How to Use The ‘Cookie Cutter’ Approach to Extending Dynamic Range

This is a pretty cool technique for those needing to extend image latitude or dynamic range. I tried it on several images and it worked well on some and not at all on others. It is certainly worth a try before moving on to HDR or other methods.

This technique is from Ellon Anon’s great book: Photoshop for Nature Photographers and its titled: The Cookbook Approach to Expanding Latitude. This is a very good book by the way, specifically aimed at nature photographers and you can buy it here.

To start, open two images in Photoshop, a dark one which has the perfect exposure for the sky or clouds or any areas that are important. Then open the bright one image which has detail for areas that were to dark in the other image.

I opened these two images from Arches National Park: one is the main exposure which has good detail throughout and is what could be considered the perfect exposure for the image. The second image is for the shadow areas and is a good exposure for those areas. There is a two stop difference between the two images: 1/8th second and 1/30 second. … Continue Reading

For Love of B&W: 5 Examples of Nature Images

I have always enjoyed black and white photography. There are many masters of the medium who have created phenomenal photography from Ansel Adams to John Sexton and Bruce Barnbaum. And there are many more than I could name here or even know of.

When I attended Brooks Institute in the 1970′s, we spent the first year doing nothing but B&W and I often joked that I bathed in B&W chemicals and slept on the drying racks.

I guess it was no joke when later I found I was allergic to something in the B&W chemicals and that ended my days in the darkroom.

My appreciation for B&W never ended but I never really created B&W fine art nature photography until I began dabbling with Photoshop B&W Adjustment Layers. Still I was not that enamored.

Last month Topaz announced B&W Effects and I am hooked finding myself digging up RAW file in Lightroom to process in B&W and here are 5 recent examples.

The other reason for this post besides showing some of my work is to invite you, our readers to submit your ideas for our ProFolio feature showing portfolios of B&W imagery. If you have some phenomenal B&W imagery let us know where we can view it and consider featuring you. … Continue Reading

How to Get Grungy in Adobe Camera RAW

Last year I photographed a mountain man rendezvous capturing a nice collection of folks dressed like mountain men with their pioneer era dress and semi-accurate historic encampments. It is a great event to shoot some fun characters and makes for good files to experiment on technique.

I thought a little Grungy look similar to over-processed HDR might be kind of fun so I set out to apply a technique I have used from time to time.

What’s cool is you do not need Photomatix or any other HDR software to apply this technique. It can all be done in Adobe Camera RAW.

So I opened my RAW file in ACR and start by applying the Contrast Slider and Clarity slider all the way to the right-100%.

… Continue Reading

Quick Tip: Dream Glow Effects With The Clarity Slider

If you are into fine art photography where creativity has no limits, you might have fun playing with the Clarity slider in Lightroom or Adobe Camera RAW.

Described as the tool for adding ‘localized contrast’ and especially in the mid tones, the Clarity slider has been likened to the Unsharp Mask in some ways, yet acts differently in other ways by appearing to not sharpen areas equally.

This post however is not about sharpening but rather using the Clarity slider to unsharpen and it is simple.  … Continue Reading

Extending Depth of Field in Photoshop When Photomerge Wont Work

If you have one of the latest versions of Photoshop you may be aware of Photomerge, the feature that has been used for years to create panoramas.

In CS4, Adobe enhanced Photomerge to allow it to blend several of the same images that were focused at various points within the scene.

I have used this feature numerous with great effect but it does not always work. In this image I encountered several issues that apparently ‘challenged’ Photoshop and Photomerge would not work.

I was hiking along Oregon’s Deschutes River photographing the summer display of wildflowers and as I often do, I shoot with my 17mm lens to make the foreground of flowers large. … Continue Reading

On Assignment in the Dead of Winter on Oregon’s Mt. Hood

This past winter I had a fun shoot where we photographed a wide variety of subjects over several days including snowshoeing, snowmobiling, drinking in the bar, children sledding, fireworks over ski slopes, sleigh rides, and this dinner photo.

In this post: How I Shot The Snowshoeing Photography Assignment, I discussed the assignment and its criteria in regards to the client’s budget with respect their need for as many shots as we could do in a specific amount of days.

For this afternoon and evening shoot, the assignment was to photograph a private dinner that a company was throwing for a list of their clients.

What was fun and even exciting was that this dinner was no ordinary dinner in a restaurants private party room. It was taking place in Silcox Hut which is halfway up Oregon’s Mt. Hood…and in the dead of winter. … Continue Reading

Quick Tip: How to Get the Best Files for HDR

If you read the tutorials on the Photomatix website and other online HDR tutorials, you will read the recommendation that you set up your camera and shoot three bracketed images; Normal, -2, and +2.

Normal would be what your camera meter suggests and -2 would be two stops lower in shutter speed while +2 would be a two stop increase in shutter speed.

That should be it and depending on the scene and contrast it just may be, but some scenes will require more exposure range beyond plus and minus 2 stops.

The -2 exposure is to be your darkest capture designed to retain highlight detail while the lightest exposure at +2 is designed to capture all the shadow detail. Normal is in the middle for the mid-tones and is by default it’s what the camera meter suggests if you follow the basic guidelines.

However, what do you need for the best exposure combination’s that produce the least noise? A different strategy! A -2 exposure and a +2 may not capture all the needed detail in a high contrast scene. … Continue Reading

How To Darken A Light Area In Photoshop

Photoshop guru and acclaimed nature photographer Lewis Kemper writes, lectures, and teaches Photoshop across North America. Here he shares a Photoshop technique on how to fix an image that was exposed properly for the shadows but which overexposed the highlights.

LK: In this example we will pick an image with properly exposed shadows and overexposed highlights. I shot this image of Mt. Ansel Adams in the backcountry of Yosemite National Park on a 2 1/4 view camera. Unfortunately I forgot to use my Graduated ND filter. I did a good job exposing for the shadows, but in doing so, I totally blew out my highlights. … Continue Reading

The Art and Craft of Ghost Town Window Photography

Most outdoor photographers enjoy shooting ghost towns.  They are great subjects for our cameras and they play well into our imagination of time gone by and the romance of the old west.

I have visited many old ghost towns that are favorites among photographers such as Bodie, California, Bannack and Virginia City, Montana. Rhyolite, Nevada, Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains, and many more towns and historic sites spread around the states.

I have photographed the old buildings, cars, and rusty relics of times gone by and enjoyed photographing all of it. Many times I visited sites like Bodie or Nevada City, Montana and Virginia City Montana and looked through the windows of these historic buildings and see them full of period furniture and artifacts from their historic past. I wished I could go in a shoot!

But at these three specific locations we are stuck outside and can only gaze through the windows limiting our camera angle and perspective and it’s due to the fragility of the furnishings, the buildings, and of course for the more obvious reasons of wandering fingers.

On my last visit to Bodie, I looked through the window and thought I would try to shoot through the window and see what I could capture. The results were horrible due to light contrast within the rooms and exterior reflections. … Continue Reading

How I Customized a Stock Image for the Sports Injury Clinic

Once upon a time I was represented by a stock photo agency named Adventure Photo and Film. I did well with them and when Imagestate bought them my income plummeted to zero. Funny how that works! Or maybe not? APF was one of the old style agents who would send you lists of images requested that they could not fill, giving us an idea of what we should be shooting. Agents may still do that still but none I am represented by these days do.

One specific image they seemed to get requests for was people crashing on their mountain bikes. APF already had some images and I had seen other versions elsewhere. Some were well done and others looked hokey making you think “give me a break.” So I got to brainstorming to see what I could come up with for a good ‘crash on your bike image’.

I shot an image and later a client wanted it customized a little more and I thought that this could be something that photographers should consider if they weren’t already. Customizing images for specific clients. Obviously, it will not work for everything such as waterfalls and sunsets, but if you are shooting people in the outdoors you certainly could.

You can change the color of clothing or tent color, I have done that many times, or change elements within the scene to suit the client. I am not talking about moving the owl from the fence post to the tree branch where the image would be used editorially in a piece about owls, because as we all know that is a sensitive issue. Rather the point here is customizing an image for commercial use where the use has nothing to do with newsworthiness or authenticity of the subject. Here is how I did it. … Continue Reading