I really enjoyed my experience with the Out of Chicago Live online photography conference in May. With over 800 participants and 60+ instructors, it was a big event, but Chris Smith and his team at Out of Chicago did a great job of organizing it, and everything went smoothly. It was a lot of fun interacting with everyone, and I thoroughly enjoyed getting to watch all the presentations from the other instructors.
Now the Out of Chicago folks are at it again, with a slightly different format, for Out of Chicago: In Depth.
Peak and clouds, Yosemite. 32mm, 1/15th sec. at f/11, ISO 100.
Summer is the dry season in California. Typically, in most of the state, one sunny day follows another, for months on end.
But there are a couple of exceptions. Along the coast, summer is the foggiest time of year. Fog can be so persistent that some spots may barely see the sun for days, or even weeks.
Comet NEOWISE over Mono Lake, California. 35mm, 10 seconds at f/4, ISO 1000.
Early this morning Claudia and I joined about a dozen other photographers along the shore of Mono Lake to photograph Comet NEOWISE.
I was expecting to search for a smudge in the sky to the northeast, and use a long lens to make the comet a prominent part of the photograph. But when I stepped out of the car I could see it right away – even before my eyes adjusted to the dark. It was bigger than I expected. It’s the brightest, largest comet I’ve seen since Hale-Bopp in 1997.
Sunset, Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite. 35mm, 1/4 sec. at f/16, ISO 200.
It seems like a normal summer in the Yosemite high country. It’s less crowded than usual, since the park has limited the number of people allowed in. But the plants and animals are going about their business as they typically do. Creeks and rivers continue to flow. Clouds sometimes float by. It’s all serenely beautiful.
The park reopened on June 11th, with lodging, camping, or day-use reservations required for entry. After being away for three months, Claudia and I wanted to visit the park on that first day, and were able to secure a day-use reservation.
Adobe just a released a new update to Lightroom Classic. There’s nothing earth-shattering here, but they’ve added a couple of nice new features that I think you’ll find helpful: a new Hue slider for local adjustments, and an updated interface for the Tone Curve. I explain these changes in this video:
This photograph is from October of 1995 – deep in the archives.
Most of my photographic ideas arise spontaneously, as I react to the light, weather, and my surroundings. But sometimes an idea pops into my head at home, or while driving, or, especially, while falling asleep.
The idea for this footprint image was one of those occasions when an idea just popped into my head, though I don’t remember exactly where or when. I had been experimenting with light painting at dusk and at night, using flash and flashlights, and somewhere during that time I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool to show a line of footprints on a sand dune, and use a flashlight to make the prints glow?”
Dogwood and giant sequoia in the fog, Sierra Nevada, California. Fog is a wonderful complement to forest scenes; here, some ephemeral fog lasted just long enough for me to capture this image. 70mm, polarizer, 0.7 seconds at f/16, ISO 100.
People seem to love trees and forests. I know I do.
But forests can be difficult to photograph. Natural forests are usually a study in chaos, with haphazard arrangements of branches, trunks, logs, and leaves. There’s an organic order to all that, with trees and understory plants growing to take advantage of small patches of sunlight, and a cycle of birth, growth, death, and decay.
But visual order can be hard to find amid all that clutter. The chief challenge in photographing forests is usually finding a way to simplify things, and make order out of chaos.
The Out of Chicago Live online photo conference last month was so much fun. I think everyone who participated relished the opportunity to focus their attention on photography for a few days, rather than on the coronavirus. And the lineup of speakers and presentations was outstanding. I got to see some of the presentations live, but there were many, many others that I missed, so I’ve been catching up by watching the recordings of the sessions.
And you can do that too, even if you didn’t attend the conference as it was happening. Every session was recorded, so you can enroll in the conference after the fact and see them all – over 100 sessions, including presentations, tutorials, panel discussions, and image reviews. You can find more information, including a complete list of every session, here:
I made this photograph in March of 2004, with a 6-megapixel Canon 10D. That was my first digital camera, purchased only about nine months earlier, in the summer of 2003. The low resolution made this camera unsuitable for “serious” work, so for about two years I carried around both the Canon 10D and my Mamiya 645 film camera. I used the Canon for snapshots, and, when time allowed, to capture digital versions of my film images, so that I only had to scan the film captures when I really needed the extra resolution (like when making prints, or sending files to publishers).
I quickly learned to love digital capture. It was just so much easier: I could see the results right away, use the histogram to check the exposure, and magnify the image to see if everything was in focus. When photographing moving water I didn’t need to guess about the right shutter speed because I could try several, see the effects immediately, and dial in the shutter speed that best suited the situation. I found that the digital camera invited experimentation and creativity, because I didn’t have to pay for film and processing, and could see and refine the results of an experiment in the field. And, as if all that wasn’t enough, the dynamic range far exceeded transparency film, so the resulting images looked less harsh and more luminous. Resolution aside, when I compared images from my Mamiya and my Canon, I almost always preferred the ones from the Canon.
Redbud above a rapid in the Merced River, California
My mother grew up in the Panama Canal Zone, in the hills above Panama City, running and playing all year in the tropical weather, watching sloths in the trees outside her bedroom window, shaking her shoes out each morning to make sure there were no scorpions inside.
When she was 13 years old her family moved to Queens, New York, but later, in the early years of her marriage, she and my father migrated to the outer suburbs, and once again she was surrounded by nature. She would often point out beautiful things she noticed to my brothers and me: the first buds of spring, a sunset, ice-coated branches, a bird singing, autumn leaves starting to turn…
I’ve been using Lightroom since Adobe released the beta version in 2006. Over the years I’ve learned many shortcuts, and in this video I share some of my favorite tips – things I use all the time to streamline my workflow:
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