The Calypso Orchid May of 2016 in Fairbanks has been a big leap into the Spring season, with early green up and a few days of record temperatures. All of this wonderful weather has no doubt influenced the early blossoms of a beautiful orchid that I spotted while on a trail in the Fairbanks area.…
If you have been on a venture to photograph the northern lights, then you have encountered the challenge of photographing in the dark while still being able to control your camera settings. A headlamp with a red filter can help provide the necessary light to assist with camera adjustments. However, that light can easily find its way into the picture if you are not careful. In order to avoid headlamp light pollution in your aurora photos, see headlamp etiquette practices on my blog article here.
I receive many questions on How to Photograph the Northern Lights–which is why I wrote an eBook on the topic. While I don’t have the time to answer all of the questions, I decided to post my response to a few questions here for the broader community. Exposure Q: For proper exposure of the aurora should…
My digital workflow always moves towards simplification whenever possible. Taking thousands of photos a year, and needing to move them from a flat, RAW state, to a processed version ready for a stock photography sale takes time. If there is one lesson universal to age, it is that time takes on a more premium value.…
Male King Eider duck Earlier in the week I posted a photo of a male king eider duck that I took at midnight in Alaska ‘s arctic, under cloudy skies. In contrast, I wanted to share a photo of the same species, but under completely different lighting conditions. I took this picture at 12 noon,…
With my rather large 30″ monitors, and the seeming tiny fonts in Lightroom, I was frustrated with not being able to see my caption and keywords well enough to mitigate a multitude of typos. Not to exclusively blame my poor typing on small fonts, but it makes a notable difference. So I thought I’d share…
Through the process of converting from film to digital, there was a slow development of programs that handled the processing of RAW files. As software developed, the potential for extracting the maximum quality from a RAW file became more easily, and more quickly achieved. I remember dragging the temperature slider in the early version of…
In the previous post I briefly discussed the general workspace and method I use to edit a folder of images in Lightroom. I began with 3,700 pictures from a shoot in Denali park, and after my first round of edits, followed by a second pass, I narrowed it down to 368 keepers. That’s about 10%,…
Based on my last post and some interest in the process of applying split grads in LR3, I decided to show a simple illustration of that process with this landscape photo that I took in Polychrome Pass, late one night in August. A video might be better to explain all this, but there is some…
Sky control is fundamental to landscape photography. The term refers to ways in which a photographer manages the disparity in exposure values between the sky (which is often bright) and the foreground (which is often dark). The “balancing” is necessary because film can’t record the full range of tonal value (dynamic range) that the human…