Snow Day On Mormon Row:

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Photographic opportunities for anyone willing to brave the elements.

We’ve had snow here in Jackson Hole on the 4th of July, so getting a blast of it in April should not be a surprise to anyone. It’s great for the high country snow pack and the reservoirs that hold the water it produces. My kids are always saying something is “bad” when they really mean it’s good—like “that’s a bad ride”. So, when it’s “bad” outside, it can be “good”. If not good—unique!

On most snow days, the majestic mountains in the Teton Range are covered with clouds. This more or less forces me to look for alternative angles and views. Most shots of the two historic barns are taken from only a few spots. Right? I enjoy just milling around and looking for interesting compositions—even if the Tetons are not part of the picture.

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Half Mile Barn: I took this shot from Antelope Flats Road using a Tamron 150-600mm lens on a D800. This image was captured at 600mm.

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Chambers Barn: Taken from the same spot with the same equipment.

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Heavy Snow captured at 1/125th second: The flakes are mostly frozen.

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Heavy Snow captured at 1/8th second: The flakes streak as they pass in front of the subjects.

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TA Moulton Barn — Front View:

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TA Moulton Barn — Front View: On snow days, I typically take dozens of the same shot. They won’t be exactly the same, of course, because of the endless concentrations of flakes. This is a random pick out of the group. On a “real” project, I’d go through all of them looking for the best one. When photographing animals in the snow, like moose, I shoot even more! I end up looking for images without a big flake across their eyes.

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Long Distance Shot to the John Moulton Homestead: I’ve never measured it, but I’d guess the distance between barns is around half a mile.

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Windmill:

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Remains of the Old Fences:

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Chambers Homestead:

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Chambers Homestead: The snow lasted long enough for me to walk around the various homesteads. The Bed & Breakfast is still privately owned and is marked with signs, but tourists and photographers are allowed to mill around the rest of the areas.

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Cart: This cart is actually on the Bed & Breakfast property, but I don’t think they care if you shoot from outside the fences. It helps to find subjects with dark areas behind them to show the falling snow.

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The Gate: I shot this one with a telephoto lens from across the road with a wide open aperture. It helped blur the background and isolate the gate.

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Gate and Wheel: The snow was not coming down as briskly on this shot of the corner gate at the Bed & Breakfast. Here’s their link: Moulton Ranch Cabins | Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming

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Chambers Shed: For a lot of the images on this page, I “opened up the shadows” by dragging the Shadows slider to the right in Lightroom. Doing so helps reveal some of the snow flakes against the dark zones.

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TA Moulton Barn: For the snow shots today, I set my camera up with “back button focusing”. Large flakes can play havoc with the camera’s auto focus. With back button focusing, I am able to put the center focusing sensor on the corner of the building. When the focus locks down on the corner, I let up on the back button. That sets the focus. I can recompose the scene. When I press the shutter button (even half way), the back button focus settings prevent the AF from trying to find a new position. On a daily basis, I go back and forth between the default focusing and back button focusing, but this is definitely a good time for the latter. Here’s a YouTube tutorial if you are not familiar with the feature: Back Button Focus : Steve Perry on YouTube

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TA Moulton Barn: I moved back and shot through the cottonwoods on this one. I am not sure if I like it, but it was worth a try.

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Moulton Barn with Wintering Robin:

A Softer View

A Softer View: The artist side of my training is always tugging at me after a photographic shoot. For this image, I dragged the “clarity” slider to the left instead of the right to create a soft layer in Photoshop. I made a second version of the image in Lightroom with more traditional settings and brought that into Photoshop. I used the “Find Edges” filter in Style group of Photoshop filters on that layer, then desaturated the results. I pasted that image on top of the soft layer, and changed the blending mode to Multiply, then adjusted the opacity to fit. This little image took only a few minutes to make (for this blog post). If I were doing a more serious version, I’d soften or reduce the dark edges on the branches at the bottom. If someone asked, I could do a tutorial on this technique in a future Feature Post. If you were to scroll up to the gate image, you might notice this is just a cropped area of that image. On a personal level, this image trips my trigger more than the literal photograph.

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Winter Robin: For this image, I desaturated everything but the Robin.

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High Key: This is the same image as the one at the very top. I did a quick “curves” adjustment. Snow day images leave you will tons of post processing flexibility.

Comments: “Bad” weather is all the more reason for me to want to be out. I am not a big fan of heavy, steady rain, but I love being out as storms are moving in or moving out. Snow storms usually offer opportunities at showcasing familiar subjects in an entirely different manner. We’ll probably get additional snow days through April and possibly into May. Count on me being out, and if you are around, I’d suggest doing the same!

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Please, if you like this post, share it on any of the Social Media sites like Facebook and Pinterest. And, please respect my copyrights! MJ

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Reclaiming the Night Participant Profile – Peter Lipscomb

I had spent nearly a week on the road before even meeting my first interviewee, Peter Lipscomb. By the time I had gotten to Santa Fe to meet him, I had been camping in Dinosaur National Monument, the Moab area, and had even just discovered Bandelier National Monument. Though I had been filming plenty of desert scenery along the way, it was feeling less and less like a trip to film a documentary, causing me to question if I even had the skills or desire to even try.

I met Peter after spending a night in Santa Fe and poking around the area a bit. – Read more

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How this image got from start to finish

On March 23 I was in Kearney, Nebraska to view and photograph the annual migration of the Sandhill cranes.  These birds are graceful, awkward, beautiful and kooky all at the same time.  They fly with grace, but while on the ground sometimes exhibit some of the funniest behaviors you’ll see from a bird.  With a wingspan of up to 7 feet, these birds aren’t the biggest, but they’re some of the biggest most of us will get to see.

Every spring, hundred of thousands of them, 80 percent of the world’s population in fact, gather in a 10 mile stretch along the North Platte River in Nebraska.  It is a sight, and a sound, to behold.  So on our way back from Wyoming to Massachusetts its always a good stop.  It’s not always a great photo opportunity, though.  The weather can be bad, the light can be bad, and so on.  Plus, it’s hard to get my wife to want to stay in the middle of Nebraska for very long!

This year there weren’t as many cranes and they were hard to find at first.  I think we may have come a bit late in their migration cycle.  But once I found them, there they were.  The photographic problem was that it was heavy overcast, the light was flat and the cranes were acting skittish.  Usually I can approach them on the ground within about 50 yards and photograph them doing their thing with a telephoto lens, but this year I couldn’t seem to get anywhere near them before they would hop or fly away.  Hmmm…  I started trying to get some flying shots.  Typically the flying shots aren’t my favorite as there are lots of them out there and I try for something at least slightly unique.  But there I was with my tripod and long lens so I thought I’d point upward and see what happened.

I got this.

Yuck.

What was I going to do with that?  Well, I’ll take you through my thought process, and then post-production process in the hopes that you may find it interesting to see how one photographer gets from here, to something that I think isn’t too bad at all.

I didn’t like this image at overall but there were a couple things that I did like.  The two birds at the top were in just about opposite points in the wing movement.  I thought that was interesting. But there were many things wrong.  Like the birds were way too dark.  The sky was drab. They were flying the wrong way!  (I like animals to move left to right, I have no idea why!)  And finally, the bird at the bottom was doing the same thing as the bird above it and that was boring.

So I checked the image to make sure it was sharp (that’s the first thing I do) and decided to focus on the two birds on top.  I cropped it and flipped the image so they were flying the right way and got this.

Now, most photographers and artists will tell you that you should never have two of something.  One is OK, three is much better, but two?  And they’re right.  But rules are meant to be broken and I though that because the two were so complimentary in their wing position that it just might work.  But it sure wasn’t working yet.  I had obviously messed up the exposure allowing the sky to overpower my camera’s meter and not compensating for that.  So the next thing I’d have to do was to adjust the exposure of the raw image from my camera.  After a little tweaking the image started to look a little better.

At least now you can see them!  But still boring.  Because the light was so flat, the contrast is low, the details were hard to see and one of the coolest features of the Sandhill cranes, their red bonnet, was not really evident.  But we have a few trick to fix those pesky problems, and once done, the picture was improving.

OK!  Now we have some nice looking birds.  But it’s not much of a picture, is it?  No.  But why?  Maybe if the birds were closer together it would be better because they seem to be doing their own thing and now that I can see them, they appear more separated.  Maybe we should use just one of them.  No, wait, let’s keep them both but ask them to move a little closer to each other.

Fortunately these are very obliging birds and once they were closer, and they appeared to be flying together, the image was starting to look like, well, something.  But it just wasn’t quite right.

So I put it down for a day.  Sometimes it’s better for me to get away from a project and let the brain work on it without my interference.  I came back the next day and looked at it again.  Now I had an idea.  What if the bird on the left were above the other bird rather than behind it?  That might make for a much more pleasing composition.

Now before you think to yourself “Hey, wait a second.  You can’t just be moving these birds around willy-nilly.  That’s not how they were in nature.”  You’re right, that’s not how they were flying.  And if I were editing images for a nature or bird magazine I wouldn’t accept this image.  If I were photographing trying to depict Sandhill cranes in their habitat I wouldn’t be making these changes either.  I am making photographs as art, and just as a painter might position the birds in a pleasing composition, so does the photographer when creating art photography.  So let’s move the birds a bit.  When we do we end up here.

  By moving the birds and squaring the crop, I now felt that I had a much more pleasing composition and I was starting to like it!  But we were not quite done.  As I looked at the overall image, it started to take on an asian art look to me.  So I thought I should accentuate that and give it an asian treatment.  And when I did, we have the finished product.

By adding a thick white border, a thin red border and placing some Chinese calligraphy I now have a piece that I am happy with.  I’ll print his on a parchment style paper and I think it will look pretty good.

If you scroll back to the top and remind yourself of what we started with, you can see that we’ve come a long way, but we have maintained the integrity of the subject, which is very important.  I’d love to hear what you think of this and what images you may have overlook that you might go back to.  Thanks for reading and your comments are welcome and appreciated!

Reclaiming the Night Participant Profile – Travis Longcore

Heading to California while filming interviews about light pollution was never on the agenda. More than once though, Travis Longcore, based in USC, came up in conversation with other people I was interviewing. Plus, my girlfriend’s excitement at the prospect of catching up with old friends put Los Angeles on the itinerary with the main goal being to interview Travis since he’s considered the go-to person for ecological consequences of artificial night lighting. In fact, that’s the name of his book.

He and his wife, Catherine Rich, founded the Urban Wildlands Group to speak out against the often alarming effects light pollution has on the animal kingdom, from the smallest phytoplankton all the way up the food chain to apex predators, such as cougars and humans. – Read more

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