Here’s a shot from Death Valley National Park. I love shooting by moonlight! The soft glow is incredible – and when you are in a place like this, it’s so hard to pack up and go home! Why not stay just a little bit longer and capture the moonlight on the sand? This is a composite shot. I took one shot for the foreground and sky, and a second shot – slightly zoomed in – to capture the moon with the proper exposure. I combined the two images in Photoshop to produce an image that looked as much like the reality of the scene as I remember it as possible.

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Have you ever tried to make the reflections an entire image? This is exactly what Varina did in the image above.

This image of stork was taken in Everglades National Park during our 2011 workshop….Varina was looking for something creative that would set her shot apart from other animal shots.

Often times with reflecting images you get imperfections in the rippling water… like the bending beak in this shot. But these imperfections give the image a bit of character.

Compare this with Jay’s image of another stork (below). In Varina’s shot, the subject is isolated against the reflected blue sky in the water… and the upside-down bird with all its imperfections adds interest and grabs your attention. My shot below is just another bird portrait – full of distractions. And the head of the bird gets lost in all those grasses behind him.

So next time you go out in the field… look for reflections. Maybe you’ll capture something unique!

To learn more about composition and color check out our eBooks below:

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Here’s a shot from Nine Mile Pond in the Everglades. It’s a beautiful place to watch the sunrise – but on this morning, I wasn’t getting any good photos. Although the sunrise was pretty, it wasn’t very photogenic – and the water was a bit choppy. A couple of test shots failed to get me excited.

I wanted to transform the scene. So I pulled out my neutral density filter. The idea was to block some of the light coming into the lens with a grey filter – that would mean I could use a much longer shutter speed. The effect was exactly what I wanted. A 25-second shutter speed (f/8) blurred out the waves, giving the water a smooth, calm surface. The slowly moving clouds blurred just a bit – which left the sky looking dreamy. Most importantly, the reflected light on the water scattered with each wave, producing an opalescent glow.

Simple, in-camera techniques like this one can turn an ordinary scene into something just beyond the usual. Have you used a neutral density filter for a similar effect?

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What is the most important element in your photograph? Can you identify it, or is your eye pulled from one element to another? The next time you go out to shoot, take a moment to consider the scene carefully.
Choose a single interesting element… a leaf, a water droplet, a rock, a tree… and see if you can find a way to make that element stand out in your photograph. There are so many ways to build an image around a single point of interest.

• Remove distracting elements from the frame by moving around to change your composition… or by moving them physically.
• Use a wide aperture to blur out distracting details in front of or behind your point of interest.
• Use color to make one object stand out.
• Use leading lines to direct the viewers attention toward your point of interest.
• Watch for patterns… an element that breaks the pattern will attract attention.

There may be many elements in the scene that interest you. Why not make several images – each showcasing one interesting object – rather than trying to include them all in a single frame?

To learn more about composition and color check out our eBooks below:

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Monello the Jester

Today, Naturescapes.net announced their “Images of the Year”. This means that the two nature photography forums I am currently involved with have now made their selections from the photos submitted over the past year. Special congratulations to Paul Marcellini whose image “Frozen Tempest” took out the 1st place in the landscape category for both Naturescapes and Nature Photographers Network. Just click on the hyperlinks to check out the photos the respective moderating teams thought to be the stand-outs of the year.

I am of course delighted and honoured to have been named winner in the “Travel & Culture” category in the NSN awards. It’s the first time a portrait of mine has been recognised in this way. I don’t often talk about gear on this blog since these days, I find it difficult to get too excited about the newest and latest gadgets. The Canon 5DMkII provides more than enough resolution for my needs and my lenses do well enough to get the job done. My main gripes are the 5DMkII’s poor environmental sealing (it seems to stop working every time it rains) as well as the corner softness and distortion on my 16-35mm 2.8L. The one piece of gear I really love though is my portrait lens, the Canon 85mm 1.2LII. It’s a chunky nugget of a lens, focus is sluggish and it’s difficult to use wide open. But get it right and the images have pop, great contrast and the bokeh is beautiful. Being able to shoot at such wide apertures has allowed me to work without flash. It’s the lens I used to capture this portrait of Monello with the technical details handheld at ISO 400, f2, 1/500. I’ll certainly be packing it when I return to Venice for Carnevale in a couple of weeks.

Wired

“Wired” is an example of going out with the limitations of a fixed lens and seeing what you come back with. I shot this with the 85mm wide open at f1.2. Most monochrome photos of Paris celebrate nostalgia and “golden age”, however I wanted to show something of the city today. Perhaps I should have named this “Wireless” instead since many parks now offer internet connection through wifi. So here is a glimpse of Tuileries in the age of Facebook, Twitter and Lady Gaga.

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Life is beautiful! Here’s a touch of fresh new life to give you a little pleasure as you wait for Spring! I took this photograph in Great Smoky Mountain National Park.

I wanted the flower to stand out, so I blocked all the light except for a little beam that was falling directly on the flower. The light on the flower is completely natural, but there were other spots of light in the scene as well. I had to use my body and my camera bag to block the light that I didn’t want to include in the image. I wanted just one trillium flower in the frame. I chose the title to match the image…Glow of Life!

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 This is a shot from Death Valley National Park in California. The salt flats are huge – 40 miles long and 5 miles wide – but it’s the tiniest details that grabbed my attention. The largest of these crystals is just three or four millimeters wide.

I was waiting for sunset near Badwater, but the clouds were gone, and there wasn’t much change of getting a gorgeous sunset. So, instead of searching for appealing foreground objects, I pulled out my macro lens and started looking for details. It didn’t take long for me to notice that in some places, the salt crystals were more spread out, so that I could see each one individually. I loved the graduated sizes spread out across the sand.

I set up my tripod nice and low to the ground, and then adjusted my lens so that the glass was parallel to the ground. When you are working with a macro lens – and when you get in this close – your depth of field is incredibly narrow. I wanted to get everything in focus, so I spent extra time making sure I had my camera set up just right.

I also needed to make sure to provide a clear point of interest for my viewer. When you are working with hundreds of similar objects, that can be pretty difficult! I chose my composition carefully so that a single larger crystal dominates – and smaller crystals fill the frame. Notice that the largest crystal is off center – and the others seem to get gradually smaller as you move through the image from the bottom left to the upper right. The placement of the crystals is random – but the composition is anything but. Despite the randomness of the natural objects, there is a clear, diagonal structure to this image. That was important to me, since a diagonal comp is usually more dynamic and interesting than a horizontal or vertical one.

Post-production was pretty easy. I wanted to make sure the patterns in the salt stood out, but it was equally important to make sure I didn’t lose any detail in the brightest white areas. A little bit of contrast and a careful white balance adjustment did the trick. I brightened the largest crystal just slightly to make sure it grabbed your attention. I also removed two small corners of crystals that punched their way into the image at the bottom. They were distracting, and I didn’t mind seeing them go.

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Pont des Arts

Recently I have received a couple of requests for biographies to go with publications. I usually just send off a cut and paste job from the “About Me” page on my website. You may recall around the time I started this blog, I wrote an article “Writing a Photographer’s Bio”. It seems that each year, I prune off a few more sentences so decided I would just go the whole hog and the last bio I sent off just reads “Kah Kit Yoong (Photographer 2005-)”. I’m hoping that this approach will save me some time and a great deal of brain pain in the future.

Truth be told, how I came to become a photographer is not all that interesting. I used to spend a lot of time on my road bike and employed a point-and-shoot to record the places I cycled to. I’m sure most of us have asked ourselves the question “Why do I take photographs?” Answers to this question often involve some way of expressing stopping time. I think “Time Catcher”, a name coined by Patrick Di Fruscia was a particularly elegant way to put this.

A few weeks ago, while researching French photographers, I came across the work of Jeanloup Sieff and purchased his book “40 Years of Photography”. His talents covered the fields of landscape, fashion, street and portraits. Sieff’s first answer to the question was amusing yet probably true for many of us photographers. “Because someone gave me a camera”. Of course why we took photographs at the start of our journey may well be different to the reasons why we continue to take them now. Sieff’s final answer is simple – “sheer pleasure”.

Personally, there are many reasons why I take photographs. The most satisfying of these, is that my images allow me to go back in time. I can marvel at the way sunlight turned the raindrops into glittering diamonds at my leisure in “Paris is Most Beautiful in the Rain”. From the most trifling moments to the great dramatic memories, photos allow me to relive the moment. Sometimes they reveal aspects of the scene that may not be obvious in the frame. On other occasions, I might be delighted by a minor detail that I didn’t notice at the time.

St Germain Street Scene

In this street scene from St Germain des Pres, depicting the Parisian cafe life, there’s something interesting about every character in the scene. (You’ll need to see the large version to make out what each person is up to). Certainly there was more going on than I could take in while standing in the rain trying to blend in. I’m sure that without this record, it would be a memory which would disappear into the ether of everyday life.

Much less likely to be forgotten is my experience on the Cornwall coast a few weeks ago, being battered by storms and a gale force wind at sunset. With golden light illuminating the majestic cliffs and the strains of Peter Hurford’s towering performance of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor powering through my headphones, the occasion certainly made an impression. Nevertheless, all memories become dulled by the passage of time and photographs make great time machines.

King of the World

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Price: $10.00

Format: eBook, PDF format, 37 pages

Size: 21.9 MB

Requirement: Adobe Acrobat Reader 9.0 or greater

Description

This in-depth guide to histograms provides all the information you’ll need to learn to make the most of one of the most powerful  - and often overlooked – tools in digital photography. A quick glance at this little graph on the back of your camera can tell you if  you have captured detail in the shadows, if your highlights are blown, if you need to bracket your images, and if your image is properly exposed. Professional nature photographers and accomplished teachers, Varina and Jay Patel will walk you through the process of reading, interpreting, and using histograms – while you are in the field and during post-processing in Adobe Photoshop. They use simple language and a wealth of real-world examples to teach you how to use your histogram.

Click on thumbnails below to see sample pages from this eBook:

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Yellowstone Falls from Artist Point is a sight to behold, but at this particular moment the view was extraordinary. The sun broke through heavy clouds, bathing the falls with light, and leaving the rest of the valley cloaked in soft shadow.

This was a waiting game…I watched the clouds for over 3 hours on this cold and rainy day before the spotlight illuminated Yellowstone Falls. I chose to under expose the image to ensure that the bright highlights in the water were not blown out. Even with under exposure, the falls were so bright that I had to process a single RAW image twice, and than combine them using our iHDR workflow.

By the time I was ready to put away my camera, my gloves were wet and my fingers were cold and numb. But it was worth the result… I wouldn’t hesitate to do it again.

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