Blogodocious ramblings of a landscape photographer living in Maine.
I'm not just going to sell out, and why do I do this anyway.
Full Moon Pull
So- get this: this is hilarious! Been meaning to get this out there and I just remembered it from something else, anyways- about a month ago I received an email from a British advertising firm that wants to advertise on my blog. So I say- well, whattaya got? Because I'm all about capitalizing on my photography when I can painlessly. The reply has an example of the agreement and a bunch of copy that they want me to post as if it were my own words- of all things- a review of a car that is, as far as I can tell, sold only in Europe- that which I've never even heard of? Didn't take me long to sum up a reply something to the effect of "this is not entirely appropriate for my viewership= I don't think this is going to work". See- I'd be wicked psyched to have a flashing B+H Photo banner on my blog that I would probably click more than anyone else- but this, uh- no.
Full Moon Pull 2
So they reply to me again- like, I thought I put them off already. Now they have this whole copy regarding how wonderful it is to combine photography and travel and gambling-, and gambling? Really? Seriously. They wanted to pay me 200 dollars, I don't know if that was before or after British Pounds conversion, to post that entire copy as if it were my own once. And who knows- maybe I could have tacked on a few tags that spelled out my being bound beyond my strength by the vice of money so that you all knew what was actually going on. And that much I told them- that there is no possible way that people are going to believe that I in my rational state of mind chose to, without duress, post these words as my own sentiments! They'd see through that like a .90 aperture 50. So in the end I lied and said that my brother is suffering from gambling dependency and that's why I couldn't do business with them. Maybe when the winter comes back strong and I get low on PBR's I'll preface the post and clue you all in what's about to happen and I'll suddenly do a review on Arby's or whatever- and then we can all have the last laugh together- eh?! Or no?
Full Moon Pull 3
These are some dawn full-moon-setting images from the other morning that I'm still working on. Why I do I do this here on the blog is because I sell my prints and I want people to have an understanding of who took the picture, get to know me, and I like the soap box too, and I love photoblogs. But I would rather shoot for myself than sell out to the gambling minicar bunch anyway anyday. At least for now. Wish me luck, eh?
And have a good one-
-Nate!
Nik Software rocks- get it before it's gone~!
Hunter Beach Summer Fog. Acadia.
Get it before it's gone= the Nik Complete Package, which used to be something in the area of at least 400 dollars, is only 150.00 until July 31'st= you only have one day! Personally I find Nik Silver Efex absolutely the bomb and I've developed just about 98 percent of anything you've seen me make in black and white through Silver Efex. Color channel black and white conversions otherwise can do a perfect job and equivalent results can be had through Photoshop and Lightroom but the workflow I've learned through using SFX for the last 3 years is just really satisfying. There's just something about the luminance that becomes sublime coming out of Silver Efex, it always ends up revealing the image to me that then I can then chase through dodging and burning to get the result I'm after. So, when I heard of the limited availability of the whole package: due to Google's purchasing the company last year and then seemingly burying it like the compost that comes out of your kitchen in the weed pile out back I figured to upgrade all my Nik products before it was too late.
Here's a link: http://www.niksoftware.com/nikcollection/usa/intro.html then use this code to get another $25 bux$ knocked off: RONMART (which is from Ron Martinsen's Photography Blog http://www.ronmartblog.com which is good in a pinch when PetaPixel has been having an off day: http://petapixel.com.
Like I said- Silver Efex 2 is worth it alone, it used to retail for $200.00 just a year ago or so, best black and white conversions hands down (whatever that means). So far I'm finding the interface more user friendly and the Fine Structure adjustment in the control point tool is sweet! Color Efex Pro 4 now is much more usable in that you can stack filters instead of having to save and reopen a file, as well as many of the filters have been tweaked to be much more useful. I've used Dfine and Sharpener pro making some particular prints and the Viveza program seems interesting for color somehow, and you also get the HDR Efex Pro 2 app which people like R.C. Concepcion love (https://www.google.com/search?q=rc+concepcion+hdr&safe=off&client=safari&rls=en&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=sU74Ucy_HrPd4AOrmICAAw&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAQ&biw=2560&bih=1248 and just may be interesting to me again someday- I used to use Photomatix a lot, which photographers ala Trey Ratcliff like- http://www.stuckincustoms.com. But in regards to HDR (high dynamic range) photography: I wouldn't recommend it and if you do I would approach with great caution!
So that's that- I don't know what Google's plan herein is- but they must have something up their sleeve i.e. a new product release that will try to supplant what Nik was. But I think those will be big shoes to fill.
Dawn Light on the Beehive
Dawn Light on the Beehive.
Last week in the middle of the heat wave that seemed to have been going on for ten days or more, I wanted to go make a sunrise image over at Sand Beach that felt hot like that the day was going to. On summer mornings over on the east side of the island, high pressure heat wave systems often make for really pretty pink high clouds with orange and cerulean contrasts and I've made those kinds of images before over there, but usually in August. I didn't really have any particular image in mind heading over there at 04:00 in the morning for a 05:15 sunrise, I was thinking of seascapes though and figured to frame "Great Head" in the distance against the shore of the beach and hope for some nice colorful clouds to come along. I guess, come to think of it, I was considering almost certainly making a color image that morning even though at the time I wouldn't have attested to it, it was just there in the background of the mind and no matter what I would have found that motivation sooner or later. Also black and white always works best for me on cloudier, stormier, and more overcast days and this was setting up to be a real typical dog-days-of-summer, humid and steamy, colorful kind of morning. Got there with plenty of time to spare in order to set up the kit not frantically in the parking lot and check to make sure to inventory all the important stuff= coffee. Set up over on the right side of the beach where the boulders are and made a balanced composition and then started to wait out the light but it became pretty obvious that the real show was going to happen out of my frame to the left/ north and the clouds were already starting to reflect good underlight in that direction so it was agony to wait for the 8 minute exposure to finish up (oh, by the way, as usual I was making long exposures with a B+W nd110 and also a 2 stop soft graduated neutral density filter) and scamper over to a new composition that would include those clouds. After a quarter mile sprint= if you can call it that in big Muck Boots with a 25 pound backpack and tripod and kit over my shoulder with shutter release clanking along and coffee cup carefully not spilling, I set up just in front of the marsh behind Sand Beach facing the Beehive promontory. There was gorgeous wisps of fog rolling over the ridge towards the sun rising and the sparse high clouds were really starting to pick up some gorgeous pink highlights when I made this first test exposure:
test 1 Beehive dawn light. 240 seconds at f/6.3 iso 100 Canon 5d mkII with 24mm Ts-e and B+W nd110 + 2 stop soft grad.
I liked where this was headed- it's an undeveloped raw file of course= a negative that needs developing for contrasts, dodging/burning, sharpening, etc, but I like the warm feel of the sky vs the green of the foreground and the tree line and mountain shapes so- then I saw that 50 yards over to the north was a blooming patch of neat looking meadow flowers that I sprinted again over to. Here the 24mm tilt shift lends itself to one of my most favorite applications of it- making a larger image in a panorama. What's good about this is I can achieve the super wide focal length of about a 14-16mm ultra wide instead of the standard wide of the 24 by shifting the lens three times from side to side or top to bottom (I like to make them as 3 vertical framed shifts from left to right or three normal landscape framed shifts from top to bottom that gives me an equivalent of a standard 4x5 crop vs a really wide and skinny landscape framed shot shifted left to right or a real skinny portrait framed shot shifted top to bottom, but you can do that too. So, in addition to giving you extra wide framing, the "shift-pans" make for 3x the resolution as a normal sized file= it's the equivalent of a 60 or so megapixel capture vs. 20 something megapixels= all the better to print you with! Which is not to say that it doesn't have it's drawbacks, but those weren't a problem here.
Where were we- after another quick sprint 100 yards to the north I set up in front of these meadow flowers and fired off a quick 3 shot vertically framed "shift-pan" ('fired off quick' in long exposure photography terms= about 12 minutes for the three images) and got something like this: 
this is just two- but that's all you need to get the gist. I use three cause, just because.
The tourists behind me were totally blowing up with oohs and aaahs, which kind of helped to reinforce for me that this was actually really pretty nice. You can become blind to the beauty that exists around here when you see it often, I'm not saying that I'm guilty of that- it was just additionally moving in some way to hear their reaction to the scene this time, usually it bugs me to no end, but not this time.
So, the raw material becomes= this: 
3 raw files stitched in Photoshop CS5- you can see the rough edges and the lens vignetting from being shifted so far to the max on the left.
rough stitched image cropped in Lightroom 4 (ya, I'm intending to upgrade next week or so to v.5). Here's pretty much what I did after cropping clean to 4x5: contrast +42, highlights -38, shadows +22, clarity +9, vibrance +18, saturation +4, then a sharpening of 70 and 0.8 radius. I also added a positive exposure adjustment graduated filter in Lr4 to the left side of the image which was burned from lens vignetting, and a negative exposure adjustment graduated filter to the sky to pop the clouds before sending the whole bit over to Nik Color Efex (which I hardly ever use because I usually go straight to Nik Silver Efex for monochrome conversions) first I applied a brilliance/warmth filter for this:
warmer. nice.
and then I sent the whole kitandkaboodle over to photoshop for dodging and burning with the gradient tool and the d+b brushes for this: 
done. And my first favorite color image of the year.
It's definitely not a "straight-out-of-camera" image, but that is a completely ridiculous concept anyways: the camera making the decisions on developing your once in a lifetime image will not always agree with what you want- so I always develop my own photographs. I felt the color choices and approaches I took herein to make this picture were in accordance to the way I felt the scene as. It was hot hot Hot that week, the bugs were murder, I lost my coffee cup int the tall grass three times that very morning just running around with my tripod in a photographic frenzy- but those inconveniences were worth it a thousand times over to be a part of this morning scene here- to borrow an ultimately squeezey cheese word here: it was "magic!"
Right then. That's all for now, and have a good one friendsies. -Nate.
Tech talk- 3 configurations for black tape on my Canon 5D mkII and a little black tang.
Black Tang at Hunter Beach in Acadia National Park.
'Black tang' is my favorite colloquialism for rock weed. So whenever I see it- I think it. This is a three shot "shift-pan" made with my 24mm tilt shift as a long exposure with a B+W nd110 that I got out for a few days ago in the fog. Which brings me to the tech talk: when making long exposures you don't want light to sneak into the camera anywhere. Nikons have a little door like thingy that you can shut over the eyepiece of the viewfinder, Canon gives you a little rubbery bit of nonsense that is supposed to clip on over the eyepiece window, but it never really wants to stay there and most people never even know what that little black rubber bit is for anyways. But time and again I hear about people going to make long exposures and then they get back home and fine them all ruined by a big streaky of glow on the edge of the frame or even right through the middle, or low contrast, or any other failure to launch kind of thing- it's really hot here in Maine today: I mean ridiculous, it's hard to form succinct sentences, bear with me.
So- what I do is I always have a piece of black tape stuck on my hotshoe of my cammy- here it is in 'configuration #1':
black tape in the ready position in configuration 1. In this case it's a bit of electrical tape that has been working for me since last fall, you may rather black gaffer tape, or some other kind of thing although I would shy away from the brand name 'Guerilla Tape' as you may never get it off!@
black tape in the shooting mode of long exposure making. We'll just call this 'configuration #2- action tape time!' I've long ago lost both the eye cup that came with the camera and a replacement eye cup that my bud Larson Harley gave me (I think it's under a seat of my car somewhere) as I'd rather leave it off because I almost always use my camera for landscapes rather than regular eye to the viewfinder style shooting, and this allows me to completely block off the viewfinder when I want to easily.
And here's 'configuration #3- surreptitiously "Dutching out" the name badge to make my kit look cheaper in the case of when I recently went down to Manhattan to show some work and then hit the streets for some people photography.
I never leave home without that tape on my cammy, and here's me telling you to check it out, if you would find that useful in some way that is!
Right then, that's all for me for now- time to go sit in front of the freezer with the door open for a while and hope that this heat wave breaks sometime this month, I mean we are in Maine after all it really should not be this hot here!
Perfect time to go watch that James Balog documentary about the receding of the glaciers- with some amazing ice photography and time lapses - called "Chasing Ice". http://www.chasingice.com/
Have a good one friendos and don't forget your black tape! -Nate.
Some of my favorite images from NYC where I missed the focus?
#Nuts.
Focus is over rated!
Heheh. See, usually I take great pains to get the best focus as possible. I use a heavy tripod- magnify 10x loupe in Live View, consider hyperfocal and circle of confusion depth, use a shutter release etc, but that's not on the street. I consider street photography kind of like a sport. A sport that I do poorly but keep showing up for in my cut-off sweats with a bandana on clapping my hands together saying "allright let's go guys!" But then miss the jump shot like a dweeb.
Washington Square Park weirdo- it's funny: I was talking to my buddy who I was supposed to meet in an hour or so on the phone while walking through the park with my other buddy Larson and we'd been photographing since midtown- saw this guy and shifted the phone top my left hand and got as close as I could bear to him with the 24mm on. Then he starts reeling around and shouting "oh my gawd: he's taking pictures and talking on the phone, oh my gawd-" so that cracked me up pretty good. Here I missed the focus on the first shot of the series where even though it's a super long depth of field, the ladies walking towards us on the right are tack and the weirdo is just a little soft.
But I got my own rebound and it was sharp here: 
Here's some tech talk for the camera nerds: I was shooting on a Canon 5D MKII with either a 50 or a 24 or a 40mm lens. I had my camera set up to Tv mode (time value/ shutter priority) at 1/160th of a sec and auto iso so I could completely focus on experiencing and trying to see and not get run over or inadvertently do something exceedingly touristy. I had my autofocus set to single shot with only the central focus point (the only cross-type point on the 5DII). So my modus of operandi like was to focus and recompose, real quick like. So that only worked to a point. Because that cameras autofocus system is only so good, which is to say mediocre at best (I use it for landscapes and that's why I got it), you have to obviously consider focusing strategy to work street photography well it would seem. From my recent experiences down there doing that I would next try 1.: using AI Servo autofocus because so many times a photograph is walking down the sidewalk towards you approaching at a closing speed of a respectable NY 9 miles an hour or so- so, unless you're at f/16 on a really wide lens the subject will go soft between focus confirmation and shutter release. Also I shoot back button focus, which can't be helping anything in fast moving environments because it has to be at least a nanosecond or so slower than shutter button focusing, but I like the back button.
She's soft but the dumb background signs are sharp- and I love that cool confident attitude that says: "yeah, take my picture!" (don't read anything into that line Sophie, sweetie- I'm just talking about photography here! :-) )
The 2nd. thing I would go with in the future regarding better street focusing is manual. I feel pretty comfortable focusing manually and there's just something to be said about taking the guess work out of the thing where if the machine fails you that half second will never come back to try again, but manually focusing if you miss just a little bit I'm gonna call it still good. See, again this is just a reference to the 5DII's autofocus system- I know the 5DIII has a rockin' good auto system, but the 2's- no. I don't trust the matrix system in a situation like this, so otherwise it's pick a point or go manual. Which brings up point #3-
This was from the hip- made the exposure just hanging the camera around my neck. I like the picture for the guy in the suit all making the stressed out pinchy face of a businessman in Manhattan backed by the high rises and windows of sixth avenue. But he's just a little too soft. Not to mention that phone booth or sign or whatever making bat wings coming out of his back, but I like the feel.
Point #3 in our tech talk regarding street photography focusing strategies: camping with a prefocused distance set waiting for something to happen. Let's say you find something in the environment that is just too crazy and amazing but you need something else, being a person of interesting variety, to make it whole. so you camp there with your focus set and wait for it to come together- but that has never worked for me. First of all that seems like it's cheating and too contrived- for me at least, or maybe I just never had the patience or foresight to pull it off correctly. Second of all unless it's just an amazing stage that you're building here with this wonderful background that is waiting to be transformed into the ultimate expression of contemporary society, you could be missing something better and more real and unfolding right now right around the corner? But for an autofocus system like mine perhaps I would be better suited to that kind of photo-trapping approach. Bah, just kidding. I'm going to go manual next time.
Larry and Paul the bird guys- I don't know how I screwed up the focus on the one- which is where relying on technology get's you!
but I photographed it again because I had a feeling that I should, also I was refraining from chimping for about 90 percent of the time down there, just trying to keep my head in the moment.
I like this one because of the guys ogling the lady from the train. I was focusing on the train rolling into the station and the people in the windows when this lady in front of me started adjusting her hair- I remember feeling that I wanted the image to be about the people in the train and not about her. But I wish the guys in the window were sharper than she is- here though it's more of a case of shutter speed making the guys a little bit softer in focus than missed focus.
And my last point here is: focus is over rated. Other than the image of the lady walking down the street in the white dress with the headphones and hat on being soft and the horrible signs totally sharp behind her- all of the other images could be interpreted as being sufficiently sharp just in a place other than I had intended, but the viewer could never know otherwise? A happy accident like. So therefore focus and the intent of the focus is a personal and interpretive thing- but to me if it's not where I wanted it, it's just a lie or a failure. But that's just me.
Any thoughts? Have a good one everybody- Nate!