Happy Holidays from ProNature & How I Photographed Santa

Happy Holidays from PNP. Read on for how I took this shot. … Continue Reading

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

Photographing Butterflies by Connie Toops

This article is an excerpt, posted with permission, from the new Peterson Field Guides/Backyard Bird Guides ~ Hummingbirds and Butterflies by Bill Thompson III and Connie Toops © 2011

As you attract butterflies to your backyard, you may discover photography assists in their identification or enables you to share their beauty with others. Patience and willingness to experiment can result in stunning butterfly images. To master butterfly photography, you’ll need reliable equipment and you’ll want to perfect techniques that insure great photos.

Simple Equipment

Excellent digital “point-and-shoot” cameras are currently available at very reasonable prices. Standard features now would have been unimaginable to professional photographers only a decade ago.  A versatile digital model in the $250 to $500 price range should fulfill the needs of most casual butterfly photographers. Digital cameras record their images on small memory cards that are ultimately downloaded into computers for editing and printing. If you plan to travel widely as you photograph, you may need an extra memory card or a portable storage device to hold large numbers of images until you can process them. … Continue Reading

The Art of Photographing Mud

There is so much in nature to photograph! National Parks, wild areas, and even our own backyards! We have an infinite amount of subjects to capture and in amazing ways.

But it is not necessarily where we photograph as it is what we photograph that makes for a pleasing image which results in images that please us. These might be subjects we discover or others we pursue that are subjects close to out hearts. And one of my favorites can be found just about anywhere.

I am here to admit: I love mud! And I love photographing it. Cracked mud in particular!

Everywhere I go, if I see mud, and especially cracked mud, I immediately stop and look for a place with NO mud to set down my camera pack and get to work.

Let’s face it; mud is all around us!  From alpine settings to a rain forest, a drought stricken desert or a city park, there is a good chance there is mud of some sort. All mud is not the same either since it depends on the makeup of the content. I have seen red mud, green mud, brown mud, and probably more colors as I have wandered around the Southwest.
… Continue Reading

Image Manipulation: Have I Gone Too Far on This One?

In my post here I discussed how I think the debate over image manipulation was mostly a waste of time. Nature photographers are artists who use nature to create art using a camera.

I have said it before: I am not a photo journalist documenting the ‘news that is occurring in nature,’ but am instead using nature as my palette to create nature art. Instead of using a brush and paints, I use a camera and Photoshop.

I am not shooting for the natural history publications. I want to create commercially viable images of nature that succeed in the market.

What’s got me a little fired up is what some are calling the Photoshop Law. I don’t know a lot about it but I am hearing it would require full disclosure of images that have been ‘Photoshopped.’

I think they are mainly going after fashion and cosmetics advertising and if they succeed, at some point that might expose all photography using any image editing tools. Every single digital photo, shot in RAW needs to be ‘Photoshopped’ to make it useful.

That prompted me to revisit this subject. I recently hiked to my favorite waterfall in the world and photographed it again. I discovered a new perspective (for me) and shot it and it had a lot of dead debris I removed. More on that coming up! … Continue Reading

Floris van Breugel Captures Amazing Marine Bioluminescence

We love to discover amazing nature photography and that is just what we found when looking at Seattle photographer Floris van Bruegel recent blog post.

He captured a natural phenomenon known as Marine Bioluminescence where living marine organisms emit light like Firefly’s.

He captured numerous images in different states of Luminescence and then created a great storytelling image that is stunning.

Here is Floris’s entire article on the process of capturing the image, re-posted with permission. … Continue Reading

How To Photograph Lightning and Live to Tell About It

by Jeff Colburn

The wind blew at over 40 MPH as lightning hit the ground about two miles away. It was getting closer than I liked.

My only emergency warning system, the hairs on my arms standing up, was useless in this wind. Suddenly, the wind died down to about 20 MPH, and my arm hairs were at full attention. That means that a charge rising from the ground was going through me, and attracting lightning.

I grabbed the camera and tripod and jumped into the car. Two seconds later there was a blinding flash and deafening thunder clap about 100 feet away. I had cheated Death, and my own stupidity, again.

Photographing lightning is the most amazing type of photography you will ever do. And probably the dumbest thing you can do with a camera, but I love it.Here are some tips on lightning and safety: … Continue Reading

Topaz Announces B&W Effects & Here’s Some Examples

Topaz Software announced the release of B&W Effects and I had the chance to test the pre-release version.

I love B&W images and have usually used Photoshop’s B&W Adjustments Layers when I covert an image. But I have been interested in trying some alternatives so the release of B&W Effects came for me at the perfect time.

I tested a variety of the features and generally had fun with several of the effects and presets. Here is more info and some examples.

B&W Effects comes with over 200 presets from Sepia to Selenium, Cyanotype to various brown tones. It has various conversion tools from Adaptive Exposure (more coming) to brushes for burring and dodging. You can also brush back color and add enhanced detail. … Continue Reading

How to Create a Fake Background for Your Flower Photography

Garden and flower photography is one of many areas that nature photographers enjoy shooting. Some gardeners create beautiful settings that are perfect for flower photography and often attracting a variety of insects and birds.

Others, like myself, plant a few flowers more for decorating the house than specifically designing a garden for flower photography. At our mountain cabin we have planted a wide variety of gorgeous Columbine flowers around the outside of the cabin. They grow to be huge and are always so beautiful, I cant help but want to photograph them.

But when I pull out my 100mm macro and frame the flowers tightly, I have an old log cabin as my background. Even with the aperture wide open, the out-of-focus logs are not very natural looking. So I revert back to my commercial photography studio days when we built sets in the studio to replicate or give the illusion of a specific structure or background texture. … Continue Reading

Australian Denis Smith’s Amazing ‘Balls of Light’ Project

It is nice to see another photographer doing something unique and different. Denis Smith is from Australia and has a unique project underway: the Balls of Light.

Denis does not use Photoshop or any other program to create these spheres of streaking light, instead relying on what we could call ‘the old fashion way’ of something akin to light-painting.

He uses nothing other than lights on a string and long exposures. and shoots in a variety of unique locations. This project is nothing short of brilliant and Denis has blasted onto the scene and garnered international attention with his project and a documentary film. We got in touch with Denis to ask him about Balls of Light. … Continue Reading