Footprints

Robert Straub State Park, Oregon

Autumn in Leidig Meadow, Yosemite Valley, California

A little fun with Photoshop for a special project. The original color image was converted to black and white and then toned. The opacity of the black and white layer was then reduced to allow a little of the original color to bleed through. The grain was added into the image to create a raw film-like quality. Finally, the image was printed on stretched canvas.

5 Tips For Better Beach Photography

Get Down Low:  I've said it before and I will say it again, "it ain't nature photography until you are getting your knees dirty." Lowering your viewpoint close to the ground is one of the easiest things you can do to improve your composition. Try using a wide angle lens and catch the waves rushing across the sand inches in front of you. Get down low next to that interesting rock formation at your feet and make it seem larger than life. Go get some sand on your pants and pebbles in your shoes. You will come home with some great images. Just remember to keep an eye on the waves and the camera out of the salt water!




Get Up High: Photographers spend most of their time on the beach when they are at the coast. You can consistently get great images on the sandy or rocky shores but don't pass up opportunities to shoot from the bluffs above. You can use wide angle lenses to include the details on the ground near you as well as the beach below. This is also a great opportunity to pull that long telephoto lens out of your bag and shoot down the beach. Longer focal lengths compress the foreground and the background, creating some very unique and interesting effects. But please, please make sure your tripod is secure when you are close to the edge of the cliff. I learned that the hard way (a story for another time).

Change Your Speed: Put your camera on a tripod and use a small aperture to lengthen the shutter speed. Moving water will blur as it breaks across the sand. Shutter speeds near 1 second can create a soft silky ethereal effect to the water. You can also use faster shutter speeds to freeze the water in mid air, showing the power of a wave crashing against the rocks. Shutters speeds faster than 1/500 of a second can record spray as a myriad of drops suspended in mid-flight. Try varying the shutter speed and experiment with the results.

Stay Up Late-Get Up Early:  Time of day...Time of day...Time of day. I can't say those three words enough. If a scene is beautiful during the afternoon hours, it will be spectacular during the evening hours. Eat an early dinner and get out there near sunset. Drag yourself out of bed before sunrise and you will be rewarded. Warm tones and long shadows give depth to subjects and create visual lines through the image. And please don't leave the minute the sun goes down. Professional photographers call the next hour of light "the magic hour" for a reason. The colors can reflect off the clouds in spectacular fashion and the entire landscape is frequently bathed in a soft diffused glow. Oranges and reds give way to dark blue skies as night begins to fall. Don't forget your tripod. Exposures are frequently several seconds long. You have my permission to leave when you can't see the controls on the camera any more.

Bad Weather-No Problem: Many photographers frequently cancel their photo shoots outdoors as soon as the rain begins. I promise that there is no other consistently dramatic moment than the first minutes when a storm begins to clear. If you are not there, toughing out the weather, you are not going to be there when the clouds begin to part. Every time I get depressed as the rain continues to fall, I try to stay motivated by remembering most of my best images were taken after enduring bad weather (sometimes for days on end). If nothing else, storms always lead to great stories to tell your friends.

The next time you are visiting the ocean's edge, try some of the techniques above and create some images that  live up to your memories.

Sunset at Olmsted Point, Yosemite National Park, California

Story Behind The Image: Letts Lake Reeds

It had been one of those summers in the Sierra Nevada. I would like to believe my skill was what led to the great images I kept producing but I really believe a monkey with a point and shoot camera could have come home with some pretty salable shots. It was really that good. Every morning the sunrise was fantastic and every evening...well that was addictive. The colors were so intense and so frequent that I began to expect them. All I had to do was to show up. Every evening it worked. Well, every evening until now.

What was I doing standing by this boggy little pond in the middle of the Mendocino National Forest? It seemed like a good idea at the time. Try something new. Go explore something else. Use my highly honed skills in a different area. On the map, Letts Lake looked promising. It lay up on one of the higher ridges of the area, a long and bumpy drive over dirt roads. It even had a campground near it. If they put a campground there, it had to be good, right? Yet it seemed to not even live up to the term "lake" at first glance. It was a more of a pond in a raggedy meadow surrounded by a scraggly pine forest. I lowered my head and walked back to the campsite thinking the whole trip was a colossal waste of time.

I downed my canned soup for dinner and began to think I should give it one more try. I sat down by the lake, closed my eyes, took a couple of breaths and then opened my eyes. I slowly began to notice things. The sky was a pretty amazing shade of blue and the lake was like a mirror. It was at that moment I saw the reeds. They were about twenty feet out in the water and they seemed to float in a pool of blue. Now there was a subject I could work with. I spent the rest of the evening working different angles on the reeds and waiting for the light breeze to stop blowing the blasted things around.

I would like to say that moment was a turning point for the trip. I would love to tell you that my mind opened up and I began to see things in that dusty forest but I didn't. If you want to know the truth, I packed my bags the next morning and headed home with my tail between my legs.  It was later that week, when I looked at the images on the light box (yes it was back in the olden days of film) that I saw what I had and the lesson sank in. No matter where you are, no matter how crappy the light is, always take a moment to sit down, breathe and really look around at your surroundings. An instructor at school must have had this in mind as he yelled out to my class long ago, "there is no such thing as bad light, only bad photographers."

Friday Photo

Sunrise over the mountains of Los Padres National Forest, California

Friday Photo: Mount Hood

Above treeline at sunset on the slopes of Mount Hood, Oregon