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Take a closer look at the advantages of hand-held photography versus shooting from a tripod,
I was talking with a friend the other day in Joshua Tree about the differences between shooting landscape photography from a tripod versus hand-held. He had been faithfully photographing from a tripod but did some shooting hand-held, apparently for the first time, and was excited with the sense of freedom he experienced. We had a brief conversation on the advantages and disadvantages of both methods. I’d like to share the conversation with you.
Continue reading “Tripod or Hand-Held”
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In this post I share with you what it’s like to be a photography judge at the Orange County Fair. It’s not that easy.
Over the years I’ve entered photographs into the Orange County Fair photography competition (with some success). This year I was thinking about the photographs I wanted to enter when I was contacted by the folks at the fair. They asked if I would be willing to be a judge.
Now, it’s an honor to have your photographs selected and an even greater honor when some of them receive ribbons. But I think the greatest honor of all is to be invited to judge the competition. But when I accepted I had no idea how tough it would be.
(For a followup post, please see
http://ralphnordstromphotography.com/wordpress/journal/orange-county-fair-judges-walkthrough/ )
Continue reading “Orange County Fair Photography Judging”
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This is the third post in a series on the histogram. This post discusses the Rocky Mountain histogram, what it is, when you can get it, how to photograph and how to do the post processing.
This is the third post in a continuing series on the oft misunderstood but oh so important histogram. In the first two posts we discussed the histogram in general. If you missed them, click on these links.
Mastering Exposure – Histograms Part 1
Mastering Exposure – Histograms Part 2
To recap, the histogram displays a graph of the tonal values in the scene you are about to photograph. It shows how the dynamic range of the scene matches and fits into the dynamic range of your camera’s sensor. There are two critical pieces of information a histogram tells you:
To recap, the exposure is displayed by the position of the histogram curve within the boundaries of the graph area. As you increase the exposure the histogram moves to the right. As you decrease the exposure it moves to the left. If the exposure is increased so that the histogram moves all the way up against the right side of the graph area you will have highlight clipping. Likewise, if it moves all the way to the left side you will have shadow clipping.
The dynamic range of the scene is displayed as the breadth of the histogram, The wider the histogram the greater the dynamic range of the scene. The narrower the histogram the lower the dynamic range. When the histogram is so wide that it extends from one end of the graph area to the other you are facing a situation where your camera’s sensor will have a difficult time capturing the full dynamic range of the scene. The worst case is you will have both highlight and shadow clipping.
Continue reading “Mastering Exposure–Histograms Part 3”
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The backup strategy I’ve been developing over the past year got put to the test. And it worked.
Backing up our photos is something we put off doing because it can be a lot of work and expensive. And we think it’s something we’ll never need.
I got motivated to come up with a backup scheme about a year ago when I thought I had lost all my photograph files from 2010. I had several days of panic and was able to recover most of them from a hodgepodge of backups scattered randomly here and there. I didn’t have anything systematic in place and fortunately they weren’t my portfolio files, the ones I sell. (After it was all over I discovered all the files had inadvertently been moved to another folder. They hadn’t been deleted after all.)
It took a while to come up with the backup strategy that I shared with you in a post last month. Here’s a link to that post. Check it out. I received some valuable comments with some good ideas from others.
Continue reading “The Backup Saga Continues”
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It was a couple of years ago when I was shooting in the Columbia River Gorge up in Oregon when a fellow photographer (a stranger, not a friend) laid this stinging remark on me. But let me explain.
Continue reading “A Sad Story”
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The workshop is ‘in the can.’ We finished up yesterday with a Mono Lake South Tufa sunrise followed by the rest of the morning in Bodie.
There weren’t any clouds but the sunrise was bright red (“Red sky in morning….” but it didn’t pan out). Still, South Tufa is always fascinating. We explored some new places and found some new compositions. We also found a place where an underwater spring was welling up. The tufa building process continues. There were clouds of brine shrimp and alkali flies (in their respective environments). And amazingly, the flies were not a bother. They swarmed on the tufa right at the water’s edge and only flew when you disturbed them by moving too close. Discovering an active site was really very thrilling.
Unfortunately, the water level continues to drop as the drought continues. I’d estimate the water level is down a couple of feet from the time I first started shooting there about two and a half years ago. But the potentially good news is that yesterday the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center issued a forecast that an el nino is building and will last through next winter. We could use five years of el nino in California to replenish our nearly exhausted water reserves.
Bodiewas fascinating as usual. And although we were photographing in late morning light the subjects are still very interesting and the photography, exciting. There’s a temptation to rush around in an attempt to cover it all. But I prefer to slow down and absorb the spirit of the area. Oh, and we ran into David Muench and his workshop.
We were so busy the last days of the workshop that there wasn’t any time to even review our pictures much less get any ready to post. But that will come and soon. So stay tuned for more images.
You can check out my other photos on my website – http://RalphNordstromPhotography.com
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