The American Landscape is a vast array of interlinked details and immense wide-open spaces compressed into a web of real and imagined suggestions. Every location is its own special vision or nightmare, filled with all of those huge, clear and unique details that are exquisite and crystal clear while you are in it.
If you want to increase the creative and emotional range of your photography, then you need to keep a journal. Creative leaders in the photographic field such as Adams, White, Szarkowski, Stieglitz, as well as contemporary artists all keep or kept journals, many of them quite detailed. However, journaling is not limited to those pursuing…
It’s not the first time that the DSLR has been declared dead, but it may be the first time that a CEO of major camera manufacturer has made it clear that his company cannot compete against smartphone cameras. It was all over the press last week, Canon CEO Fujio Mitarai the leader of the Japanese…
Within the visual arts, we define Visualization as the practice of seeing in the mind’s eye a finished piece of artwork before it is created. It is a particularly important skill for Art Photographers to learn, and Ansel Adams described the process as follows:
“When I’m ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my mind’s eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I’m interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.” — Ansel Adams
Finding your next landscape location is a process, not a product, and a critical workflow element for landscape art photographers. After all, if you want to make a great landscape photograph, it is critical to be in front of a great scene at the right time of day and season. Location research can be a fun adventure, one that is full of exciting anticipation, as you imagine going to a new area.
The Dehaze slider in Lightroom is one of the most powerful and useful tools and produces contrast far beyond what we can do with curves, clarity sliders in Lightroom, or third-party plugins. It brings dynamic contrast to thin or washed out skies and reveals details that you cannot see with your own eyes.
I can’t tell you how many messed up, utterly chaotic, Lightroom catalogs I’ve seen as an Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop Instructor; lost images, lost drives, collections substituting for folders, duplicate images, triplicate images, Photoshop files sent off into the ether and photographers on the verge of suicide. If you got a mess on your hands…
As a rule, I recoil from anything described as “auto,” any promise of instant gratification and the term ‘pleasing image’, which Adobe uses in their description of their new AUTO workflow button, seems ‘snap shotty.’ Well, forget all of that because Lightroom’s new AUTO command is impressive, a feature that you can use with a high degree of confidence in many image situations.
During our National Park Photography Master Class and First Horizons workshops, we are often using filters for photography- specifically neutral density (ND) filters. To be clear, these are full neutral density filters, not gradients which are sometimes used to darken landscape skies.
The answer to “Are Photography Workshops worth the Money” is a two-sided affair. On one side, we have the student’s perception and on the other the instructor’s knowledge. How well these two points converge will determine the workshop’s value.