I’m in Moab, Utah getting ready to teach the Spring in Arches workshop which starts on Sunday. However, not wanting to forget all of you who couldn’t make the workshop , I did manage to record another Lightroom video tutorial before I left.

Also, because much of my work is printed, I added a section at the end where I show you the final print on Canson Platine Fibre Rag paper, which is my current favorite. There’s something about the physical nature of a print that makes an image come to life for me, and this image definitely looks better on paper. I think it’s the subtle detail that doesn’t really come across on a monitor.

As always, thanks for the support, and please leave your feedback and comments below. Enjoy the video.

I'm really proud and excited to be teaching a photography workshop at the the renowned Omega Institute in Rhinebeck NY this summer. It's a 5 day course where students learn the art and craft of photography, and also get a chance to show their work as part of the Omega Arts Week program.

Omega has a beautiful campus and the workshop includes lodging and amazing food. If you're curious or interested, contact me for more info, or check out the Omega website for more details.

Recently they asked me to answer a few questions about art, and I answered them with the first thoughts that came into my head. It was a fun exercise, and I thought I'd share the answers with you here.

What does art or creativity mean to you?

Freedom to express my innermost feelings, desires, and love for life. Also the opportunity to share that in a way that inspires others to a greater awareness of beauty, nature, and the precious gift of every noment in our short lives.

How important is art in our lives?

To me it is the most important aspect of being human. The realization that we are all creative and have the ability to express ourselves is what makes us unique individuals.

How do you celebrate art in your own life?

I try to absorb as much art as I can from countless others who have traveled the creative journey in their lives. I find I get inspired and motivated to give more, share more, and help others do the same.

Do you have any favorite quotes about art or creativity you would like to share?

“My future starts when I wake up every morning…everyday I find something creative to do with my life.” – Miles Davis

What is the connection between art and metamorphosis?

Art allows you to challenge preconcieved ideas, discover new ways of thinking about what matters to you, and from that approach self made limits with more confidence. This is how we grow, adapt, change, and ultimately reach towards a higher potential that seems to stay out of reach. And we should want it to stay out of reach – it means we need to keep reinventing ourselves to get closer. That is metamorphisis.

Thanks for reading! Care to share what art mean to you? Leave your first reactions in the comments below!

Canon 1DS Mk III, 1/60 sec @f/11, ISO 100, 28mm

“Learning from the Masters” is a weekly series where share useful lessons we can learn from others, regardless of their medium. The important thing for me is how we can apply these lessons to photography, and to our lives as creative individuals.

Photographer Platon is world renowned for his portraits of world leaders, thinkers, and more recently the regular guy on the street fighting for civil and human rights in places where people lose their lives over what they say and believe.

In addition to his photography, he is also a great speaker and presenter, and this presentation at Wired 2013 was one of the most powerful examples I’ve seen of the power of the image. Regardless of what type of photography you do, this is a masterful and powerful look at how a photograph can truly communicate thousands of words.

Watch the Full Version of the presentation here!

“My future starts when I wake up every morning…everyday I find something creative to do with my life.” – Miles Davis

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” – Albert Einstein

“Master your instrument. Master the music. Then forget all that bullshit and just play.” – Charlie Parker

“Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.” – Mary Lou Cook

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play instinct arising from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves.” – Carl Jung

“When we all think alike, then no one is thinking.“ – Walter Lippman

“Techniques and skill and even a point of view are often handed down, formally or not. It’s easier to get started if you’re taught, of course. But art, the new, the ability to connect the dots and to make an impact—sooner or later, that can only come from one who creates, not from a teacher and not from a book.” – Seth Godin

“Learning from the Masters” is a weekly series I started here recently with the goal of sharing useful lessons we can learn from others, regardless of their medium. The important thing for me is how we can apply these lessons to photography, and to our lives as creative individuals.

I heard the following story while listening to a talk given by spiritual teacher Jack Kornfield, and thought it was not only profoundly inspiring, but contained great lessons for us as photographers.

Itzhak Perlman, one of the greatest violinists in the world, was doing a concert in NY at Lincoln Center with the New York symphony. He has braces on his legs because he had polio when he was 4 years old, and so he can't walk really well and walks with braces…and he takes these braces off and pulls out his Stradivarius and makes this extraordinary music.

So there he was playing this violin concerto and he's part way through it, and striking the bow all of a sudden there was this loud crack and pop – a string broke. Everyone in the hall heard it, the orchestra stopped, and he sat there quietly for a moment, closed his eyes, paused.

“What will he do?” everyone was thinking.

“Will he limp off stage and get another violin? Will somebody come and restring his Stradivarius?”

“What's going to happen?”

After he paused for a few moments, he signaled for the conductor to begin again, and he re-entered the concerto playing with passion, and power, and purity. And those who really knew, who were close, could watch him modulate, and change, and reconfigure the piece, so that he could play it on three strings.

When he finished there was a silence in the hall, and then an outburst of applause. People rose and cheered. He smiled, wiped the sweat from his brow, raised his bow to get things quiet. And then he spoke not boastfully, but in a pensive, reverent tone.

“You know” he said, “sometimes it is the artists task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.”

The May 2013 Free Desktop Wallpaper is now available for download. The mountain ridges in the Great Smoky Mountains provide endless opportunities for interpretation, and combined with great light offer some of the most dramatic landscapes in the world.

As always, come closer to nature in the Great Smoky Mountains, NC.

1920 x 1200

1920 x 1080

1680 x 1050

1280 x 800

Instructions:

First determine your screen size. Your Current Resolution Is:

Then click on the link for the correct size. When the image opens in a new browser window, right click on the image and select “Set as Wallpaper” (on a Mac, select “Use Image as Desktop Picture”).

Tress and Leaves, Mohonk Preserve
Canon 1DS Mk III, f/4 @ 1/15 sec, ISO 200, 115mm

I’m always looking for that different perspective, a different arrangement of the same elements in nature I’ve seen countless times. A group of young trees in a pleasant pattern, with fresh blooming leaves at the beginning of spring. It sounds basic enough that I wouldn’t even go out looking for such an arrangement. But when I saw it, I knew it would make at the very least an interesting image.

Of course it depends on how I see, and that’s not the way you see. And it shouldn’t. I can never experience the way you see things just like you can never experience the way I do. That doesn’t mean one is more valid than the other either. It just depends on how refined and clear you can make your perspective, your vision. That’s the key, and it’s what I spend most of my time on workshops trying to drill into students minds.

We need a language, and that is certainly shared by all of us. The visual language is a part of our evolution, and deeply ingrained into our brains at a very early age. It’s essential to become familiar with every nuance of this visual language. Contrast, light and shadow, shapes, lines, depth and perspective. But after that it all depends on how you as an individual can use that language to tell the rest of us how you see and what your emotional reaction is to what you see. 

In “Trees and Leaves” I wanted to make a relationship between the strong vertical trunks on the left with the leaves on the right. Notice how the pattern of vertical lines becomes weaker as we move towards the right, letting the leaves occupy more visual weight. It’s like making space for each to contribute to the overall image without cluttering the other element.

I was pretty far away, so f/4 gave me just enough sharpness to make the leaves the center of focus, while letting the trunks become mere shapes without any real detail or texture. Again, simplifying the composition as best I could to emphasize what I was reacting to…the beautiful green colors of spring.

Hope that sheds some light on my thought process and helps you develop yours! Stay tuned for another Lightroom workflow video coming later this week.

Late last summer I was asked by Hudson Valley Magazine, a major national publication, if I was interested in taking an assignment to shoot photos of people paddleboarding on the Hudson for an upcoming issue on “summer fun.” They would be used in an article and possibly for the cover. I agreed and started planning the shoot before the summer ended as the creative director wanted them as soon as possible.

I don’t always accept commercial assignments – not because I don’t need the money, but rather because I want to make sure I can provide exactly what the client needs. In general if it’s an outdoor shoot and involves sports or recreational activities, I may consider if I think I’m right for the job. Otherwise I’m more than happy to refer a very short list of other photographers I’m confident can get the job done.

For this assignment, they wanted closeups of someone on a paddleboard in the Hudson River. I was free to shoot it any way I wanted, and had no limitations aside from the color of clothing for the model, and that the photos provide plenty of space for text. They suggested using someone I actually knew locally, since they had seen previous photos of her I had shot for fun and thought they would work for their purposes. Katy Bell and husband Leonard own Mountain Tops Outfitters here in Beacon, and are good friends, so I knew the shoot would be fun.

I decided the waterfront in Beacon would provide a great backdrop for the shots with the Hudson Highlands in the background, so all I needed were clear skies for text and great light. Luckily we got both on our first attempt, and I spent about 2 hours shooting in total. They also used a second image for the actual story inside the magazine.

While I experimented a bit with different angles, in general I wanted a very low perspective along the water to really highlight Katy and the mountains in the distance. I used my 70–200mm lens with an f/2.8 aperture to blur the foreground and the background. This creates a very distraction free image that really focuses on Katy and her great expression. I shot hand held with image stabilization on at ISO 200.

Post processing was done in Lightroom 4, then exported as a hi-res tiff file to Photoshop for CMYK conversion. And that’s pretty much it. I had lots of fun and am really grateful to the creative team at Hudson Valley Magazine for the opportunity.

Any questions, comments, or feedback, let me know!

Newfound Gap, Smoky Mountains

Every month I do a Q+A session on my Facebook page where I answer questions as quickly as possible about photography and related subjects. I thought it would be a good idea to post the questions and answers here for the benefit of those who missed it over there or aren’t on Facebook regularly. So here we go…

I tried a similar shot from Clingman’s Dome last May and now I am embarrassed after seeing yours. My succession of mountains lacked detail and my sky was quite noisy. Since then I’ve learned a lot but my question is about the noise–should I have used an ND grad and/or reduced my ISO?

It’s hard to say without seeing your image and settings, but in general low ISO’s are better in terms of having less noise and more detail. An ND grad has no effect on noise per say, but has more to do with exposure and maintaining highlight detail. This particular image was shot without a grad, just exposed to avoid clipping the highlights.

Do you use any secondary printing software such as Qimage or Image Print in your printing workflow?

Not anymore since I use Lightroom for most if not all of my printing workflow. The convenience, ease of use, and built in features like templates, selectable profiles, layout options, soft-proofing, and printing directly from RAW files make it the go-to choice for me.

Do you shoot video when you are out taking photographs, and if so, how often? One of the great things I love about Canon is the stunning video as well as stills.

I do shoot lots of video, but not when I’m shooting photos – way too much to deal with in terms of gear and creative approach to do at the same time. I use a combination of a Canon 60D and hacked Panasonic GH2 DSLR for video. Audio is also a problem, so I use a Zoom H4N to capture audio and sync later post.

How do you know how to price your photos? And besides using your printer where else would you recommend to print up your photos?

Pricing prints is a combination of the current market, perception, artist reputation, and cost of materials and labor- there is no easy answer. Here’s nice guide from PhotoShelter on selling and pricing prints.
I recommend White House Custom Colour for printing and have used them in the past with great results.

If you had to travel light and could only bring one Canon lens on a hike to photograph “flora and fauna”, which would you chose and why?

mmm…that’s a tough one, but I’d go with the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 L IS USM Macro Lens. Great image quality, image stabilization, lightweight, fast 2.8 aperture, and great for many subjects besides flowers. A close second would be the Canon EF 24-70mm f/4 L IS USM Lens. It has a very close focusing distance and .70 magnification factor, which is the highest for a zoom lens from Canon, has image stabilization (IS), great quality, and a versatile zoom range.

I shoot in RAW, but when I upload my images to an art site that I use for sales I have to convert them to jpeg. Does this damage the photo, and should I just shoot in jpeg since I have to convert them anyway?

Absolutely shoot in RAW – this is your original digital negative. You don’t convert the image to jpeg, you generate a copy that is a jpeg. This is a smaller version and is compressed, but you still have your RAW image as the original to work with. If you shoot in jpeg, your “original” is already compressed and compromised in other ways, so that is not a good option. Always start with the highest quality file, and generate copies from that in whatever form you need.

Lightroom 4 manages this entire process for you, and it’s a major reason why it’s my recommendation for cataloging and processing of your entire raw library. Most of the industry agrees with me as well

If you are taking pictures on a windy day, how do you make sure the image is not blurred, example flowering trees?

The key is to maintain a high enough shutter speed to avoid blur (or wait for the subject to stop moving!) Use high ISO’s (800+) and fast (large) apertures of 2.8 or bigger to raise your shutter speed. This is very general and depends on the image itself, but the higher the shutter speed, the less the risk of blur from movement. Aim for 1/250th or higher for flowers and leaves.

I teach beginning nature photography classes and rarely does a beginner have a tripod (which I feel is just as important as the camera/lens). They have usually spent money for the camera/lens and are glazed-eye when I recommend a tripod. Do you have any suggestions for inexpensive tripods ($250 & less) that would be sturdy and efficient? Know anything about Induro or Vanguard? I have always used Manfrotto and am happy with them.

Any suggestions for a lightweight tripod suitable for hiking (I have the Gitzo CF – wonderful and stable with a big lens but much too klunky to cart around in the woods!).

There are so many out there it’s hard to choose just one. I love the Manfrotto 190CXPro3 carbon fiber tripod for a long term investment that will outlast most of your other camera gear.

Yes tripods from Induro are good quality and economic as well. Check out these other great economical tripods (relative to Gitzo) from my friends over at Outdoor Photo Gear who I highly recommend.

Here are some reviews of 3 more carbon tripods that are super lightweight and affordable.

Thanks to all the readers for their great questions! If you have any related questions or feedback, or comments about my responses, please leave them below. I’m always happy to hear from you.