This is a very long time exposure taken from the top of Half Dome. It was around 1AM. I pointed the camera straight up towards the sky facing north. Here's what I wrote in my diary: I am taking photos after midnight, the camera on tripod open for half an hour at a shot. It is cold. Not so much...
At the end of June this year, the full moon rose in the eastern sky at about sunset (although by July 2 after dark). This cosmologic timing gave me the chance to consider extravagant dynamic range. In other words, what can you do with captures in which the dynamic range is simply too great to process for both bright areas...
I've relaunched my Digital Night website. It's greatly expanded, with tips, techniques, and geographic sections. This site is an archive of my stories about photographing the landscapes of the night. The geographic sections are for Point Reyes, Yosemite, San Francisco, and Marin Headlands. Check it out: www.digitalnight.us. View this image larger. Read the back story featuring this image....
Mark and I went back out to Arch Rock last night. It was a little earlier than my last hike out there, so I was able to work my way down the little canyon and across a couple of rock faces to the beach, where I photographed the arch in Arch Rock in the gathering dusk. Of course, I also...
My Dad says he told a group of his friends that he just bought a $25,000 computer. Understand that these friends were a bunch of computer scientists. Everyone thought my father had bought some really macho heavy digital iron. Completing the punch line, my dear father said, describing his Toyota Prius, "and it even came with a steering wheel and...
If you grant my premise that digital photography is an entirely new medium of expression, then you have to wonder about the prevalence of metaphors that use the techniques of analog photography. In Photoshop, we use the Dodge and Burn tools. We "cross process" using Nik's excellent library of Photoshop filters (among other digital "cross processing" techniques). We produce versions...
It all started when I pointed my digital camera into the void of night and was surprised by the results. In apparent darkness, there's plenty of "light" we cannot see that is picked up by digital sensors. The digital night landscape is very colorful indeed. Since this discovery, I have haunted dark and wild landscapes at night...[Read more]. My new...
The term bokeh is used to refer to blurring in a photograph. Good bokeh is smooth and pleasing, whereas bad bokeh produces a jagged and discordant effect. This may sound subjective, but pretty quickly you can get to recognize excellent bokeh when you see it in a photo. And the effort of doing so will help you improve your photography....
What has a flexible rubberized tube, like a short version of the hose you find on a vacuum cleaner, and a piece of optical glass at the end? Why, my Lensbaby, of course: a specialized interchangeable lens that fits Nikons, Canons, and other dSLRs. The point of this somewhat bizarre but dearly beloved piece of photo gear? To allow a...
When I came back to photography in early 2005, I confronted a world gone digital and virtual. On the whole, I thought this was a good thing, and I was pretty clear that digital photographs are different from film photographs. One thing I didn't get yet: that physical prints had a place in this new virtual world. View this image...
