Your Point of View

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Rob Sheppard

I have watched photographers come to a beautiful landscape in a national park and simply set up their camera and tripod in the most direct view of this landscape. Such common positioning of a camera is one reason why so much landscape photography looks a lot the same.

You have a unique view of the world. I believe everybody does, and this unique view is important. This waterfall is part of Gooseberry Falls State Park in Minnesota, one of my favorite places, and a favorite place of a huge amount of Midwesterners. In spite of this falls being photographed tons of times, I am guessing that few images look like this. I deliberately got in close with a wide-angle lens and shot with a fast enough shutter speed to render the water the way you see it here. This makes the photo neither good nor bad, but it does make it fit my point of view.

Yes, I understand that some photographers like to go out and “trophy hunt” landscapes. They just want to go to famous landscapes and take their own picture of that landscape. I don't have a problem with that basic idea. I love to go to beautiful locations that I have seen in other photographs as well. But I have a unique way of looking at the landscape and so do you. There are things that impress us about a particular landscape that may or may not impress someone else. I think this unique point of view is important.

This image is from Arches National Park, another place that gets a lot of visitors, to say the least. And I am guessing that few people have this image. What was important for me was to show this late aster blooming near the rock fins in the northern part of the park because it fit my point of view (a flash balances the light on the flowers with the rocks).

Think about this. Not everyone will go to the landscapes that you photograph. As a landscape photographer, you are showing off the world that excites you. You and I are the eyes of so many other people. If all we do is duplicate images that other photographers have taken, that our eyes and our point of view are diminished. The world has lost the opportunity to see something special that you and I can offer.

I really like this dramatic black-and-white photo from another popular location, Joshua Tree National Park. It speaks to my sensibilities about rocks, Joshua trees and a special place.

I know, you might be thinking, but I am just a simple photographer, I'm not a pro, what difference does it make? I think it makes all the difference in the world. You do see the world differently than I do, than anyone else does. And your point of view is valid and important because it enriches all of us when we have a diversity of views of our landscapes. I think our beautiful world deserves that.

So just being aware that you have the potential of seeing this landscape with fresh eyes will help you start seeing your compositions better. Your choices about composition defined both how you see the landscape for your photograph and how any viewers of your photograph will also see that landscape.  You are influencing other people's view of the world.

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments

Image Manipulation and Nature Photography

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Rob Sheppard

Photoshop has, at times, created problems for ethical photography. Now before I tell you what brought that to mind, I also have to say that many people do not understand how photography really works. They think the camera is a perfect recorder of reality. It isn't.

Cameras, for a lot of reasons, have a number of limitations that prevent them from capturing what we can see. This is not a digital issue. Andreas Feininger wrote about this problem 50 years ago in his classic photo books. Because of this, sometimes "Photoshop" is needed in order to make an image more accurately reflect what was really in front of the camera.

Mark Larson recently sent me a link to something that happened at the Sacramento Bee newspaper (http://www.sacbee.com/2012/02/01/4232790/setting-it-straight-photo-manipulated.html). A photographer there combined two images of egrets to "better show" a part of the subject. He was fired for this manipulation. Here are the images from the Sacramento Bee website.

The manipulated photo is wrong on many levels. A lot of folks want to simply condemn such an image for "changing reality" (which it does and is not an ethical thing for a newspaper), but for nature photography, this brings up something, that to me, is more disturbing. As nature photographers, we are the "eyes" of the public. People believe photography, so we owe it to them to show nature as honestly as we can. I don't want people to get the wrong impression of nature.

In this Sacramento Bee situation, the photographer has literally created a behavior of the birds in the final photo that is not real. Notice how in the first image the great egret is "backing away" with its neck (a normal behavior when another bird is trying to get its dinner), but in the second, it almost looks like the bird is handing the frog over. This photographer was just not thinking.

Ethics in terms of what a photo looks like is important, but I think the discussion sometimes gets lost in arbitrary discussion of the photograph's photographic qualities (the "manipulation") rather than what is happening to the depiction of reality. This becomes important because it goes beyond "Photoshop."

This is one reason why I have always been very disturbed by the John Dominis LIFE magazine photo of a leopard attacking a baboon. To this day, that photo is touted as a "great wildlife photo", yet the story is tragic. The leopard is a captive animal and was deliberately put into an enclosure with the baboon just for the photograph. To me, this is a more ethically egregious photo than the Photoshopped egrets, but both images are important for the way they pretend to portray "nature reality" when they don't.

I think it is also important to go beyond looking at photos simply as being "manipulated." I am far more interested in how nature is portrayed. I believe that a lot of "fang and claw" wildlife shows on television that portray nature as vicious and aggressive are also "manipulated", though nothing has been digitally manipulated.

This is also important in that young people are very comfortable with the computer and working on it. They may not see a simple change in the graphics of an image as being significant or even lying (which may be what the Sacramento Bee photographer thought), but it is the change of the world into something that does not exist that is important to me as being the big problem (and an issue that cannot be argued based on "I was just doing simple computer work").

Posted in Nature photography, Wildlife Photography | Tagged , | 22 Comments

Spot Removal and More in Lightroom

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Rob Sheppard

I find there are three main problems in nature photography that the Spot Removal Tool in Lightroom can help with:

  1. Dust spots (usually in the sky).
  2. Flare spots (I love to shoot backlight, so this is not unusual).
  3. Distractions (I am pretty careful about keeping distractions out, but sometimes you will get an annoying bright spot or a distracting bit of plant that was not easy to avoid).

Lightroom's spot removal tool is a very different tool than what is in Photoshop. I find a lot of photographers are not sure how to use it, so here are some ideas. It is found in the toolbar in Develop just below the Histogram. It can be set to either clone or heal, and it can always be changed between either (which is really cool because you don't have to guess which will work better -- just try them!).

It truly is designed for spots. You work with round areas that are cloned or healed. What happens is you click your "brush" (a circle) on a spot in the photo and Lightroom finds a similar area to copy from to that spot, using the same size circle. Size the original "brush" with the size slider in the spot removal panel or by using the bracket keys to the right of the letter P on your keyboard (just try them to see what they do).

After clicking, you then see two circles. Both circles can now be moved to get a better result by clicking and dragging inside the circles. I find I often need to change the position of the "from" circle (the circle Lightroom creates) to make a problem go away better. And if it is totally messed up, just press Delete to delete it.

You can change the size of your original circle by clicking and dragging the outer line of the circle. You can also change the strength of the adjustment by changing its opacity. Now one thing that is very cool about this is that these are always changeable. You can go back to the spot removal panel at any time and readjust them. If you want to see how well the removal is going, press H (that's all) and the circles are hidden. Press H again to get them back.

You cannot paint or do irregular shapes with this tool, which you can do in Photoshop (a reason for having some Photoshop product). But for small spots, it works very well. You can overlap spot removal circles to a degree, but you still do not have the control of Photoshop.

Clone simply copies the "from" circle to the circle covering your problem. Heal copies it and then tries to blend it with both the problem and its surroundings. Sometimes it can be hard to predict which will work better, so try both by clicking Heal or Clone and seeing what looks better. Nothing is harmed on your photo when you do that.

I am not big on removing blemishes on a subject if that is truly part of them. I think if you were trying to show an ideal flower for an identification book, for example, you might want to remove any blemishes. But even on this photo of a black-necked stilt at sunset, I typically would not remove the water debris, but it is an example that shows the technique so well that I am using it here.

One thing you can always do is tone down a distracting blemish with the spot removal tool without actually removing the blemish. To do that, use the spot removal tool as described to completely cover the blemish and make it disappear. Then use the opacity slider to reduce the "spot removal" until the blemish reappears, but now not as strong.


Posted in Lightroom | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Close-Ups and Autofocus

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Rob Sheppard

I love close-ups. They truly bring you into a different world that we normally don't see. And I am not talking about super close work, either. Any time we get in close to a natural subject, we are looking more deeply at the world around us in a way we usually don't do. In a way, the act of close-up photography gets us to pause and look for and observe details that we might otherwise pass on by.

One challenge that comes from close photography is the focus point. When you are close, depth of field is very narrow, no matter what f-stop you use, so the actual point of focus becomes very, very important. This is even more critical when you play with extremely shallow depth of field as I often like to do.

Autofocus can be really challenging when you are up close. I will usually shoot manual focus when I am doing any close-up work with any lens. The challenge the camera has is that since depth of field is always very limited (and gets less and less the closer you get), yet there are many points where the camera can focus and it will "choose" its focus point rather arbitrarily. Often visually the wrong point for the subject and the composition.

My preference is this:

  1. Change the camera/lens to manual focus
  2. Roughly focus on the subject to get a basic distance
  3. Then without changing the lens' focus, move the camera toward and away from the camera until the right point is in focus
  4. Take the picture
  5. You can be careful as you do this so you do not have camera movement during exposure that will make the image soft.

When you manually change focus of the lens up close instead of doing what I just described, you can find it harder to focus partly because of a curious thing that happens when you are close. The size of the subject in your camera's view changes because magnification changes with focus distance. That slight change in size of subject can make it harder to see the focus change on the subject itself.

Both of these close-ups are from the redwoods. The first is in the Dicentra or bleeding heart genus and is often called squirrel corn when it is so white. The second is a redwoods sorel flower.

Posted in Close Up Photography, Nature photography | Tagged , , | 12 Comments

Lightroom and Photo Organization

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Rob Sheppard

I am finding that the number one digital question I consistently get now is organizing photos in Lightroom. This is something I am finding a lot of people are struggling with. Folks download their photos through Lightroom, and they think Lightroom is automatically organizing photos -- it isn't.

Lightroom offers a lot of great tools for organization, but that is like Office Depot selling you a lot of great tools for office organization. Office Depot doesn't tell you how to use them, nor does Lightroom.

If you structure that separate hard drive (and you really should have two, one for photos and one for backup) based on some system to help find photos, you will find this is much easier to work with your photos. Once you have that structure, you follow it when you import photos into your computer through Lightroom.

A lot of Lightroom is designed to be intuitive, so pay attention to the interface and try things. You cannot hurt anything in Lightroom, so if you aren't sure about something, try it, then undo it if it is not what you want.

Whenever you download photos through Lightroom (a good idea), you are telling Lightroom to put them somewhere (even if you didn't think you did -- that is the only way Lightroom works). Remember that a lot of people get into trouble because they think Lightroom is automatically organizing photos -- it isn't.

Putting photos into Pictures or My Pictures is not a good idea for a number of reasons. You should be putting your photos onto a separate hard drive that is just for photos. That helps protect your main drive (which operates your computer and has the important programs), among other things.

If you structure your separate hard drive (and you really should have two, one for your photos and one for backup) based on some system to help you find photos, you will find this is much easier to work with your photos. A simple way to do this might be:

  • Top level folder: Photos
  • Next level folders: Year
  • Next level folders: Something that reflects how you shoot, such as events, shoots, locations, etc. (I use locations and add a date to this folder title but I don't recommend doing only dates)

Once you have that structure, you follow it when you import photos into your computer through Lightroom.

All photos that are recognized by Lightroom show up in the left side of Library under Folders -- that actually tells you where they are. You can also right-click with your mouse on any photo and you will get a menu to help you find the photos, too (right-clicking is very important in Lightroom because you get important context-sensitive menus). Under that menu you will see a choice that allows you to show the photos in Finder (Mac) or Explorer (Windows) -- that will show you exactly where the photos are.

Adobe has announced the public beta of Lightroom 4. The big news for Lightroom 4 is the additional video support. It is now a viable program for actually organizing video and doing some basic work on video files, such as trimming clip length and adjusting things like brightness and contrast.

Lightroom 4 also includes a book feature (to allow you to create books that can be printed by places like Blurb) and a map feature to tag images with a map location. Basic adjustments have been simplified (finally "whites" are recognized and "Exposure" is more than adjusting whites), plus noise reduction and white balance controls have been added to local adjustments. Clarity has been much improved and there are new and improved Shadow and Highlight controls.

Posted in Lightroom | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

How Two Photographers Found Their Focus

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Rob Sheppard

This is a guest post from Hugh Nourse, a photographer and friend from Georgia. I think it is very interesting how he and his wife found a home for their nature photography.

Some thoughts on my focus in photography by Hugh Nourse

Our first photography was street and travel photography when I was in the military in Japan.  My wife, Carol, and I bought a Petri rangefinder and used Kodachrome 25 slide film.  Returned home to graduate school and then an academic career in economics, so photography became shots of the family.

We came to photography a second time near retirement when trying to identify wildflowers.  I bought a point and shoot to capture images to check with the field guides.  Showed image of photos to a friend, and he said join my camera club.  Within six months I was carrying a tripod and an SLR with a 100mm macro lens.

When first learning photography, we were told to get closer.  We liked using a telephoto macro close-up to get a simple green background. We learned to think about five things for better flower photography:

  1. What is the subject?  Close in until you are just showing the subject.
  2. Where is the subject in the frame?
  3. Does the background enhance the image?
  4. Does the foreground enhance the subject?
  5. What is the light on the subject?

Today we are volunteer photographers for the State Botanical Garden of Georgia, and we get the most raves from the editor (as well as the graphic designer) of The Garden Newsletter  for close-ups we provide. They also use overviews and scenes.

For a while, I tried stock photography. Even though I had thousands of images, it was not often that I happened to have the “right” image.  Furthermore, since I had been taught to do close-ups, the ones I had did not show the flower in a garden setting, so someone else got the editor's attention.  But I did manage to get some photos into American Gardener and was given picture assignments by the editor.  We also had images published in Nature Photographer, Backpacker, and Wildflower magazines.

We have also donated images to the US Forest Service "Celebrate Wildflowers" website, to identification guides to wildflowers (maybe five such guides), to University of Georgia extension web pages on wildflowers, and to Tipularia, the magazine of the Georgia Botanical Society, and to their bi-monthly newsletter. Since retiring from college teaching, Carol and I have published three books with University of Georgia Press as photographers and authors: Wildflowers of Georgia, State Botanical Garden of Georgia, and "Favorite Wildflower Walks in Georgia.

We have just finished a 7 year effort to provide photos of plants and their habitats for a Guide to the Natural Communities of Georgia, which involved a great effort to visit over 67 natural communities in Georgia with ecology authors.  For this book we were pushed to photograph ecological processes, such as prescribed burns, or other indications of change, i.e., storytelling. All royalties on this book will go to the Department of Natural Resources for Georgia.

Now we are about to embark on a Field Guide to the Wildflowers of Georgia by Natural Communities. The author, Linda Chafin, is a fine field botanist.  We have worked with her before on her book, Field Guide to the Rare Plants of Georgia.  She is a good friend.

We like doing plant identification images and plant habitat images, but there never is any money.  Our reward is that the images get published, and that they are used in a wonderful cause -- improving the botanical knowledge of the public so that they may support conservation causes. Identification images are not necessarily close-ups, since you need to show the critical identification characteristics to the viewer.  Sometimes a flower is so small, or the characteristic is so small that one-to-one photography is needed.

Mostly you need to find good backgrounds in good light for a portrait. I used to be able to hike many miles with tripod, camera, and macro lens. Today I am physically limited to about a mile to hike with this equipment. Longer hikes with equipment cause back pain, so I am working to find alternative equipment such as the small mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras.

One does not get rave reviews from the camera club for this type of work.  So be it. It has been a great retirement.

Posted in Flowers, Native plants, Nature photography | Tagged , , | 6 Comments