I am happy to report that the Next Step exhibit in Indiana is now open. Installed at the Renaissance Fine Art & Design Gallery, One South Range Line Road, Carmel, IN, the show presents the diverse work of 25 photographers, all members of John Paul Caponigro’s Next Step Alumni group. This invitation-only group has met collectively and privately for more than 10 years in goup workshops and online forums. The name for the group is based on the question John Paul frequently asks his students: “What’s your next step?”

The work on view includes landscapes, editorial, abstracts, composites, portraits, seascapes, cityscapes, nude and figure, street photography, architecture, nature, and wildlife. I have two images in the show; they are described in the previous two posts (here and here) on the blog. Each exhibitor produced of book showcasing their portfolio; my book, Motion|Pictures, can be viewed (or purchased) here. Click on this link to view (or purchase) the Next Step Exhibit book. Click here for a list of all Next Step members with links to their individual books.

Click on this link for more information about the Next Step exhibit.

Click on this link for more information about the Renaissance Fine Art & Design Gallery.

In the previous post, I showed one of my Yellowstone images that will appear in a group photography exhibit entitled The Next Step that opens this coming weekend. This is the other image that will be in the show. Like the previous image, this one is part of my Motion|Pictures series. But where the previous image shows the kind of intense colors you can find in hot springs when the sun is high in the sky, this image illustrates how hot springs are all about reflections early and late in the day.

This image was taken near the start of the Fountain Paint Pot Trail in Yellowstone’s Lower Geyser Basin. Runoff streams and pools cover a vast area below the trail’s boardwalks; when the sun is low or (as in this image) below the horizon, the mineral and algal colors beneath the thin layer of water disappear and are replaced by reflections. In this case, reflections of the intense, post-sunset sky visible in the background. Steam rises from areas where the water is still hot; tangled roots of trees killed by the mineral-laden water dominate the shadowy foreground. In a future post, I’ll talk about the problem of capturing high-contrast scenes like this one when using camera motion techniques.

Technical Data:
Body: Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi
Lens: Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM at 50mm
Exposure: ISO 100, f/22, 1/4 second

Two of my Yellowstone images will appear in an upcoming exhibit at the Renaissance Gallery in Carmel, Indiana. The group photography show is titled The Next Step, is curated by John Paul Caponigro, and will be open May 20 to June 24, 2011.

One of the images in the show is this one: Cistern Spring, Yellowstone #1. It’s part of a series I’m working on that focuses on water and camera motion (which is a subset of my Motion|Pictures series). There’s much to be said about photographing water (at slow shutter speeds, while moving the camera) — but I’ll save that for later posts. What I’d like to point out here is that the best way to photograph hot springs like this one is often not under the photographer’s standard working conditions: early or late in the day with some nicely photogenic clouds. To see the beautiful blue of a spring like this one, the sun needs to penetrate into the pool’s depths, and you usually need a bright blue sky above. So mid-day, then, is often the best time to see (and photograph) the startlingly brilliant colors of Yellowstone’s hot springs. And on a clear day, Yellowstone’s generally high elevations help things along by creating intense blue skies. So if you’re in Yellowstone and it’s getting near noon, don’t settle down for a long leisurely lunch in the shade. Grab your camera and look for some great hot springs color.

Technical Data:
Body: Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi
Lens: Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM at 40mm
Exposure: ISO 100, f/22, 0.3 seconds

Photographers refer to the hour or so after sunrise and before sunset as the golden hour, but sometimes you can capture a “golden hour moment” at other times of day — perhaps especially in autumn. This is often true in Yosemite, where the high granite walls in the narrower parts of the Valley block the sun from the valley floor until long after sunrise (and, in corresponding fashion, long before sunset). This image, for example, was taken on October 30 at about 9AM, as the first rays of light hit El Capitan meadow. The meadow’s oaks and azaleas were at their peak yellow and orange at the time, and back-lighting made the colors even more intense. Not exactly golden hour, but certainly a golden image.

This particular morning was an unusually memorable confluence of light and color. For someone who is lucky to get one keeper per day (or per week), I had quite a few successes on this outing. I remember being pretty overwhelmed by the whole spectacle once the light hit the valley floor, and feverishly trying to capture as much as I could before it was too late. Alas, when I downloaded everything onto my computer, I discovered that my best frames for this image (in terms of composition and blur effect) were my seriously overexposed initial trial exposures. My first thought was to hit the delete key and regretfully move on, but for some reason I decided to experiment with Lightroom’s Recovery slider instead. And contrary to all my expectations, it worked beautifully! I have since learned that the Recovery slider often doesn’t work very well (or at all) when an image contains areas that are significantly overexposed. But sometimes it does. So the moral of the story of this image is that it’s always worth a try. See my Motion|Pictures galleries for more motion blur images like this one.

Technical Data:
Body: Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi
Lens: Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM at 90mm
Exposure: ISO 100, f/8, 1/2 second

First up are several new videos from George Jardine. One is a very helpful overview, from the theoretical to a practical how-to, concerning the whole concept of how a world composed (for the most part) of color objects translates into a black and white image. This 37-minute video is free for the asking; just enter your e-mail address in the box on his web post, A Few Thoughts on Black & White Conversion, and George will send you the link. This video is, in fact, a spin-off from George’s new video tutorial series on Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), and it contains a lot of the detail on the theoretical side of things that he was unable to include in the ACR tutorials. So, for more on the practice of black and white conversion using ACR, head over to George’s Adobe Photoshop ACR Video Workshop page and click on the buy now button. For $34.95, you get over 6 hours of instruction divided into 15 videos, one of which is devoted to the practice of black and white conversion and split toning.

If you use Lightroom rather than ACR, George has two tutorial series for Lightroom, one on the Lightroom Library module and one on the Lightroom Develop module. The Lightroom Develop series is 5 hours long (and, as with the ACR series, divided into 15 videos) and costs $24.95. The Lightroom Black-and-White/Split-Toning segment is about half the length of the one in the ACR series; perhaps at some point George will update the Lightroom tutorials with the additional information found in the ACR series. Nonetheless, I know there are a lot of video tutorials available these days, but quite frankly, George Jardine’s ACR and Lightroom tutorials are among the very best, and a steal at the prices he’s asking. For the video-inclined — highly recommended.

For the readers among us, Craft & Vision has just released a new ebook, The Power of Black & White in Adobe Lightroom & Beyond, the first in their new Masterclass series. While many of their previous offerings were more like appetizers, this one, at 100 double-page spreads, is clearly a main dish. The author is Piet Van den Eynde, a Belgian freelance photographer, author, and teacher. And Piet does a great job helping the reader get his/her hands dirty with black and white Lightroom workflow. I particularly like the case studies that show how individual images were processed, from start to finish and in great detail.

Piet also has very helpful things to say about when and where Photoshop works better than Lightroom, the pros and cons of presets, how to leverage plug-ins like Silver Efex Pro 2, combining HDR (high dynamic range) and black and white, and printing. I do have a few quibbles: A book this long could use a table of contents (at least) to help those who want to visit/revisit a particular topic. A better editing job could have saved Piet from a few awkward malapropisms. And, on an iPad, I could never find a display size that provided both a sufficiently comfortable font size (for my eyes) and easy page-turning. These are, however, quibbles. This book is a great addition to the Craft & Vision library and, at $5, a highly cost-efficient learning tool. Interestingly, the overlap with George Jardine’s videos is relatively small — in fact, the ebook and the videos work very well together. Click on the link to purchase the PDF version of The Power of Black & White in Adobe Lightroom & Beyond from Craft & Vision.

I was happy to see that one of the suggestions in Andrew Gibson’s new ebook (The Evocative Image, see my review here) is something I’ve been doing for years. Which is simply sticking around after all the other photographers have gone home. Apparently, a lot of photographers think that once the sun has set, the good light is gone. While that may be true sometimes, it’s definitely not true all the time. All kinds of things can (and often do) happen after the sun has dipped below the horizon. The glow in the western sky can turn wonderful colors, and that glow can light up the scene in front of or behind you, and/or reflect off water or rocks or… I could go on, but I’ll leave it to your imagination. Also, as it gets darker, our eyes can’t see color very well (or at all), but the camera still can — and sometimes the colors the camera sees at twilight are remarkable.

A case in point is White Sands. The pure white of the park’s gypsum sand is a near-perfect reflector; if you spend enough time there and look carefully, you’ll see dunes of almost every imaginable hue (see my White Sands photographs gallery). But many of the most unusual (and sometimes intense) colors occur well before dawn or long after sunset. Which can be a problem: The National Monument is surrounded by a missile range and is locked up tight at night. Gate openings and closings vary during the year, so you need to schedule your visit carefully to get as much time as you can between sunset and gate closing (not to mention avoiding the windy season and the heat of summer). Pre-dawn photography is pretty much out of the question, unless you hire a ranger to open the gate early. This special service is arranged through the park office and will cost you. (Hint: it’s less painful if you share the cost with other photographer friends.) But it is totally worth it.

Technical Data:
Body: Canon EOS 7D
Lens: Canon EF 70-200mm f/4 L USM at 187mm
Exposure: ISO 100, f/11, 1/45 second

On several visits to Yellowstone, driving out to photograph at dawn, I frequently passed this stand of dead trees along the road north of Old Faithful. The first few times, having somewhere else in mind, I didn’t stop. But there was always a beautiful mist among the trees, and finally I couldn’t resist. It turns out there’s a hot spring uphill from these trees, and the overflow seeps down into the grove; the warmth of the water creates the mist. At some point in the past, the overflow killed the trees, and they acquired the characteristic white mineralization at the base of the trunks that you see at many Yellowstone springs. All this, and the fact that the sun rose directly behind the trees and filtered in through the mist, created a ghostly feeling in the chill of the morning. An irresistible subject for Motion|Pictures, my impressionist landscape photography series.

Technical Data:
Body: Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi
Lens: Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM at 45mm
Exposure: ISO 100, f/22, 1/8 second

My friend Michael Frye has been posting some very helpful instructional videos on Vimeo. This is his third and final video on white balance (follow the link in the video frame to view the previous two, plus those on other topics, on Vimeo). I’ve posted the last of the series because it deals specifically with the thorny issue of white balance in landscape photographs. Like many photographers, I am often asked if the colors in my images are “real” or “what I saw.” And I am never sure if I should respond with a lecture on the mechanics of human vision, the sensitivity of modern camera sensors, the vagaries of white balance, dodging and burning, and so on — or just nod and smile my way to another topic. Similarly, some photographers think there is only one proper white balance for any given photograph, while others will tell you quite the opposite. Michael’s video is not specifically about these debates, but in talking about the difficulties of white balance adjustment and how to solve them, he offers much food for thought as well as some valuable practical advice.

Michael, by the way, runs photo workshops at the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite Valley three or four times a year, concentrating on Lightroom and Photoshop workflow, with twice-daily photo outings in an unbeatable location. I went from taking one of his workshops to assisting him for about two and a half years, so I’m not exactly objective in my views. But that said, I highly recommend his workshops; for more information, visit Michael Frye Photography (opens in a new window).

Oregon’s Painted Hills are located in one of the scattered units of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in the dry, central part of the state. They are a long way from anywhere, and the nearest town, Mitchell, is the epitome of life in the slow lane: a bed and breakfast, a sad looking cafe, an even sadder general store, and people walking down the middle of a dusty main street that literally seemed to lead nowhere. Sitting on the porch of the B&B eating lunch from our cooler, the place was charming in a way rarely seen in the US anymore.

I’d seen photographs of the Painted Hills, and given that they are part of a National Monument, I had always assumed they were pretty extensive. Quite the opposite, in fact. Although there are small colorful outcrops here and there, the main area is rather diminutive, and because it is so fragile, it is fenced off. Or fenced in. In any case, you can walk around much of the perimeter, but not within the formation itself. And that meant, for my work, using the longest lens I had with me.

This was one of my first attempts to use motion-blur on a more expansive landscape. It took me quite a while to find a way to make it work. The problem is that large landscapes like this one have dominant lines that converge, cross, diverge, go all over the place — so moving the camera can blur some parts of the image beyond recognition. The trick, for me at any rate, is to make sure that at least one dominant line, or one element of the landscape, is sharp and not blurred. That way, the viewer has something to hold on to, a strong reference point within the image. In this case, I wanted those two bright red areas to remain well-defined, and eventually I found a way to move my camera so that they did. In the near future, I’ll be adding more images from this series to my impressionist landscape photography Motion|Pictures gallery.

Technical Data:
Body: Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Lens: Canon EF 70-200mm f/4 L USM at 200mm
Exposure: ISO 50, f/22, 0.7 second