VPol's Photography Blog

Website Update - finally

2008-06-04T08:46:00.000-07:00

I finally updated my website with some new photos from the past six months or so. Please take a look!

Hopefully in the next day or two I will begin posting some of the photos here for you to look at and discuss, but that will have to wait.

Discussion - Star Trail

2008-01-30T05:58:00.000-08:00

I really need to get back on task with my "Photography Basics" posts. Hopefully soon. Even though I haven't talked about that stuff yet, I hope that you can get something out of my discussion concerning a handful of my more recent photos. Granted, it might be nice to describe the photos that didn't work out, but since I didn't get those photos scanned it would be hard to do that!

Click photo to see full size
a14 - 15 Minute Star Trail, Joshua Tree National Park

Comment: Point your camera at a clear night sky, open up the aperture, keep the shutter open for a while and see what happens! I have tried taking these photos throughout the years with varying levels of success. You have to be someplace with minimal or no light pollution and have a location that will not have extraneous light falling on your lens. If you can get the photo to work, I love all the different colors that are actually present in the stars!

Technical aspects: These photos are actually not that hard to shoot, but you do need to have a few things - however if you are serious about your photography these are standard anyway. The first thing is a camera that allows you to keep the shutter open for as long as you want. My camera is an old manual camera and after 1 second on the shutter ring there is a "B" for "Bulb". This keeps the shutter open for as long as the release button is pressed. However, I do not want to be standing with my hand on the camera for 15 minutes so I have a locking cable release. This little device screws into the shutter button and I can lock it open for as long as I want.

The next choice that needs to be made is what lens to use. Zoom lenses are fine as long as they are tight enough to not change their focal length while pointing straight up for a long period of time. Another thing to consider is the "integrity" of the shot. Light pollution is a problem in a lot of places and usually the closer one gets to the horizon that light is present. Depending where you are in the country, airplanes might also be flying around which would ruin a photo with a nice straight line or blinking dots across your frame. If light pollution on the horizon and airplanes are a problem, then wider-angle lenses might not be the best choice so that you can isolate a particular patch of sky. Since stars are not really all that bright you will also want a decently fast lens to capture as much of that light as possible. Using a lens that is f/4 or above might not get the fainter stars. Personally I like my 50mm f/1.8 normal lens for this work.

Another must is a good tripod, and one that will allow you to point your camera where you want it and keep it steady throughout the shot. Strictly speaking it doesn't matter how tall the tripod is, but if you want to look through the viewfinder to compose the shot then having one that is taller than you is nice. Another good reason to have a taller tripod is to keep out unwanted, extraneous light. All it takes is one person to shine a flashlight across your lens or a car to go by to ruin the shot. Elevating the camera (and using a lens hood) will keep that problem to a minimum.

Finally, you need film (assuming you are like me and still using the stuff). Since we are dealing with faint subjects, the faster the film the more stars will be recorded on film. This photo was shot on Fuji Velvia 100 film, which isn't fast, but it still did a great job getting the stars and since it is Velvia, the colors are rich and saturated. I have tried Velvia 50 film and it didn't work. Provia 400 film is great because it is fast, but not as rich of colors as the Velvia.

Composition: Actually in a way this photo didn't turn out the way I would have liked it. There is one element missing that I would have liked to have, and that is something else in the photo to anchor it, something that doesn't move relative to the camera. I actually tried putting other stuff in the photo, but where I was at I didn't like the options and just gave up and shot this. One suggestion for composing a shot with a foreground object is to use a flashlight to illuminate the object so that you can actually see it through the viewfinder. One problem that I run into since I usually do these photos in or near a campground is my foreground objects being lit up, even for a second, by a car or flashlight. This is fine if that is what you want, but I want to have a dark, silhouetted object to anchor my photo.

The only other thing to think about when composing these shots is that the farther you get from the North Star the less of an arc your star trails will be, and vice versa. Just something to think about!

One final thing if you are using film for these shots. Before actually taking photos of the stars, take a few photos of something brighter. This will help whoever mounts your slides figure out where the frames are and not cut anything off because they can't see what is going on! It might also be nice to let them know what these photos are so that they don't assume they are blank frames at first glance.

Please comment if you have anything else concerning this photo!

Site Update!

2008-01-24T17:33:00.000-08:00

I have just updated my website with some new photos! These photos are from Daley Ranch back in November as well as some photos of our friends' daughter Mollie.

I am always looking for critiques of my photos so feel free to discuss here or drop me an e-mail!

New Photo Gallery

Website Update!

2007-11-17T10:43:00.000-08:00

I finally updated my website after almost a year. Check it out!

http://www.mvpol.com

In the Field

2007-11-07T07:06:00.000-08:00

Daley Ranch, morning of November 6, 2007

After thinking about it for a couple of weeks and just not finding the opportunity, I finally got out and took some photos Tuesday morning! For some reason I really wanted to go out and take some close-ups of subjects with dew on them, but the past few days I didn't see any dew on things around my house so I wasn't sure what I was going to find if and when I actually went out. This morning a moment of doubt set in around 4:30am when I was in bed pondering whether or not to get up, then again around 5:00am when I was leaving the house in the fog - should I even go out?

I arrived at the Daley Ranch Cougar Pass Parking lot in the dark around 5:20am, obviously I was the only one around! My plan was to try and make it to the top of Engelmann loop before the sun actually rose. I was hoping by then that I would be above the fog and able to take some nice photos of the sun and mountains over the fog. So I got all my stuff together and headed out in the dark with the aid of a flashlight. I immediately knew I had made the right decision to go out this morning. I could see water droplets hanging in the air from my flashlight beam, and in the trees it sounded like it was raining with all the water droplets falling. Because it was dark, I couldn't really see if all that moisture collected on the grasses, shrubs and spider webs, but things were looking good so far!

Well around ten to six I was getting closer to the top, but off to the side were some shrubs full of dew drops. This is what I wanted to see and it was light enough to start taking some photos. I had a great time exploring the immediate area and working on my macro-photography techniques attempting at getting the dew on the bushes. I did get some photos of some trees in the fog early on, but after that all my focus (literally!) was on close-ups.

One funny thing happened. I was working on a particular drop of dew and was taking some time in getting everything set up and composed right. After a few minutes I was almost ready when the cable release slipped out of my hand, swung down, and hit the branch I was working on thereby knocking all the dew off!

In my photography books I have always been drawn to the photos of dewy dragonflies. They just look so neat covered in thousands of drops of water. I had never seen a dewy dragonfly out in the field, and therefore have never taken a photo of one. As I was walking the other day I was looking down off to the sides of the trail to look for things to photograph - then something white caught my eye about a foot of the ground in a bush. It was a dewy dragonfly!! I know this might not excite a lot of people, but I certainly was! One thing about dewy insects is that because of all the weight of the water on their bodies, they really cannot move until they dry off so there usually is plenty of time to photograph them - even so I was trying to get set up as quickly as possible and was almost nervous! I ended up starting with a photo of the dragonfly in it's context (on a branch, and then working my way in until all I could see was pretty much just one wing. I really hope these photos turn out, because I always wanted to take photos like these.

In case you are interested, below are some comments that I have from my little outing. While I am waiting for my film to be developed I always think about what I did, and sort of "debrief" myself as to what I did in the field. Once I get my film back I can see if I was successful, and learn from my mistakes as well as successes. Some of those things I would like to reflect on now and I hope that these things too will stimulate your thinking about photography and the process behind taking a (hopefully) good photo.

Tripod

Having a good tripod is an absolute essential for a nature photographer and I came to appreciate my tripod all the more Tuesday morning. The reason a tripod is essential is because quite often you must deal with shutter speeds that are not able to be "hand-held." This is due to a number of factors including: low-light situations (pre-dawn, dark forest, etc.), the need for good depth-of-field, the desire to get motion in the photo (water flowing, grasses swaying), and film speed (I usually use ISO 50 or 100 film - even digital camera users have to think about this). Because of these types of things, I usually have shutter speeds in the range of 1 second to 1/4 of a second - way too long to hand-hold!

When I first started taking photos I had a very cheap tripod (the kind you buy at Best Buy for $25.) I actually attempted to adapt it to meet my needs, and it served its purpose decently, but once I was able to get a real photographer's tripod I don't know how I lived without it! I am able to put my tripod in almost any position that I need: from just an inch or two from the ground, to over my head, or even sticking my camera into a bush from the side. I love it!! In this case I used almost all the potential configurations to get to the shots that I wanted.

Fog

Overall, I haven't had a lot of opportunities to shoot subjects in the fog. Before getting to all the dewy shrubs there were some trees that looked really nice silhouetted in the fog. Because the trees are overall dark I metered an area just off the tree that was just fog so that I could get an accurate reading of the fog. Then since fog isn't "middle-toned", it is more white than that, I opened up my camera 1 to 1.5 stops, composed the shot with the tree, and took the photo - bracketing 1 stop on both sides.

This is a good example of not letting your camera do all the work. It wants to make everything "middle-toned" whereas there are things you that aren't. You have to constantly be thinking about what you want to actually appear on the film and then tell your camera to do that! I hope that I was successful with the fog.

Patience

If you know me, then you probably know that I can tend to be impatient. This makes itself all the more evident when I am taking photos and something I am constantly fighting against! The first way this makes itself evident is in finding the right subject. Too often, either in taking close-ups of dew or broad landscapes, I tend to jump on the first photo opportunity without taking the time to make sure that it is the best photo. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, because that first opportunity may be your only one, but more often that not it is just one of many.

On this day, I really didn't look around at all the dew drops on the shrubs, but started to set everything up on the first one I saw. Even while I was doing this I was telling myself that this wasn't the best subject, but I wanted to just take a photo so bad that I continued. This is the one where I hit the branch with my cable release, and I was in a way glad because it forced me to actually look around for another subject - which I did with more care.

The other thing that really tested my patience was the presence of a slight breeze. Since I was working at higher magnification and longer shutter speeds, any movement at all would ruin the photo. Sitting with the shutter release in your hand, watching a little branch, and waiting for it to stop will try anybody's patience! I know there are some photos where I was pushing it and probably got some fuzzy photos!

Thinking about Procedure

One of the most frustrating things about taking film photos (even digital to a point as well) is getting back home, looking at the shots, and realizing that you missed something basic and that you should have caught that before. Things like intrusions into the frame, blown-out highlights, improper metering, etc. This happens to me all the time. Usually it is because I don't think about metering the whole scene (and just go with my camera's center-weighted value) and I don't take the time to look at the other things in the frame. I can get so focused on the one subject I want to capture, but don't see the element off to the side that will eventually ruin the shot.

Some other things that I usually forget about are what is the mood I am trying to convey in this photo? How are people going to look at this photo? What is their eye going to be drawn to and how? What do I want them to think of when looking at this?

This time I was trying to be as conscious as possible of all the procedural "rules" and technical aspects of the shot. Taking meter readings of what I wanted to meter off of and adjusting those to how I wanted them to appear on film, making sure the composition was correct and not allowing extraneous elements into the shot, and finally making sure that I was using the correct equipment. On this final point I kind of missed something early on, but it shouldn't effect things too much; when it is overcast the photos tend to be a little "cool", to combat this there are "warming filters" (81 series). I completely forgot about this and it wasn't until later that I put on an 81B filter. There might not be a lot of harm done to the earlier photos, they just might be a little "cooler" than I would have liked.

A lot of these types of things I would like to talk about in my "Photography Basics" blogs in the near future, but this should give you some ideas of the things that one needs to think about.

If you couldn't tell I can think about these things for a long time, and if you got this far I thank you for bearing with me! Happy shooting!

Photography Basics - Prelude

2007-10-29T07:11:00.001-07:00

"...You can take great photographs with a camera set on "autoexposure" or "programmed exposure" as long as you are aware of what choices the camera is making, can evaluate them to see if they are what you want, and know how to override them if necessary. You should be in control of what your camera is doing, not the other way around. (p.16)"

"Cameras can't think. They don't know what you're photographing nor do they know how you want your picture to appear. (p. 22)"

From John Shaw’s Landscape Photography

I have wanted to do this for a long time, and that is to give a "tutorial" of sorts on the basics of photography. Almost everybody likes to see a good photograph. What defines a good photograph is subjective, but yet the technical aspects of taking that photograph are the same no matter what the style or "genre" of the photograph. Quite often I see photographs that are lacking in some respect because the camera did all the work in determining the exposure and the composition wasn't well thought out.

First of all, I am not an expert in photography nor do I pretend to be one. However, I have spent the better part of the last seven years having photography as a serious hobby and have thought and read about it quite a bit, but more importantly I have gone out and taken thousands and thousands of photos, and messed up thousands of times! It is through those mistakes where I have grown as a photographer. Having a gorgeous scene in front of me and coming home to find out I missed something and all the photos are trash is a real-life lesson as to the importance of thinking about the technical aspects of photography while in the field.

I use a fully-manual 35mm film camera, which is a rarity in today's digital world! However, the rules of photography are the same for my camera built in the late 70s and the digital point-and-shoot camera purchased earlier this year. In a lot of ways, I wish that everybody would take some time learning the basics of photography on a fully-manual camera. Being in full-control of the camera makes you think about everything (and makes you pay when you don't), but really gets you to understand the principles behind exposure. These principles can then carry over to the vacation photographer and his fully-automatic digital P&S camera.

There are two main areas in which I am constantly learning and trying to improve my photography: exposure and composition. It is these two areas where I find the greatest need in a lot of photos that I see from people on vacation to those who are selling photos for a living. Most of the problems I think are just ignorance, not really knowing any different and having the camera do all the "thinking". When somebody has thought about the photograph, consciously, the viewer can tell and the photo truly comes to life.

Although my discussion will primarily focus on my passion of Nature photography, the principles apply to all genres of photography. So if nature photography isn't your thing, but you still want to learn about exposure and composition take what you can and apply it to your own situation.

The following can change (and probably will) but below is something of a "Table of Contents" for my discussion of Photography Basics.

Foreword - My "photographic journey"
Introduction
Exposure
1. Introduction
2. The three parts of exposure determination
  1. Aperture (depth-of-field)
  2. Shutter Speed (movement)
  3. Film Speed
3. Stops and the reciprocity principle
Composition
1. Introduction
2. Time of Day
3. Finding subjects
4. Rule of Thirds
Equipment
1. Tripods
2. Filters
3. Lenses
Appendix
1. Features of many digital P&S cameras
2. Resolution and printing

I hope to start this endeavor soon, as time warrants with all the other stuff I have going on! I hope that there is some interest (even if there isn't I will still do it for my own enjoyment and learning). If questions arise or there is something you want me to cover please let me know!

I'm Back!

2007-10-27T10:04:00.000-07:00

I had mentioned earlier that I had some film in for processing. Well, I just got my two rolls of slide film from the processor! Overall I am very pleased with the results – in a way it is kind of a relief! Looking at the slides proved to me once again that I love this hobby and that I need to do it more often.

While I was going around taking the photos a lot of the techniques and technical know-how came back to me, but there are still things that I forgot or over-looked. If I can continue to shoot some film on a more regular basis, those things will hopefully be corrected as I practice.

I hope to have some of these slides scanned soon so that I can actually discuss them here, but that might be a few days before I can get those since I do not own a slide scanner. But in the meantime here are some initial comments that I have (I will try and scan some slides that demonstrate these and discuss them later).

Initial comments from Joshua Tree Slides:

Bracketing is a good idea!

Put some photos in sharp focus throughout

Look for things intruding into the frame

Meter entire scene (although not as bad a problem this time, I got lucky!)

Double check metering

For star trails, put something terrestrial into the photo

On Location

2007-10-20T07:51:00.000-07:00

Before moving back out to California, I lived in Chicago for a number of years. It was out there that I began to love photography. Since I am a nature photographer, being such in Chicago wouldn't seem like a good fit, and in many ways it wasn't. Overall there are not a lot of "landscapes" to be shot around Chicago, but Cook County had a lot of Forest Preserves which afforded decent places to go take photos (generally not broad, sweeping landscapes, but what I called "creative cropping"). Needless to say I got pretty familiar with the preserves around where I lived and worked!

Just because of the way things worked out I usually would get out and take photos before work to catch the sunrise. I would get up well before dawn, park my car along side the road (the preserve parking lots usually wouldn't open until around the time of sunrise), get all my stuff together, and head into the woods using the light of my headlamp. After getting to the spot I was thinking of, or finding one along the way I would usually have some time to set up my camera gear, and then just wait for the sun to rise. What a magical time of day! Watching the sky get brighter, maybe grabbing some shots of the higher clouds with some color, and then seeing the world around getting bathed in warm, golden light makes you forget where you are for the moment. I really think that even in Chicago what I saw on those occasions out in the forest preserves at dawn were things that not very many people ever experienced. Sure the trails in the forest preserve were used by many people, but at the wrong times! Every so often depending on where I was I would see a mountain biker or even another hiker, but not until the sun was up for a while and I was heading back to my car.

In many places around Cook County especially in the southwest suburbs the lakes, ponds, and sloughs were really close to the roads. So often there I was sitting along side the road with my camera on the tripod waiting for the sun to rise while people drove right past at 45-50 miles per hour. I always wondered if somebody who took that road to work everyday, never looking off to the side, after seeing me there with my camera, realized the beauty of the scene they had always missed and started to actually pay attention. Quite often when I was hid from the road, but yet very close to it and seeing some amazing things I just had to chuckle as all these people were driving right past and missing it all!

Even though I took a lot of photos around Chicago, I was also privledged to go on a number of vacations where Michelle and I would be able to go to some amazing places and I would shoot up a good number of rolls. Moving out to Southern California presents an entirely different set of locations and environments in which to shoot although to be honest I have only done so really only twice (see the "Photography Revival" below) and it is starting to bug me! I really need to start getting out and exploring the photographic possibilities around me!

There is one little problem however, even though San Diego County and the surrounding areas go from the ocean to foothills to pine-covered mountains (snow covered in the winter) to the desert floor, the time it takes to get to those locations is much further than it took me to get to the forest preserves in Chicago. For instance to take photos at sunrise in the desert means I would have to leave Escondido at least three hours earlier if not more (two hours to drive, an hour to hike/find a location). And that would be the case for a lot of places. So taking those kind of photos on my way to work just wouldn't work out. I would almost have to spend the night out "on location" as to alievate the early morning driving.

There is a nature preserve in Escondido just a couple of miles away as well as other decent places fairly close that I haven't even really begun to explore their photographic potential yet so I have plenty to do in the short term! Now I just need to get out and do it!

Learning About Photography

2007-10-19T11:54:00.000-07:00

There are two main vehicles by which I have learned (and am learning) the art of nature photography. The first is through the books of John Shaw, and the second is actually going out and taking photos (and messing up a lot!). The books by John Shaw are unbelievable, just the full-color photos contained in the books makes you want to go out and take your own photos, but also his earlier books deal with the equipment that I currently own and use (fully manual film cameras). His later books that I have deal with more sophisticated film cameras, but I can still gain a lot by reading them. Below are some excerpts from his book Focus on Nature: The Creative Process Behind Making Great Photographs in the Field, (New York: Amphoto, 1991), that I found extremely useful and well said. I hope you enjoy them as well.

Introduction
Photography is a way to order the chaos around you by emphasizing some aspects of the environment and ignoring others. You do this by choosing what to photograph and what to include in the frame. Then by using the tools of photography (lenses, films, light and exposure) and selecting a vantage point from which to photograph, you emphasize one aspect or another of your subject. In effect, you're telling the viewer what is important by your having made choices.

But order doesn't happen automatically. Simply pointing a camera at a subject doesn't guarantee a successful photograph if success is defined as an interesting, engaging work that involves the viewer's mind and emotions. You have to structure a photograph both technically and aesthetically without allowing these concerns to overwhelm the subject matter. When the construction of a photograph is more noticeable than its content, you've failed as a photographer; instead you are a dilettante in the worst sense of the word.

How to arrange a picture, how to make order out of chaos, should be a conscious decision on your part. Structuring your visual environment is the role of composition, and the more you can consciously control this structure, the better a photographer you'll be. I believe that far too often - myself included - tend to be sloppy when it comes to making decisions. We slide be with such vague thoughts as "That's a pretty scene" or "Oh, I like that" without analyzing exactly what we mean. You should ask yourself some questions. What has influenced me? Why am I visually excited about a particular situation? What specifically can I do to emphasize the subject?

There is quite a difference between the procedure of photography and the process of photography; but a good work has both. Photography is a synthesis of two ways of dealing with the world, two ways of dealing with subject matter. On one hand, you must be a technician, determining shutter speeds and f-stops, choosing equipment and mounting lenses for example. You must have a rational, strictly scientific approach to your work. Here, step two must follow step one in the correct manner in order for the machinery to work properly to record an image. This side of photography is the logical world of procedure. On the other hand, you must also be a poet and an artist, paying attention to the intuitive and mystical world of your inner vision. You have to bring your own sense of emotions about the subject to the photograph, otherwise it'll be lifeless. You must be able to see an image. This is the process of taking a picture.

Procedure without process is as much a failure as process without procedure. A photograph can't be successful without the interplay and mutual support of these aspects. Everyone has seen photographs that are technically immaculate but aesthetically insipid. The usual reaction to such pictures is that they are dull, uninspired work. Everyone has also seen photographs that are intensely personal and evocative yet lack a solid basis in technique. These are judged to be the result of bad craftsmanship and an inability to control the medium. The artist with his vision and the craftsman with his tools must unite to create a successful product. (9-10)

Seeing the Light
Most people don't see the nuances of light on the landscape. A photograph is only a two-dimensional representation of our experience. The fuller the experience, the more it touches all of our senses, the better our photographs are. Visual sensitivity to the landscape and how it is shaped by light is a skill that we need to develop. We must learn to spontaneously respond to unexpected moments of clarity and light. We literally must have insight.

Many of us have never seen the light. I believe this happens because we are in such a hurry that we don't have the time to watch how the light changes and consequently alters the appearance of subjects. Without noticing change, we see neither the beginning nor the end but think that how subjects look at the observed moment is how they always look.

We tend to do this, consciously or not. I am as guilty of being in a hurry as everyone else. When I travel to a new location, I often feel I must get a definitive photograph immediately. The pressure I place on myself to produce prevents me from seeing what is happening around me. Like most other people, I need to slow down. Keep in mind that our perception of a place is colored by the time of day and year that we saw it. For example, if you visit the Everglades on a morning in February, the way it looks at that particular time is the way it will be locked into your memory, But the Everglades in February isn't the Everglades in July, and the Everglades in the morning isn't the Everglades at twilight.

I realize that most of us are pressed for time to photograph. We have appointments to keep, jobs to go to, and engagements that take up our time. But learning to see the light, to see how light changes a subject during a day or a season's duration, is of utmost importance. The word "photography" literally means to paint with light. An awareness of light is our first and most essential tool in terms of our aesthetic control when taking a photograph.

Slow down, stay a little longer, just wait and watch. Only be being in the field and observing the light play upon the landscape can you truly learn to see the world around you. (17)

Graphic Elements
In photography, that is, photo-graphics, you're dealing with the graphic elements that are common to all visual arts. You must be conscious of the basic building blocks of design: color, line, pattern, texture and form. The become your visual vocabulary, and photographic technique provides the syntax. The synthesis of the two is communication. (19)

Photography Revival

2007-10-19T11:52:00.000-07:00

Some of you know that I am something of an amateur nature photographer (my website is www.mvpol.com). It is a hobby that at one time I was looking into how I could actually take pictures for a living. This had kind of fallen off of my radar the past couple of years because of two primary reasons: 1) going to seminary full time took most of my attention, time and resources and 2) in July of 2006 I broke my favorite and most used lens in a freak hiking accident (instead of unclipping my backpack’s sternum strap I unclipped one of my camera strap buckles and the camera went crashing onto some concrete).

The lack of that lens really hurt my ability to take the photos that I wanted to take. One of the lenses that a landscape/nature photographer needs is a wide angle lens (technically speaking anything under 50mm is a wide-angle lens, under 24mm they become more “fish-eye” wide-angle lenses). The lens that I broke was a 28mm-90mm zoom lens, and because of its wide-angle capability as well as everything up to 90mm I found it very useful in composing my shots. I have a 50mm lens and a 70mm-210mm zoom lens that I used, but very much missed my 28mm-90mm zoom lens. All that to say, I was quite depressed and never felt like going out and taking photos because I knew I couldn’t do what I wanted to do.

This past weekend I went camping at Joshua Tree National Park. We had been there two times before I always thought that this would be a great place to take some nice photos. Well, this time I actually decided to do it. I borrowed a 28mm fixed lens from a professor (thanks Dr. Clark!) and bought some film (I didn’t even have any in the house, how sad is that?!). I was going to be arriving at the park a couple of hours earlier than everybody else so I knew I would have some time in the late afternoon to get out.

Needless to say, I loved every minute of it! Just going through all my equipment trying to figure out what I needed to carry along, loading film, cleaning lens, was such a joy! Then I started walking around actually taking photos trying to remember all that I had learned in the previous years about exposure, depth of field, composition, etc. I was having so much fun setting up my tripod again, figuring out the best composition, and determining exposure. On my website I talk about the moment that got me really hooked on nature photography, and I experienced that again in a similar manner. The first time was looking at a processed slide on a light box, this time it was looking through the viewfinder. I had been walking around mainly taking photos of some climbers who were scaling the rocks in our campsite. Once I got away from them I saw a composition of some Joshua Trees framing a rock formation in the background, I put on Dr. Clark’s 28mm lens, set up my tripod, looked through the viewfinder, and BAM!! I was hooked again! I had a polarizing filter on the lens which made the sky a deep rich blue, the green of the Joshua Tree leaves was verdant, all contrasted with the harshness of the rocks and hills in the background. That was all it took for my heart to start racing and my love of nature photography to come flooding back!

Now I have no idea if that photo I took actually turned out (the film is being processed right now), but even if it didn’t – I know that I am able to take the photos I want and just need to get back into practice again. I do hope that I get some good photos out of this weekend (or else I might be posting again soon as to why I hate photography!) and I cannot wait to throw them on a lightbox and take a look!

One thing that frustrates me concerning nature photography is that I see a lot of people displaying and selling photos that, in my opinion, stink. So many times I see prints being sold that are out of focus, horrible color (usually from being over-exposed), poor composition, and the like; but yet they are trying to sell the print for $150! Obviously there are those photos that I see that absolutely blow me away and confirm that I am in a different league, but yet I am relatively new at this and am proud of most of my work.

In the future I will talk more about photography since I have been “revived” again (hopefully I can actually get out and do it more!), but I am thinking of getting a little more technical as to how to take good photographs. In the past couple of years people who know I am into photography have asked me questions about photography, but also I have heard people who don’t know how to use their digital cameras. Having a basic understanding of photography and its principles helps to understand what your camera is doing and why and might even get you to the point where you are telling the camera what to do instead of the other way around. Also some thoughts about composition and taking photos that will take your photos to another level.

So if you are interested in me doing this let me know so that I can have some motivation for pursuing that endeavor! Also, if you are in my area, let me know and someday we can go out and shoot some rolls or memory cards as the case may be!

Purpose of this, my new blog

2007-10-19T11:11:00.000-07:00

I doubt anybody will be reading this blog, but oh well! The purpose of the "VPol Photography Blog" is pretty self-explanatory - to allow me the chance to blog about my photography! I had been posting these sort of comments on my other blog but thought it mught be best to separate the two.

I got the idea from a fellow student who is a professional photographer and he has a blog talking about and displaying his most recent work (his website is here).

This blog, then, will give me the opportunity to talk about photography, my recent outings (if I can get out and take photos!), as well as answer questions about photography.

So I hope you will visit every so often and participate in the discussion!