Friday, May 17, 2024
He carefully dusts off the dust from the keyboard, cracks his knuckles, and begins to type out the first blog in what seems like forever.
OK, so maybe that is a little dramatic, and would indicate that I haven’t been busy since we last spoke. That is not entirely true. Yes, I haven’t been posting new photos here, nor doing entries as often as normal. But by no means have I been slacking during the month of May. I have started an ongoing project to create a new website that will hopefully have less glitches than this one, but it will be a ground up development. So far, I just have the shell of the site ready, but haven’t quite figured out the gallery pages, or how the blog will work and be transferred from this one. The progress is good so far which is promising. I’ve also been quite busy with a camera in my hand doing portrait work. I’ve done a decent sized headshot session for a corporate client in Charlotte, and just scheduled a small session for another corporate client in Huntersville for Monday morning. I’ve done a test shoot with my wife and muse down in the studio to try out some different lighting techniques, as well as doing a branding photo session for another photographer at ECH Photography. That one took me out to Wiseman’s View in the Linville Gorge which is usually a landscape destination for me. In the middle of all of that, I have been keeping up with my weekly Tuesday’s Tips video series where I delve into all things Lightroom. So, you see, I have been quite busy here lately.
To be completely honest, I was actually needing a break from photography, but I still had a mentorship session that had been promised to one of my clients and friends. About a year or so ago, during a Lightroom tutorial, we discussed going out in the field for a bit of landscape photography to try and work through some issues that he was having. Since he is in Virginia, there were some logistical and scheduling concerns that had to be worked out. He also got very busy with things and the mentorship kind of dropped for a while. However, things started to change, and it was looking like we were going to be able to get out together. For what he was wanting to work on, I chose to go to Doughton Park since he didn’t have any direct suggestions closer to him. I knew the park very well and could work several areas to help clear some of the issues up for him. It would be an efficient use of time and resources by going there. The only glitch that came up was that the access to the park was closed from a construction project that started last Fall. After some research, I found out that they were going to try and have the park opened back up around Memorial Day which gave me some hope.
Not too long ago, the road was opened, and I could at least get to the park to just give it a once over before committing to a time to go out there. Things went very well on that trek, even though I had to make a number of compromises when it came to the photography that I was doing. I was able to confirm that I was going to be able to do everything that I had said I would be able to cover there. Then the rains started to come in. This pushed the mentorship off once again, which wasn’t a bad thing considering all the other things that I had going on.
When things started to calm down and I felt that I could finally put the camera down, I happened to look at the weather. For the first time in weeks, Friday and Saturday mornings were looking promising for weather conditions. These were the days that we had agreed to aim for. Even though I just wanted to rest, or take care of some projects around the house, I reached out to find out if either of the days were good. As it turned out, Friday was workable, and he was willing to meet out there for sunrise as the rain was supposed to be coming in around noon. That was that; I was going to be getting up early on Friday morning for a mentorship. We agreed to meet at 5:30 which was a 3:45am alarm for me. Although, I found out that he had to drive two hours to get there which was much worse than what I was having to do.
When the alarm rang, I got up out of bed and noticed almost immediately that I wasn’t feeling particularly creative, or excited to working with the camera. In any other situation, I would have rolled back over in the bed and slept till the sun came up. However, when it comes to my clients, I will always put myself second. I wanted to bring my A-game for the day and make this a beneficial mentorship session for him no matter what. I pushed through the morning routine and was on the road slightly early which I like being able to do. All the way up the mountain I was trying to think about compositions and how I would want to convey ideas during the morning. It is one thing to go out in nature and talk myself through things and quietly listen to the landscape, but it is quite another to take on the roll of a mentor and instructor. That is when I have to guide and work within how the client sees the world rather than how I do. It forces me to think outside of my own box many times and this can be an excellent thing to spark my own creativity, which was what I was hoping would happen through the morning.
When I arrived, the sky was largely empty of clouds which didn’t bode well for the sunrise that I had been hoping for. I knew that the clouds were going to build through the day so there would be plenty of interest in the sky soon enough. I was just hoping for some color to make the early morning worth it for both of us. Right on time, we were hiking up the trail from the newly opened picnic area parking lot which made the hike much easier than it would have been otherwise. We arrived at my favorite tree at the top of the meadow where we had done the first of several workshops together a few years back.
There was just a hint of color in the sky, but it was enough to justify some frames to get the day started. I spent the time working with Joe to get his in the groove quickly as the light was changing quite fast. As we worked the scene and talked about the different compositional opportunities, he noticed that there was a sun dog showing up in the sky to the right of the tree that we had been working with. Just like that, I started trying to find a composition for him to shoot in order to capture that phenomenon that had caught his eye. We managed to get a composition worked out and he got a few frames shot before the sun dog faded away. As we were talking about what had happened, I noticed that the sun dog had returned in the form of a complete arch in the sky. I knew that we would be able to fit the tree within that arch, so I grabbed his camera to get it into position quickly. I then talked him through the composition and exposure as he did the final setting up of the photo. He was barely able to get the fleeting light around the tree, but I think that it will turn out really great.
There had been no time to get my camera out knowing that my first priority was to help him with his own process. I had wished that I had my camera out because that was a really awesome sight and one that I just don’t see often and have never been in a position to photograph it before. The regret faded because I had the opportunity to see it happen, and at least it was photographed by Joe. The event did get my own creativity bubbling up and I started to think about getting some photos for myself at this point because the light was starting to change much slower now that the sun was up. One of the areas that I knew Joe wanted to work on was photographing mountains from essentially an overlook.
This kind of photograph can be more difficult than you might expect. You see, the overlooks are designed to allow you to see a sweeping vista with an uninterrupted view. This is great for sight seeing, and grabbing snapshots, but they can prove a little difficult when trying to find a meaningful composition. With this in mind, I knew that there was a spot just off to the side of the ridge where we had been working around the tree that would offer a view very similar to what he was having difficulties with. When I moved over to see this section, I was very happy that there was a thick cloud inversion in the lower areas which added a great deal of visual interest to the scene. This was a good opportunity to talk through the ways of capturing the scene.
Unfortunately, he was limited in telephoto choices at only 135mm which kind of forced a lot of foreground that wasn’t needed in the shot. This is part of the problem when working from an overlook though. Everything has been cut away, so foregrounds are usually not beneficial to the photo, and you have to work with patterns and layers more than anything. This is the realm of the telephoto lens and the focal lengths that I have been really exploring over the past year or so.
Wanting to demonstrate the power of the longer lens, I used the opportunity to pull out my 70-200mm and frame up a composition that I had picked out for him to shoot. Even with the extra reach that I had using that lens, the composition failed to be interesting due to what had to be included. To drive the point home though, I added my teleconverter that gave me a reach of 400mm and framed up the composition that opened up this entry. It had layers, mountain tops shrouded in low clouds, and a nice section of crisp green trees to anchor the scene. It was shot at 335mm and cropped in camera to a 16:9 aspect ratio to limit the inclusion of the sky and the foreground trees. It worked very well but showed the need for the 100-500mm lens that I have been eyeing for when I finally make the move to using the EOS R5 as my landscape camera. That is well off in the future though, so I will happily stick with my extender to get the added reach that I sometimes need.
I had the first shot in the can and felt really good about it. Joe had several by this point and had only run into a problem with the lack of reach for the distant mountains. We were starting to look around to find other points of interest that could make for good compositions. He started working on a scene near some rock outcroppings that I enjoy working with and I turned my attention to the lone tree at the top of the hill. The sky was looking really fierce behind it, and I could see a good composition developing. It was going to be a good opportunity to show the other end of the spectrum in terms of focal length because this was definitely going to be a wide angle shot. Feeling frisky at this point, I pulled out my favorite cheap lens, the Rokinon 14mm f/2.8 and started doing the composition waltz with a prime lens.
After finding the right spot under the tree, I started to make exposures which is a little different than with my other lenses. Live view doesn’t work at all for exposure information using this manually adjusted lens. The histogram is all wrong because the camera doesn’t know that the lens is stopped down. I’ve tried to figure out a workaround so that I could use the histogram, but to no avail. I had to use the light meter, which is usually pretty simple to do. In this case, I had a very dynamic scene that fooled the light meter in several ways. The sun was behind the clouds which forced a really bright highlight in the left part of the sky, but the tree was essentially backlit, and I wanted to be careful with the shadows, even though I was going for a silhouette. It took me a few shots to land on the right exposure which was underexposed by a stop and a third. This gave me a good histogram in the image review which made me confident that I had all the information that I needed for an edit.
After Joe had a chance at the same composition with a 16mm focal length, we decided that we had worked this area enough. It was time to move to the next part of the park that I thought would benefit him. It was another tree that I have grown to love over the last couple of years. It was more complicated to compose around though which was a good thing in terms of mentoring. I took a good deal of time and helped work through the compositional considerations with this tree when photographed from below. We talked about how to frame things and what focal lengths worked the best. Exposure was another problem that we ran into with the sky being quite bright behind the tree. This turned into a great time to really work through an issue that I had seen developing with the histograms on his camera between the shooting and image playback. We had done some testing at the previous location, but the issue was popping up again here, so I wanted to try and figure it out for him.
What we were seeing was a tendency for his Sony A7III to show blow out highlights and a hotter histogram in image playback than what he was seeing at the time of capture. He had the camera set up as I had recommended to allow for the greatest dynamic range in his RAW capture and I thought that was causing issues. The more we tested and tried things, the more that it seemed that wasn’t the case. Something that I had not been aware of was that this camera apparently has a proclivity to show an overexposed file in the image review, but there is plenty of latitude to recover what appears to be blown out highlights. We were pushing the exposure as far to the right as possible in the live view histogram, and it was showing to be around a stop too bright in the image review. We did several runs of comparison images to look at in Lightroom for an official exposure check, but the more we talked about it, the more we decided to trust the capture histogram rather than the playback version.
Once he was all situated and was working on his photos, I pulled my camera over to the side and mounted that Rokinon one more time for a sweeping view of the scene that I had done a couple of years back. The lighting wasn’t the best, but I know that this lens excels in black and white images which is what I intended to do in order to maximize the potential in the sky. I think I still like the other version better, but I can see an improvement on the composition which makes me happy.
Once we both had our fill with the lower section of the tree, it was time to move up to the higher level to get a new view on the location. This opened up another 360-degree view of the park and surrounding mountains. We started to look around for things that interested him, and he landed on the lone tree that I always enjoy working with. He liked it but didn’t like the fallen branch that was still hanging there from last year. I used this as an opportunity to show how to pull just a bit of a tree out of a scene and make it work. It just so happened that while we were talking about the tree, he noticed the clouds that were moving across the sky. That was what I chose to frame up with the tree trunk and used my 24-70mm lens to make the composition happen.
While I was working on this composition, I had the time to think about how little I use this lens. Once upon a time, this was my workhorse finding its way on my camera 90% of the time. I didn’t even have to think about it, that was just the one that I pulled out of the bag. Over the last year, I have grown to really appreciate the telephoto lens, and have found a lot of joy in wider angle glass as well. It was now feeling strange to use this lens, but it was the right choice for the job.
By the time that I had the composition set up and the exposure figured out, the clouds had dissipated leaving not much in the sky to focus on for the viewer. I had the shot which allowed me to show the concept that I had been talking about. This helped to illustrate my point even though the moment was gone. There was still plenty more to photograph on that hilltop, so we went around looking for other views of the tree.
I found one on off to the right of where I had been where the trunk of the tree masked the fallen branch. While working on that composition, Joe spotted another view that he liked more. It just so happened to be the same tree that we had worked with on the trail below. The light was hitting it nicely and I took a break to help him figure out the composition that he wanted to shoot. As we worked through things, and tried to translate his vision into a photograph, it was seeming that he was wanting to get in very close and pull out the detail from within the tree. Even then it was seeming that he was not liking how it was looking. I took that opportunity to abandon the composition that I was working on and moved my camera around to work on the tree that he had started working. I went in the opposite direction and increased the distance between me and the tree while using a longer focal length than we had been using. The compression seemed to help the scene and I thought that Joe might prefer this view since he was still not happy with the up close version.
I called for him to come back and check out the composition that I had just found. He did like that one better and went back to get his gear in order to get something similar. We got his composition fine tuned and figured out the exposure. He was pretty much mirroring what I had come up with, but it was really working out well. Now that we had the composition set, we just waited for the light to change as that little kiss of sunlight made all the difference in the world. The grass and the leaves would positively glow when the sunlight hit them. The clouds were just interesting enough behind the tree to pull it all together. It was a much stronger photograph than what I had been working on prior to helping figure this one out.
It was this photo that I was most excited about when I got the images home and I waited until the end to edit it. I wanted to get a feel for the location of the day in some different edits before I dived into processing this one. That delay paid off because by the time I got started, I already knew how I wanted to treat it. The edit was actually quite simple and very little was done to it. It turned into my favorite image of the day thanks to that bit of sunlight on the greenery.
After we worked that scene for a bit, we decided to head back down to the parking lot where there was another spot I wanted him to try. This was a tree and fence that I had photographed many times over the years. It was going to be an exercise in using wide angle focal lengths on a subject that was really up close and personal. It was a little different than what he had been doing through most of the morning. When we got close, I challenged him to find an interesting composition and way of photographing the tree. He actually did very well at working the scene and finding the best angle. He knew what was important to photograph but had a little bit of hard time figuring out how to do it. This was exactly why I chose this subject and it turned into a great teaching moment.
That moment seamlessly moved into another example of the same concepts with a smaller tree located behind the location we were shooting. He picked this subject out and it was something I had never even considered photographing. He saw something interesting in it and started working through photographing it. He only needed a little help in determining how much of the scene needed to be included and he ended up with a really interesting photograph. I’m looking forward to seeing how it turned out. I even told Toni about it since she likes the old, knotted trees more than about anything in the landscape.
With the rain starting to fall, we moved over to the last section that I wanted to work him. This was another opportunity to work something similar to an overlook. This time, we took advantage of the foreground that was on the edge of the parking lot. The trick here was the focal length used. We determined very quickly that what seemed to be a logical choice in lens actually flattened out the mountains in the distance and made the foreground too large. It was time to use the long lens once again to get a bit of compression to the scene. It really seemed counter intuitive to back away from the foreground, but there was no doubt that it worked well for how we both wanted to capture the scene.
This pretty much wrapped up our day because the rain was starting to fall a little heavy for our tastes. We packed up our gear and went through some review from the day. We had been at it for about nine hours at this point but had worked through just about every issue that he has been having in his photography. It was one of those days where I got to see the lightbulb pop on more times than I could count. It always makes me feel good when I can help somebody figure out problems that have been preventing them from moving forward on their creative journey. When I looked back on how the day started with very little motivation, there was no comparison to how I felt now. I was tired, but more satisfied than I could have imagined.
If there is something in your own photography that you need help with, or just want to learn how be more than a button pusher, I would love to talk about a mentorship plan with you. I have a very customizable collection of plans available from image critiques to advanced sessions that can last months. In my opinion these are much better than workshops because I don’t have to split my time between different participants. My time is there for you, and you alone. I will create a curriculum that addresses your specific concerns and then work with you step by step to make sure that you understand the concepts and can apply them. It is a very efficient way of learning, and you will also get the benefit of being able to review with me as needed once the session is finished. All you need to do to get started is to contact me for a no-obligation consultation which is always free.
Thank you for joining me on this trek. Looking back on the day, it was great to get back out in the landscape again. I have really enjoyed the portrait sessions, but there is something relaxing about taking your time with a scenic view. Doughton Park is always a fun place to be as well, but you have probably already gathered that this is a favorite shooting location for me. Don’t forget that if there are any of these photos that you would like to see on your wall, I do offer prints of all of my photography. I can do photo prints, fine art prints, as well as prints on canvas and metal. If you would like to discuss options, I am ready to chat with you, just let me know.
Until next time…
