that make for more interesting compositions while Bodie is built on a flat empty plain.

Here’s an example of Silver City topography…

 f11.0 @ 1/500 sec., ISO 400; Lens @ 40mm

This image was a natural for a B&W conversion because I knew that the dark tones of that outhouse would contrast nicely against the old white church in the background. In addition I wanted to get rid of all the greenery in the scene that distracted form my main two subjects.

This B&W conversion was done using Adobe Camera Raw.

A detail image of a front porch….

f5.6 @ 1/800 sec., ISO 400; Lens @ 40mm

Going for the textures in this image: I was drawn to this scene because of the slivers of sun light slicing through the uncovered boards of the porch overhang.

TECH NOTE: Processing for texture; I used NIK’s HDR Efex Pro single image Tone Mapping here; using the Dramatic preset.

A Low-Light Interior Detail…

f4.5 @ 1/25 sec., ISO 3200; Lens @ 32mm

This is the old telegraph office inside the hotel. Set-up in 1874 it was the first telegraph in the Idaho Territory.

TECH NOTE: This had to be B&W so I converted it in NIK’s Silver Efex Pro using the fine Art Preset. Then I selected one of NIK’s Film Emulations (the Agfa100) for the monochrome look I liked best.

Then out at the Silver City Cemetery….

f5.6 @ 1/500 sec., ISO 400; Lens @ 40mm

They have some of the best wrought iron work I’ve ever seen at a cemetery. I enhanced the color and texture of the rust in Adobe Camera Raw for this image.

Next week in Part #2 I’ll show some before and afters of images I dramatically altered for artistic effect.

’Til next week…

Author: Jerry W. Venz, PPA Master Photographer, Craftsman

Training Site: http://www.LightAtTheEdge.com

Client Site: http://www.TheStorytellersUsa.com

WHY I OFFER PHOTOGRAPHIC EDUCATION NOT JUST SETTINGS; PART 3

Having been doing fine art photography for over 40-years I’ve come to realize that often TWO camera settings Dominate Creatively in my art images. I provided some examples of this in Part-2 of this series.  However, I went beyond the usual “settings” as is known as the Exposure Triangle to include one of our most powerful creative settings—Focal Length—and expanded these settings to become the Creative Quadrangle. 

Those creatively dominate pairs of settings are:

Aperture / Focal Length or Shutter Speed / Focal Length

I’m sure many photographers will take issue with that statement so, I will continue with more complex and challenging subjects that test the capabilities of all the settings at our disposal.

SOMETIMES EVERY SETTING IS CRITICAL

f22.0 @ 4.0 sec., ISO 800; Lens @ 20mm

The Roman Colosseum is a very challenging subject even in daylight. And, it’s big, but worse, it’s much wider than it is tall, which makes it squat and very static compositionally. I figured it was going to be a night shot to avoid the tourists (I had NO idea!). So, I had purchased two items just for this subject; a compact tripod and a new lens; the Nikkor, f2.8, 20mm prime, which was rated very highly for its sharpness. When we walked to the Colosseum on our first day trip we were shocked by the throngs of tourists already there and bus loads more arriving constantly! I was there to check out my angles on the structure and was struck by how gray and ugly it was in the daylight; and yet how beautiful it was at night when they turned on its lights.  We returned close to midnight to a Colosseum aglow, but I did not know how long I would have those lights. A light rain had started, but I was prepared with an umbrella.

The most important setting in this image?  FOCAL LENGTH

The Focal Length defined the Composition. In many of my blogs on fine art photography I’ve mentioned my philosophy that “You can often reveal more about a subject by showing less of it.” I do this by using a longer Focal Length and slicing-up my subjects and/or cropping in post; the former is preferable.

Most photographers would use the 20mm lens I bought for this subject, to take pictures of the entire Colosseum, but everybody does that; there are Thousands of images of the entire Colosseum, in landscape mode, on the internet!

With large horizontal subjects I like to take Vertical Slices to create unusual compositions. In close my 20mm lens was ideal for these verticals because I could use the Distortion (extension distortion) it created at the edge of the frame of the bulk of the Colosseum (the part that was closer to me) to create those wide to narrowing openings of each story of the Colosseum.

The Set-Up

• To enhance this effect I set-up my tripod close to the building and tilted-up while Kathi held the umbrella over the camera to shield the lens from the rain.
• Next, I did a “Dutch-Tilt” to break-up the static nature of a multi-storied building—creating Diagonals of those lines.
• This also enabled me to include more of that nice wet roadway and the street lights.
• I wanted a Long Shutter Speed to blur the cars and streak their lights
• And I wanted Maximum Depth-of-Field. So, starting at ISO 800 (to avoid as much noise as possible) I settled on 4-seconds at f22.0.

With the planning, preparation, and the pre-visualization this image turned-out just as I imagined it!

By far even more challenging than any static subject is capturing extreme action creatively. Having done most types of action, the most difficult is chaotic action like rodeo; because with animals involved it’s always unpredictable action. It can also be as dangerous to the photographer as it is to the participants.

Case in point….

 f5.0 @ 1/2500 sec., ISO 800; Lens @ 200mm

I’ve learned that vantage point is important in rodeo photography for a clean background—that is eliminating the arena fence and crowd. So, I usually find a high angle to be able to “shoot” down on my subjects, which creates a clean background—the dirt of the arena itself. This also takes me OUT of the arena. I learned this lesson, the previous day, when another photographer standing near me in the arena was slammed into the steel arena fence by a spinning bull that had just thrown-off its rider! So, after that near miss, I found a nice perch up on the announcer’s platform on the side of the arena where the release gates were positioned. With that bit of important wisdom said…

THE SET-UP

Focal Length:

Very seldom do I go below 200mm with rodeo work. It’s a big arena and I want to isolate my subjects. In fact I would love to have a zoom lens giving me 200-500mm. In this image they were close to me because this bronc took out its rider just out of the gate! The compression effect of my lens at 200mm did a nice job of bringing the horse and that fleeing gal close together enhancing her peril!

Shutter Speed:

I use 1/2000 to 1/2500 seconds because it works with rodeo action; 1/1000 is not fast enough.

Aperture:

Here I used a fairly wide aperture, 5.0, because I want to isolate my subjects and I’ve found that with a distant subject (eg. 50 yards away) at 200mm I get plenty of Depth-of-Field.

ISO:

Like I said before I use the ISO I need to use to get me to the f-stop/shutter speed I want. Using my Canon 5D MKII at 800 ISO can produce a file that responds well to noise reduction.

Auto Focus:

I use my Canon in AI-Servo; it works great. I wish I had this capability back in 1970!

When it comes down to artistic creativity All Settings Matter; that’s why I’m always in Manual Mode and create my images in RAW.

The point of this blog series is that the random use of camera settings, as when you use the Auto or P-Modes you give up creative control of your images. And, using settings given by other photographers for their images will not teach you how to creatively use Apertures, Shutter Speeds, or Focal Lengths that are the best for YOUR subjects. To be an artist you must be the author of your images. This means you must study your subjects and decide what is most important about the subject that you want to highlight visually.

Any Questions….’Til next week.

Author: Jerry W. Venz, PPA Master Photographer, Craftsman

Training site: http://www.LightAtTheEdge.com

Client site: http://www.TheStorytellersUsa.com

WHY I OFFER PHOTOGRAPHIC EDUCATION NOT JUST SETTINGS; PART 2

At the end of Part 1 on this topic I veered into how I used a telephoto focal length to creatively interact with my Aperture to change the basic look of my image. In addition I used the telephoto effect of compression distortion to enhance the impact of the composition. I’ve found in my 40+ years of fine-art photography that the settings for exposure, in the creative process, cannot really be considered in isolation because one of the most important settings we use as a creative tool is Focal Length.

So I propose the Creative Quadrangle!

APERTURE, SHUTTER SPEED, FOCAL LENGTH, ISO

A Note about ISO Today

You’ll notice I put ISO last. That’s because it’s no longer the creative setting it once was in the film era. With film it was a choice we made right up front before we did any photography. The film we chose decided our Color Palette and the amount of grain we wanted (grain was a beautiful artistic effect). The whole look of an image was decided by the film type; Kodachrome, Ektachrome, color negative, Tri-X, Pan-X, etc., all had unique characteristics. No longer; ISO today is just a number. It no longer represents an artistic look. And, the ISO numbers today don’t even reflect an adjustability of the sensitivity of our DSLR’s sensor. That’s because we actually have no control over its sensitivity as every digital camera’s sensor has a Fixed Sensitivity.  All our DSLR’s do now when we roll-up to a high ISO is do a bright-up (increase gain) in response to an under exposure condition we created. The unfortunate result is increased noise—and noise is not pretty.

So, these days the only function ISO has is to get me to the Aperture/Shutter Speed combination I require to create the image.

So, back to my Creative Quadrangle…

In most of my fine-art images TWO Settings usually Dominate creatively:

• Aperture/Focal Length or
• Shutter Speed/Focal Length
• Sometimes ALL of them are critical for certain images

I will illustrate with some examples…

APERTURE / FOCAL LENGTH

 f7.1 @ 1/250 sec., ISO 400; Lens @ 200mm

Walking through our common area just before sunset I was looking for some icicles to align with backlight when I found this great threesome.

Shutter Speed:

For this image I wanted good Depth-of-Field and nice Bokeh in the background. Because the background is so distant I knew I could stop-down quite a bit and still knock that background way out-of-focus so I chose f7.1 to keep all the icicles and that clump of snow covered pine needles sharp.

Focal Length:

In addition I chose a Focal Length of 200mm to further soften the background and create Larger Bokeh. This illustrates nicely that you DON'T need Large Apertures for Good Bokeh—good Bokeh is more a matter of Long Focal Length than anything else.

SHUTTER SPEED / FOCAL LENGTH

f25.0 @ 1.6 sec., ISO 400; Lens @ 20mm

Working the Western Idaho State Fair is always challenging—especially the midway area.All the rides and attractions are placed close together and the place is chock-full of people every night of the fair. I brought my tripod since I knew I would be doing time exposures of the rides.

Shutter Speed:

I wanted my Shutter Speed to be at least 1-second to really make that Ferris wheel blur with color. In addition, I wanted all the people to disappear as much as possible. That structure in the foreground is a fun house maze and it was full of people running through those three levels of balconies. Doing some test shots I settled on 1.6 seconds by using my smallest aperture at a medium ISO to try to avoid too much NOISE.

Focal Length:

The Shutter Speed created the pizzaz here but the Composition was created by Focal Length. I didn’t want just an image of a solitary Ferris wheel—I wanted something in the foreground; I wanted leading lines. So, I backed-up directly in front of the fun house maze and used my lens at 20mm to distort that fun house (wide angle extension distortion), which turned it into an “arrow” pointing to the Ferris wheel—my leading lines!

Sometimes every setting is critical…that is what I will be covering in the final Part 3…’Til next week…now go out and practice!

Author: Jerry W. Venz, PPA Master Photographer, Craftsman

Training site: http://www.LightAtTheEdge.com

Client site: http://www.TheStorytellersUsa.com

FALL PHOTOGRAPHY TIPS FROM A PROFESSIONAL

First and foremost you’re NOT going to see any backed-off, wide-angle views, of a forrest of fall colors from me. I’ve always found those views pretty, but photographically boring. They’re what the amateurs do with their fixed lens point-n-shoot cameras—usually at the “scenic view” pull-out along side the road! 

I do what photography does best—narrow the view and reveal stunning detail. And, you do that with lenses leaning in the telephoto region of focal length.

That being said, lets move on to lighting.

Back-Lighting for intense detail…

f7.1 @ 1/800 sec., ISO 400; Lens @ 280mm

With this pair of small leaves 200mm was not enough so I installed my 1.4X extender on my 70-200mm f2.8 lens. The large lens hood with careful framing avoided flare (I HATE detail robbing flare!) in the intense backlight here.

Here I used backlighting for mood…

f7.1 @ 1/320 sec., ISO 400, Lens @ 98mm

With my lens at nearly 100mm I’m still only showing a part of this weeping willow tree; I rarely even photograph a whole single tree. In this image I wanted the juxtaposition of the hanging willow leaves over those interesting red bushes—that have lost their leaves.

Front Lighting can be Tricky….

f6.3 @ 1/800 sec., ISO 400; Lens @ 175mm

Direct Sun can easily ruin an image if you’re not very careful with your exposure. Those yellow leaves are prone to Clipping—blowing out your highlights—a loss of detail.

Two things made this image work:

1. I did this at 5:04pm in November—the sun set at 5:20pm and I chose leaves that had Crossing Light from the left side. That directional light picked-up really nice detail.
2. In Addition, I used my camera’s meter in Spot Mode—where I usually keep it—measuring the brightest surfaces of my subjects.

Or Front Lighting can be Easy…

f7.1 @ 1/160th sec., ISO 400; Lens @ 200mm

Top lighting here from an overcast sky is super easy to expose. It also creates nice soft colors. If the sun came out in this situation those wet leaves would have clipped like crazy. I cheated with this image and spritzed these leaves with my spray bottle mister until they dripped water—hey What can I say—it wasn’t raining when I needed wet leaves! Besides I don’t like doing photography in the rain.

Fall Colors in Flat Light…

 f8.0 @ 1/160th sec., ISO 800; Lens @ 150mm

This was done in full shade under this tree’s canopy. Since flat light can rob a scene of it’s contrast it’s important to pick a scene with lots of contrast. Here I had some great colors against that black tree trunk, which made these leaves glow with color. I did have to go to 800 ISO to capture this hand-held, but my Canon 5D MKII has no problem at that ISO.

I guess this proves that you can create great fall images in most lighting situations. You just have to pick subjects appropriate for the lighting and be careful with your exposures.

Well, ‘till next week…I’m here if you have questions….

Author:  Jerry W. Venz, PPA Master Photographer, Craftsman

Training Site: http://www.LightAtTheEdge.com

Client Site: http://www.TheStorytellersUsa.com

VARIATIONS ON A THEME; POST PROCESSING DIGITAL FILES

I’ve been revisiting my archives back to my early digital files, some as far back as 2000, when I got my first digital camera. What’s nice to see is that those old CD’s (Yes, CD’s!) can still be opened on our new computers and loaded into Photoshop!

I can open these old JPEGs in Camera Raw and do my favorite tweaks I do today with my new DSLR’s RAW files. After that I go to my favorite plug-ins for some artistic interpretations.

Here’s a finished artistic version of a file from 2003…

This image was form my second digital camera—the Fuji FinePix S-2 Pro, which produced jpegs at around 4.0 MB. Not much by todays standards, but we managed, with careful exposes, to produce some outstanding 30x40 images from our S2’s back then.

Black & White Processing Technique:

Step 1—NIK HDR Effects Pro 2 (Single Image Tone Mapping). Used Grannys Attic Preset with my modifications.

Step 2—NIK Silver Effects Pro 2—Used the Antique Plate 2 and modified it to my B&W taste.

Here’s the original file…

f13.0 @ 1/180 sec., ISO 400

This was an old hotel under renovation in Sacramento, California. I thought, with those ripped and tattered window shades, that it had the kind of creepy vibe that I could do something with.

Here’s the Color Interpretation….

I like this version mostly because of that red triangle in the second window (top left). It looks like a broken shard of glass.  I like the rust stains on the paint beneath the windows as well.

Color Processing Technique:

NIK HDR Effects Pro-2 (Single Image Tone Mapping).I used the Granny’s Attic Preset and tweaked it to my taste.

NOTE:  In addition to the obvious artistic changes to the original file a side benefit of processing an image in NIK’s HDR is that the size of the file is increased a lot.  With this image the original file was increased from 3.69MB to 6.06MBs.

However, I think that the Black and White rendition of this scene promotes the creepy vibe I imagined when I saw this building.  What do you guys think—the color or the Black and White?

’Til next week….

Author: Jerry W. Venz, PPA Master Photographer, Craftsman

Training Site:  http://www.LightAtTheEdge.com

Client Site: http://www.TheStorytellersUsa.com

OBSERVING AND WAITING FOR THE MOMENT IN PHOTOGRAPHY

While visiting with our sons in California this last summer we stayed with friends in route and they took us to Morrow Bay, on the Coast, for a marvelous seafood lunch. I had not been to Morro Bay in decades so, photographically it felt fresh—like I was seeing it for the first time. After lunch I suggested we drive out to Morro Rock so we could do a walk. I wanted to get out of the town and into the natural environment there at the coast; my camera beckoned me!

Parked near Morro Rock I knew that the huge landmark was not going to be a subject for me—it’s too big! Even being a hundred yards away it’s like a towering skyscraper dominating the landscape.  So, I put my 70-200mm lens on my camera and prepared to do what I do best (as I teach my students) and look for interesting slices of nature within the huge costal landscape.

While walking around Morro Rock looking back to the town the three huge stacks of the old Morro Bay Power Plant certainly dominated that landscape. That was not what I had in mind for a natural composition at the coast!

However, in the foreground this was what I saw happening in the ocean….

f10.0 @ 1/800 sec., ISO 400; Lens @ 102mm

This great scene was not just there waiting for me to show up—I hand to wait for it to develop. When I first walked up and put the viewfinder to my eye with my lens zoomed to its widest at 70mm this was the whole scene…

The Whole Ugly Scene; but look at that foreground!

Ten minutes later before the tour boat came into the bay the water was pretty smooth and the reflections of the smoke stacks were too literal a presentation for me. But, I loved that floating seaweed an the sea otter having his lunch was great as well.

So, I waited a bit and when I saw that boat approaching I thought that a boat that size should create a wake that would help me with this scene and the vision I had in my head.

That small wait really paid off.  Not only did I get some terrific ripples in the water, created by the boat’s wake, but the sea otter floated deeper into my frame and a bird landed in the water as well!

I just waited a few more seconds for that bird to paddle in-between the stacks before I started with the zoomed in image cropping out he top half of the whole scene.

I got what I wanted—a symbolic blending of nature and the abstract reflection of an abandoned man-made blight on the environment.

’Til next week…

Author: Jerry W. Venz, PPA Master Photographer, Craftsman

Training site: http://www.LightAtTheEdge.com

Client site: http://www.TheStorytellersUsa.com

PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE OLD IDAHO PENITENTIARY

The Old Idaho State Penitentiary, here in Boise, is a really fascinating piece of history as well as a grim reminder of a time people were less tolerant of crime and had the will to actually punish offenders.

Started in 1870 as a territorial prison and enlarged over the years with a maximum population of a little over 600 inmates, it served its purpose for over 100 years. After several riots and fires it was finally shut down in 1973. 

The site was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 for its significance as a Territorial Prison. With its dramatic romanesque architecture I decided to use mostly wide angle as a lens choice to both capture exteriors of the large buildings and be able to show more of some small interiors.

f16.0 @ 1/160sec., ISO 400; Lens 15mm

I Wanted something really dramatic as a pano so I cropped one of the 180 degree images into a long skinny. The angry over cast sky added to the perfect mood topping one of the burned-out buildings. 

Next, is the dinning hall…

f11.0 @ 1/250 sec., ISO 500; Lens 15mm

It was designed in 1898 by inmate George Hamilton to provide natural light in the basement. He was paroled early for his exemplary efforts, but committed suicide the day after his release. The building was burned in the riot of 1973.

To the Cell blocks…

f10.0 @ 1/80 sec., ISO 800; Lens 15mm

I liked the color and the peeling paint in this cell house—not to mention its formidable cell doors. Cell House #4 (1952) was the largest  and most modern in this prison.

f5.6 @ 1/30 sec., ISO 800; Len 15mm

As in all prisons troublesome, violent, prisoners we put in solitary confinement…

f6.3 @ 1/40 sec., ISO 800; lens 15mm

They called this Siberia (1926). As you can see it has radiant heating, but it’s outside of the cells! This bleak building had dark, one-man, cells measuring 3’x8’…Siberia indeed!

But, they had clean clothes…

f5.6 @ 1/30 sec., ISO 800; Lens 15mm

The laundry building was impressive. It had 5 or 6 large, turn of the century, belt-driven, bulk washers.

The inmates built a wall around the original warden’s house to be used as the Women’s Ward (1905-1906).

Women's area

You can see the back corner of the women’s ward just beyond this cool looking gate. But, theirs was not a country club…

Women's cell

As you can see their cell doors were just as formidably built as the men’s. Their building had seven 2-person cells. 

I recommend a visit to this historical site to anyone visiting Boise, Idaho. I’ll bet a lot of residents here have not, but should, take the time to view this piece of their history!…Only took me 9 years…LOL

Just a little history and photography education too. ’Til next week…

Author:  Jerry W. Venz, PPA Master Photographer, Craftsman

Training Site:  http://www.LightAtTheEdge.com

Client Site: http://www.TheStorytellersUsa.com