The fishing trawler Point Reyes is forever aground on a Tomales Bay mud bank behind the Inverness, California general store. Along with the Point Reyes Lighthouse, this wrecked ship is a cannonical photostop on the Point Reyes tour, just as McWay Creek Falls attracts photographers visiting Big Sur. In the same way, Tunnel View in Yosemite is nearly always crowded...
Two things are special to me about wandering the night with my digital camera. The first is the way I experience night. The second is the way a digital sensor can reveal colors and shapes in spite of apparent darkness. As a wanderer in the darkness, I enjoy more freedom of the hills than those who must rush back to...
I'll be giving two workshops in 2008 under the auspices of the Point Reyes National Seashore Association. Please consider joining me on Saturday, June 14 for a one day intensive seminar in digital landscape photography (on-line course registration). The weekend of September 12-14 will see us rocking to the music of the stars in a great location for night photography...
In Greek mythology, Calypso was a water nymph. In ancient Greek, calypso (Καλυψώ) was a form of the verb "to conceal" (or "to hide") meaning "I will conceal." Calypso kept Odysseus imprisoned for seven years on an ocean island; it's easy to read Homer to take this as a kind of sexual slavery, and according to some accounts (e.g., Hesiod)...
The photo below is a dream-like image of what it may feel like after the wedding is over and bride and groom face reality a/k/a the descending spiral of an endless stair. Of course, there's a ton of photography of weddings, brides, and grooms. But wedding photography is seldom as apparently unintentional as this photo. Even "candid" wedding portraiture is...
I've written about using noise for aesthetic purposes. I've also explored the possibility that noise generated by boosting a camera's sensitivity (ISO) will become a historical artifact and thing of the past. I've also explained my strategies for effective noise post processing. It's time to take a look at a technical challenge that decreased noise generation at higher ISOs solves....
Sometimes the best way to photograph something natural is indoors, using a studio setup. This kind of studio doesn't have to be anything fancy, although you do have to pay attention to light and exposure. Often, the setup for indoor still life photography of natural objects such as flowers, shells, and insects is pretty ad-hoc and jury rigged. Case in...
Proving once again that a digital camera is a computer with a lens on front, yesterday I upgraded the firmware (or BIOS) of my Nikon D300. This was a simple process. I downloaded the file containing the up-to-date firmware to my Mac (of course, you can use a Windows PC as well). I de-compressed the file, and copied it to...
I've been shooting in low light at ISO 6400, partly on the grounds that my Nikon D300 is remarkably low noise, and partly on the grounds that noise can be used as part of the aeshetic of an image. My photos of the jellyfish in the aquarium tanks at Monterey are examples of this kind of high ISO work. However,...
In a previous story, I showed imposition proofs for my Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers laid out on our living room floor. I noted that the book is due out in the next few months, published by O'Reilly, and is being printed in Italy. As I explained, imposition proofs are used to determine the layout of the book into...
