Recently I needed to photograph flowers with a very specific look for an ongoing project for a client. These were controlled, studio images. While it may seem unusual to photograph flowers in a studio mode, in my experience it's not that different from studio product photography of small objects such as watches and jewellery. Except that, in my opinion, flowers...

When a photo is about pattern, the thrill of composition can come from a dissonance in size. Is the subject big or small? What is the sense of scale? In these kinds of photos, that which seems to be big is actually small, or that which appears to be small is actually big. The viewer gets a thrill when the...

In my spring release from O'Reilly Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers, I show that image noise can be used creatively. This material is in the ISO and Noise chapter. For example, the noise in this close-up capture of a tiny Lobelia flower is what makes the photo interesting. View large size. Photoshop Nyet: see my blog entry for backstory...

I sometimes wonder how I end up with images that are elaborate photo composites, having more visually in common with paintings than photographs. These images are born of photographic parents but brought up differently. It is nature versus nurture. In this case, the influence of nurture is so obviously non-photographic that the resulting composites must stand or fall on their...

Forgotten in the mythology of Oakland--the high violent crime rate, and the barrios that gave birth to the Black Panthers--is the fact that this is a thriving city. San Francisco, across the Bay, casts a long shadow. It's hard to compete with a sibling so graceful and talented. It's also hard to overcome Gertrude Stein's pithy epigram about the lack...

As an argument for keeping photos on file, and being prepared to revisit their treatment in the digital darkroom, this image is a good case in point. The original was a wild flower along the lines of a dandelion in a field near Sea Ranch. I photographed it this summer in the early morning, covered with drops from a heavy ocean mist.

This is the last photo I took during my all-night vigil in the desert. The photo looks generally southwest, up towards the crest of the Sandstone Ridge near the Wave in the Vermillion Cliffs Wilderness of Utah. My last battery gave out after the thirty minute exposure had finished, but before the camera had finished processing it. My speculation is...

As dusk darkened to night, my exposures got longer and longer until the swirl trails of the stars echoed the swirls in the rock of the Wave. View this image larger. To take this photo, I needed to wait until darkness out in the desert with the ordeal that was to come. But, I say, since all's well that ends...

The sun in the photo below apparently frames the northern tower of the Golden Gate Bridge in a perfect circle. In fact, there are apparently three "suns" in the photo. One sun is real, two of them are optical artifacts. The fake suns, including the perfect one framing the Golden Gate tower are caused by an optical phenomenon called double...

I like the way this three second time exposure makes the car lights look abstracted but still recognizable. I took this photo early in the evening from the location across the mouth of the Waldo Tunnel described in Alignment. I used a long lens, my 70-200 VR zoom combined with a 2X telextender at the maximum focal length. The...