Tag Archives: Photography

Sandia Mountains – Timing is Everything (Part Two)

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Here is a sequence of photos taken on a single winter evening at the foothills of the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque, New Mexico, showing the fleeting light of a sunset after a dusting of snow.  Often, the primary difference between a good photograph and a great one is the presence of unique light.  To increase the possibilities of getting great light, photographers often go out before sunrise and at sunset.  The soft, horizontal light in the evening is often called the golden hour.  This light allows the photographer to capture a scene that is more evenly illuminated without the harsh contrast of bright sun and dark shadows that are present during most of the day.  FYI, the sunset glow photo was captured with a 300mm lens.

Sandia Mountains, Before Sunset

Sandia Mountains, Before Sunset

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For more photos….

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Antelope Canyon – Timing is Everything (Part One)

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Antelope Canyon Summertime

Antelope Canyon Summertime

Antelope Canyon Late Fall

Antelope Canyon Late Fall

I recently returned from yet another  trip to Lower Antelope Canyon outside of Page, Arizona.  Lower Antelope is the more peaceful, more quite slot canyon compared to the overcrowded Upper Antelope Canyon where photographers literally push and shove for the best spots.

These two photos help show the difference the time of the year can make in such a place.  Both were taken at about the same time of the morning on a clear day.  With the summer sun more overhead the photo on the left was much more orange compared to the late fall photo on the right showing more purples.

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Do You Manipulate Your Photographs?

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Ansel Adams, Before and After Photo Manipulation

Ansel Adams, Before and After

With the proliferation of software such as Adobe Photoshop, it is easier than ever to make models thinner, skies bluer and erase those pesky telephone lines from our prized photographs.   Somewhere along the way, the average person on the street, or the novice to photography got the incorrect notion that manipulation is a recent innovation developing alongside the computer age.
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Antelope Canyon, “Our Lady of the Canyon” photo background

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AZ02-good-Our-Lady-of-the-Canyon-

“Our Lady of the Canyon” photograph, in my Arizona Portfolio, was taken in Antelope Canyon, a small sandstone canyon carved by wind and water erosion over millions of years, located on the Navajo Reservation in Northern Arizona. This photo recently won 2nd place out of thousands of entries at the Hubbard Museum Fall Photo Contest in New Mexico.  This location is known as a “slot” canyon and may only be three feet across when viewed from above, but is over 100 feet from the rim to the natural floor.

Reflected light bounces off of the canyon walls, resulting in tones from bright gold near the most intense light, to soft blues where the light is more diffused.  At high noon shafts of sunlight pierce through the openings at the canyon top to the floor below.  Wind blowing the sand into the canyon illuminates these sunbeams.  Most often one simply sees a beautiful ray of light.  But as captured in this fine art photograph, a figure of a woman wearing a headscarf and outstretched arms is very visible in the fourth photo of this sequence, “Our Lady of the Canyon.”  In the actual photograph, if you look closely, you can see the streaks of sand falling.  Long exposures and a tripod are required to capture the light in this canyon.  Below are the photographs that led up to this once-in-a-lifetime image.

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Photo Manipulation – Ansel Adams and Group f/64

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Ansel Adams (1902 – 1984)

(Fifth in a series of six articles)

First, it needs to be noted I am not making a comparison between my photography work or skills to that of Ansel Adams. He is the subject here simply because of his popularity the admiration so many share for his popular works of art . I greatly admire his photographs as does most of the professional photographic community today.

Radical may be too strong of a word for Ansel Adams and his small group of photographer friends in the early 1930’s but they did represent an opposite view of photography than what was generally accepted at the time. This group of seven California photographers formed Group f/64 as an opposing point of view from the dominating New York pictorialist photographers of the time such as Alfred Stieglitz.

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Photo Manipulations – Human Eye vs. the Camera

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(Fourth in a series of six articles)

????????Camera LensPart of the RAW file processing can be to get the image to look more like what was viewed at the time the shutter was clicked. The human eye is much more sensitive to light than the typical high end cameras of today. We can all look at our feet under our dark desks and see some detail in the shoes then immediately look up at the bright overhead lights and see some detail next to the light bulbs. No camera can capture this same range of light in a single photo.

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