The Watchman

ISO: 100  Focal Length: 15mm 

Aperture: f/6.3  Shutter Speed: 1/50

Filter: Lee 0.9 GND Soft Edge

Shooting the Watchman with the Virgin River is one of Zion's iconic shots. I didn't want to make my shot like what most people were doing so instead of shooting from the road I wandered down the Pa'rus trail a little bit until I found this spot. It was nice because I was the only photographer there and when I walked back to the road there were probably 15-20 photographers cleaning up. I used a little lower aperture number than I would normally use because I didn't like how my shots were turning out with the water blurred. The Lee GND was key for this shot and it really helped balance the exposure between the foreground and the sky. Lining up a GND is pretty easy. I handhold my filters. To start I hold the filter against the lens with the dark part of the filter completely out of the frame and then while looking through the viewfinder I slide the filter down until the transition between light and dark is against the horizon.

When I got this shot into the computer I still thought the exposure wasn't balanced like I wanted it to be. So I loaded the single RAW file into HDR Efex Pro and tone mapped it. At first the result was WAY too strong so I dialed back the settings by about half in order to get a realistic result. I came away being very pleased with the shot. 

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Oceanside Pier 2

ISO: 100  Focal Length: 11mm 

Aperture: f/22  Shutter Speed: 5 seconds

The Shot

Piers present a lot of opportunities for shooting. The texture of the sky and the pier along with all the strong lines made me immediately think of doing this shot in black and white. In order to make it seem like there weren't very many people on the pier I used a long shutter speed. When you do this you can make very crowded places seem almost empty. So to do this I put my polarizer on to cut down some light and then used the smallest aperture I could. I also decided not to make the image symmetric because I thought the clouds on the right side of the shot were too interesting to cut out.

Post Processing

When I got the image onto the computer all I really had to do was convert it to black and white with Nik Silver Efex Pro and then sharpen it.

Holbrook Canyon

ISO: 100  Focal Length: 13mm 

Aperture: f/13  Shutter Speed: 2.5 seconds

Exposure Compensation: +1.33

It was a very cold morning when I got up to shoot this. When I arrived at Holbrook Canyon it was snowing. Luckily, I had an umbrella in the car so I could avoid getting snow on the front of the lens. After walking down into the canyon I made my way to the creek and worked through a few compositions before I finally arrived at this one.

Composition

I composed the image this way mainly because of two things. The ice and cascade provide a definite focal point for the image and the way the creek meanders around the snowy outcropping creates great leading lines that create depth. Notice how the eye immediately goes to the cascade and then will generally follow the stream. The use of curves like this is an excellent way to make a stronger composition.

Post Processing

Once I got the image on the computer I took down the highlights some to bring some texture back into the snow. I sharpened the image and added some definition to make the ice pop out even more.

When shooting snow you will usually have to overexpose the image. If I did not use a +1.33 exposure compensation the snow would have shown up as a grey color.

Oceanside Pier

ISO: 100  Focal Length: 13mm 

Aperture: f/22  Shutter Speed: 1 second

Filter: Lee 0.9 GND Soft Edge

The Shot

It was a beautiful night at the Oceanside Pier. There are so many good shots to be had around a pier. For this shot I wanted the reflection of the pier to be my foreground element so I had to wait for the moment when the waves were out. I moved about 100ft to the side of the pier until I liked the diagonal it was making in the frame. One of the things I like most about the composition is all the leading lines. The pier, clouds and colors of the sunset make great leading lines to the end of the pier where the sun adds more visual weight to the end of the pier. 

One of the real keys for this shot was the Lee graduated neutral density filter. By placing the filter transition correctly you can balance the light between the sky and the foreground. It made it so I could retain great details in the bright sky as well as the foreground.

Post Processing

In order to make the image more like the scene I remembered at the pier I boosted the saturation up to 1.8, adjusted the black point to 37, and then reduced the luminance of the blue channel slightly. The final step was to add edge sharpening and I decided to add a vignette. 

Shooting the Stars in Joshua Tree

ISO: 1600  Focal Length: 11mm 

Aperture: f/2.8  Shutter Speed: 30 seconds

You don't have to stop shooting when the sun goes down. To get great pictures of the stars you will need a few things.

1. A very dark place away from the city. In this picture from Joshua Tree you can see some light pollution from the city of 29 Palms even though the city was 15-20 miles away.
2. Little or no moon. To have the best view of the stars shoot when there is no moon or the moon is just a sliver.
3. A DSLR with long exposure noise reduction turned on. Long exposure noise reduction will essentially create a second black exposure of the same length as the original shot to see where the noisy spots are and then it will subtract them from your shot.
4. A sturdy tripod. It is VERY important to have a good tripod when you are doing long exposures like this. I use the Manfrotto 055XPROB Pro Tripod .

You will need to shoot at a high ISO and at a very wide aperture. Notice that I shot at ISO 1600 and f/2.8.

When you are shooting the stars, remember your normal composition rules. You still want a foreground element to add interest to your shot. When framing the shot I like to hold my headlamp in one hand while I look through the viewfinder. This way I can put enough light on the scene to compose the image properly. The foreground was lit with our campfire and the moon. You can also light paint the scene with a flash light. In the image below you can see the stars better but there is no foreground element to add interest to the image.

ISO: 1600  Focal Length: 11mm 

Aperture: f/2.8  Shutter Speed: 30 seconds

A few notes on post processing. I really didn't do much for post processing in the first image, I tried to bring more detail out with some curve adjustments but it made the foreground too bright. In the second image I raised the exposure and adjusted the black point to keep the sky black.

One last tip. If you want to avoid star trails follow the 600 rule. Divide 600 by the 35mm effective focal length and that will give you the length of the exposure you can make. For example I shot at 11mm on an APSC sized sensor so the 35mm equivalent would be 16mm. So I take 600/16 and I get 37. So I could have made a 37 second exposure.

Provo Portraits

ISO: 100  Focal Length: 50mm 

Aperture: f/4  Shutter Speed: 1/200

Flash at 1/4 Power

Last week I was shooting some for my good friends. They were looking for some shots for a Christmas card. We headed to downtown Provo for the shoot. There are some great older buildings to use as a backdrop for portraits. For this shot I used a flash that fired off camera to the right. The flash fired through a translucent umbrella to spread it out more so the light would be very soft.

Here is a diagram of how it was set up:

Lighting Diagram from www.lightingdiagrams.com

Light is the key to photography. Using the off camera flash with an umbrella makes the light directional but there aren't harsh shadows because the light is diffused. With my flash off camera I can only shoot at a 1/200s shutter speed so I adjusted my aperture accordingly and fired a few test shots to make sure everything was dialed in. 

For post processing I sharpened the raw file, and adjusted the shadows and highlights just a little bit to get the exposure just how I wanted it. The final step was removing almost all of the saturation, I decided not to do a full black and white process. I kept just a little bit of the color because in this case I thought it was more interesting than straight black and white.

If you want to learn how to shoot with an off camera flash I will cover how to do that in an upcoming post.

Fall Slacklining

ISO: 400  Focal Length: 12mm 

Aperture: f/18  Shutter Speed: 1/100s

I wasn't quite sure what kind of shots I'd be able to get in the middle of the day, but I was pretty happy with how this shot came out from slacklining. Thankfully I am much better with photography than slacklining.

Composition

There a few important aspects of this composition. First, the slackline moving across the frame creates depth to the image. Second, the sun and Scott create a well balanced image. In order to make the sun into that nice sunburst shape I used a very small aperture f/18. Having a small aperture made the shutter speed too long to capture the action of slacklining. So I put my ISO up to 400 to make the shutter speed fast enough to catch the action without any blur.

Lighting

I knew that I wanted the aspens to be backlit and that meant shooting towards the sun. Using backlighting in the Fall brings out great colors in the leaves. In order to bring light into the foreground I simply used my flash.

Post Processing

I did very little post processing for this image. It came out of the camera almost exactly like I wanted. The only adjustment I made was adding saturation to the blue channel to make the sky pop a little more. 

The Falls in the Fall

ISO: 400  Focal Length: 24mm 

Aperture: f/14  Shutter Speed: 1/4s

      On our same trip to Bridal Veil Falls I hiked up closer to the falls and there were these beautiful trees with very red leaves. I really wanted to get a shot with the red leaves and the falls behind it. In order for this to work I had to make this shot while standing in thick bushes on a steep slope. It made me very grateful for the independently adjustable legs on my Manfrotto tripod. The wind was blowing down the canyon so I had to adjust my exposure accordingly so I could get the shot I wanted. The aperture needed to be small because I wanted everything in focus from front to back, so I needed a higher ISO to keep the shutter speed lower. Normally I would've kept the ISO 100 and dealt with the longer shutter speed but the leaves were moving too much. In situations like this it is important to wait for lulls in the wind and then shoot quite a few images and look for the sharpest one when you get home.

Here are the post processing steps I went through:

Original Image

Using the white balance slider I warmed the temperature up to 61K from 58K

Increased the exposure by .15 ev

Increased the contrast and definition by .1

Increased saturation slightly on the green channel

Added a slight vignette to the bottom left corner to give more attention to the red leaves
Which gives the final image.

Head out and find some fall colors to shoot. It is a great time of year to get outside and take beautiful pictures.

Moulton Barn Part II

ISO: 100  Focal Length: 24mm 

0, -2, +2 ev

Aperture: f/8 

Quite often the key to good landscape photos is to chase the light. Usually this means shooting around sunrise or sunset. When I went to Mormon Row to have a look at this other barn, I wasn't expecting great shots. It was the middle of the afternoon and the lighting was not at a good angle. I snapped a few shots of the barn just for the heck of it and starting walking away. Then all of a sudden the sun lit up the  ground and barn beautifully. It made for a great contrast against the storm that was approaching. So I literally started running back to the barn to get this shot. The mountains and clouds make for a great background with the barn as middle ground and the grass as foreground. I processed these 3 exposures in HDR Efex Pro and brought up the lighting on the barn a bit with the dodge brush in Aperture 3.

Buy this and other prints through my gallery.

Subway

ISO: 100  Focal Length: 28mm 

-.33 ev

Aperture: f/13  Shutter Speed: 2.0s

The Subway is one of Zion's most famous places and it is also one of the top sites for photography in the park. Although it is so famous there are usually few people around because it is a very long hike in and the traffic is limited. The hike is about 10 miles round trip and is very strenuous. If you want to do the hike you will need to reserve a Zion backcountry permit. The hike is a bit technical and for the most part there is not a well defined trail. You basically follow the river once you are down in the canyon.

After about 5 miles of hiking you will get to the Subway portion, which is actually quite short. It is named for the tunnel like formation of the cliffs, see the image at the bottom of the post.

The image with the pools was a pretty straight forward composition. I wanted the lowest pool to be in the lower third of the picture to add foreground interest. The cascade of pools provided a great sweeping line that gives the image depth.

As for the more technical details of the shot, I had a polarizer filter on my lens and chose the small aperture of f/13 so I could get the long shutter speed that would give the water a very smooth look. For post processing I took down the highlights a little, gave saturation a slight bump and sharpened it for the final result.

Coastal Portrait

ISO: 100  Focal Length: 18mm 

Aperture: f/4.5  Shutter Speed: 1/30

This is actually a portrait of my wife and I from the day we got engaged at Solana Beach in Southern California. The sun was about to set so there was very nice directional light with a golden tint. I set the tripod up next to the cliff, dialed in the settings I wanted and put a 10 second timer on. The leading lines are what make this image.

The cliff has these great lines that not only create depth in the image but they also guide the eye right to the subject.

For post processing I used Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 for the black and white conversion and that was pretty much it. I just picked the preset I liked the best for the image, adjusted a few sliders to fine tune things and the image was good to go. 

Now I probably should've used a little wider aperture (smaller number) so the depth of field was a little shallower and the rocks would have been a little more blurred. I think the image would have been a little stronger if I had done that.

Bonneville Salt Flats Portrait

ISO: 100  Focal Length: 50mm 

Aperture: f/2.8  Shutter Speed: 1/4000

This was a shot from an engagement session I did. The couple wanted to do it out on the Bonneville Salt Flats. It is a pretty cool place to go shoot. This was shot in the afternoon and the light was still pretty harsh. I would have liked to have shot it early or late to get better light from the sun, but unfortunately that just wasn't an option. When shooting at the Salt Flats you will want to overexpose just a bit maybe +.5 or +1 ev, otherwise the salt flats will be a sort of gray color instead of white. For a lot of shots during this session we used a 5 in 1 reflector. In this case we positioned the translucent part of the reflector to the left of the camera to take out the harsh shadows and give some directional light to the couple. I used an aperture of f/2.8 to get a shallow depth of field to isolate the couple from the background. If I had tried a wider aperture the shutter would not be able to fire fast enough so f/2.8 was the widest aperture possible. For a wider aperture you would need to use a neutral density filter (think of sunglasses for your camera) it restricts the amount of light going through the lens without changing the color of the image.

During the entire shoot I was shooting with my 50mm lens that I mentioned in my last post. It is really great for portraits.

For post processing I used Nik Silver Efex Pro 2. It is an incredible tool for converting images to black and white. 

If you shoot a lot of portraits I would really recommend getting a 5 in 1 reflector. They are a fantastic tool that can be had very cheap. Like my 43" set cost less than $20. I use the Neewer Reflector and it has really worked great for me. It does have a few drawbacks but for less than $20 it is well worth it.

Yellowstone Pool

ISO: 100  Focal Length: 28mm 

-.33 ev

Aperture: f/9  Shutter Speed: 1/125

The colors in Yellowstone are pretty amazing. The clear blue pools with swaths of orange around them make for great pictures. I arrived at this particular pool pretty late in the day, so the lighting was pretty flat. This did serve to illuminate the colors well. To get this shot I crouched down low on the boardwalk so the stripes of orange would create a lot of depth in the image. I decided to darken the image by .33 ev so the skies would be better exposed than what the camera originally metered for.

A big tip for shooting in Yellowstone: get up early. Everyday we would get up before sunrise and there was very little traffic. As it gets later in the day there are crowds of people everywhere.

Aspen Sunburst

ISO: 400  Focal Length: 12mm 

2 Shots bracketed at 0 and -2 ev

Aperture: f/22  Shutter Speed: .4s and 1/10

Originally this morning was supposed to be all about a waterfall. I had driven up near Sundance and hiked in a few miles to shoot Stewart Falls in the morning light. After shooting there I was hiking back and came upon this beautiful scene. I positioned the tripod so that the sun would just be peaking out behind an aspen and set my aperture to f/22 so I would get that nice sunburst shape from the sun. 

I composed the image this way so there would be the sunburst on the left and a stand out aspen on the right to balance the frame. These are the most dominant elements in the frame and are what will draw the eye the most. The forest floor that is carpeted with ferns serves to add interest and depth to the picture. With the sun in the frame I knew I would need to bracket my exposures for an HDR image. I set my camera to take pictures at 0, -2 and +2 exposure compensation. Once home I processed the files in HDR Efex Pro and ended up only using the 0 and -2 exposures. The original exposures are below.

Although I was originally just looking for good shots of the waterfall, this might be my favorite image of the morning. So keep your eyes open for other opportunities for great images when you set out with a specific subject in mind.

Moulton Barn

ISO: 100  Focal Length: 20mm   Exposure Compensation: -.67  

Aperture: f/10  Shutter Speed: 1/125

Right after shooting at the Snake River overlook we hurried over to the famous Moulton barn on Mormon Row in Grand Teton National Park. It was lucky that we got there in enough time for the light to still be a good golden color. I composed the shot with the intent of cropping it down for a wide print. The trees on the right and left of the frame serve to help balance the shot. The dirt path in front of the barn added a nice diagonal line to the shot that helped give depth to the image. Having the path and brush in the foreground, the barn in middle ground and the Tetons in the background really helped to make a good composition. 

The post processing this image was very minimal. I bumped up the saturation and vibrancy just a little and cropped it down. It is always best to get as much right in camera as possible.

Snake River Overlook

f/8.0 ISO 100

3 Shots at 0, -2, +2 ev

I was filled with apprehension before the trip to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Park. Ansel Adam's Snake River overlook photograph is one of my favorite landscape images and I was nervous about how my images would turn out. It is important to get to the Snake River overlook in order to get a prime spot. By the time I got to the overlook there were already a few photographers. 

In order to get a better composition I stood on top of the wall that is at the edge of the slope down to the river. In order to make this work it is important to have a tripod that has independently adjustable legs. Two of the legs can go to the right and left of you, but the third leg will go right in between your legs.

The s bend of the river really draws the eye into the image, which is one of the big draws of the Snake River overlook. In this case the river points almost directly at the peak that is highlighted by the first rays of the sun. These lines that lead you to the focal point (the highlighted peak) are what make this a strong composition.

I chose to make this image from three shots and combine them with HDR Efex Pro. The image could have also been made by using a graduated neutral density filter. The final touch was to put a slight vignette on the final image.