Making great fall foliage images: surprising tips for success

Too often when photographers think about fall foliage photographs, they're guilty of target fixation.

They're only thinking of photographing fall foliage colors in rolling hills, vast fields and grasslands, solely in rural areas or parks, in bright sunlight and blue skies. While no one can deny that fall foliage images in those areas and conditions can be magnificent, there are many other locations and conditions than can produce equally or even richer photographs of fall foliage.

As autumn leaves change color and slowly fall, photographers need to expand their vision to the wide variety of photographic opportunities that are available to them. Scenes that include ponds or lakes like my image above, that include reflections of the green red, yellow and orange colors in the water can greatly enhance the fall seasonal feeling we look to obtain in fall foliage photographs.

Other opportunities to create these images with their intense colors can be found in rain and morning mists and fog, in urban areas, town centers, small villages, farms and in both landscapes and close-ups. Fall foliage photographic opportunities are virtually everywhere we find deciduous trees, trees that shed their leaves annually.

Avoiding Beginner Photography Issues and Mistakes Revisited

Travel photography requires versatility and knowledge of a variety of photographic genres. Beginners must be serious about learning the craft if they want to produce solid travel images. When engaged in travel photography, beginners have two major issues to overcome; a lack of confidence and a lack of basic photo knowledge.

It's hard to study and learn from practical experience when you have little confidence in your equipment. Often, when I'm leading photowalks or workshops I hear, “If only I had your gear.”

Avoiding Beginner Photography Issues and Mistakes

Travel photography requires versatility and knowledge of a variety of photography genres. Beginner travel photographers must be serious about learning the craft if they want to produce solid travel images. Beginner photographers, especially when engaged in travel photography, have two major issues to overcome; a lack of confidence and basic photo knowledge.

It's hard to gain essential knowledge and experience when you have little confidence, which often shows up in beginners thinking their equipment is letting them down.

Often, when I'm leading photowalks or workshops I hear, “If only I had your gear.” Just about every beginner I've worked with has gear capable of capturing magnificent images. Today's consumer Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) and Digital Mirrorless Interchangeable Lens (DMIL) cameras are excellent. I've proved this to more than a few beginners by swapping cameras with them, then making some great shots with their gear, better than they've produced with mine.

It's July 4th, and that means photographing fireworks

Wednesday, we in the United States celebrate our nation's birth. In Philadelphia, America’s birthplace and the nation's first capital, that means after a concert at the foot of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, more than 500,000 people will enjoy one of the largest and most spectacular fireworks displays in the nation.

I'll be there. If you're there too, look for me south of the Art Museum.

Here are my updated tips for photographing fireworks using your digital camera:

Tips to capturing aquarium images while traveling

There are amazing public aquariums for travelers to visit for hours of great enjoyment and learning. Some house more than 10,000 colorful and interesting wildlife species.

Photographers in public aquariums encounter a myriad of challenges; fish in constant motion, darkness, dirty glass walls, water which washes out even the brightest colors, and general bans on tripods, monopods and flash use.

Here's my public aquarium photography tips to assist in capturing great images from your visit:

Travel portraits: family, friends, and interesting subjects

When traveling with friends and family, most travelers eventually want to get a nice travel portrait or two. Travelers often try to capture interesting portraits of a local inhabitants.

Sometimes the friend/family exposure is dictated by where and when you're there. Sometimes the “choice” of background and light is made, in part, to keep a famous background in the photo, to say, “We were there.”

Sometimes you can choose the time of day your photographing, the background, and the way your traveling companions are facing, thereby control how light illuminates your subjects but more often, locations and schedules dictate exposure details.

The place and time for portraits of local inhabitants is rarely in the traveler's control, but the photographer can often control their position to help set up the portrait.

Introduction to White Balance for Digital Camera Users (Part III): Gray Card or White Card?

In the last week I received many emails asking which is better for measuring white balance accurately via a digital camera, a white card or a gray card, so I'm adding an unexpected Part III to my series on White Balance. (Part I, Part II)

Without knowing it, they've asked a question which has an technical answer, though not one they're expecting, and an unexpected practical answer too.

Let's go back to Part I of the series and review what white balance is:

"White balance is the process of adjusting color casts, so that objects which appear white to human eyes/brains are rendered white in the photograph by the camera."

To put it more simply, photographers set a digital camera's white balance to get the colors in images “right,” where the images' colors are what photographers' brains tell them their eyes are seeing.

Introduction to White Balance for Digital Camera Users (Part II)

Last week, in Part I, I discussed the concept of white balance and defined it. The general idea of white balance is to get objects which appear white to human eyes/brains to be rendered white in your images, so the rest of the colors will render properly as well.

I also discussed the important concept that sometimes, things we consider to be “white” aren't always white when we look at them, and that it's not wrong to ensure they don't look white in our images. During the “golden hours,” for example, white can appear “golden.” At sunset white buildings can take on red and golden hues.

This week I'm going to discuss the practical side of getting your white balance “right,” or at least as “right” as you can get it, so the colors in your saved image are rendered as you saw them.

Introduction to White Balance for Digital Camera Users (Part I)

I'm often asked about white balance by travelers using digital cameras who periodically have a noticeable and sometimes severe color cast on their travel photos. More often than not I'm queried about what white balance actually is, why “auto white balance” doesn't work, and how to get the color rendition of a scene “right.”

It turns out that white balance is a difficult term to define for most people. Here's my try.

White balance is the process of adjusting color casts, so that objects which appear white to human eyes/brains are rendered white in the photograph by the camera.

I'm sure you're asking what the heck that means.

Photography is all about light. If we examine light, which from the sun appears white to our eyes, we find it's made up of a whole spectrum of colors, each with its own color temperature which describes its individual color. Cameras need the ability to render the colors of scenes as the human eye sees them, and that isn't necessarily easy.

It's winter. It's snowing . . . blue?

If you live in the northeastern US, the weather this past weekend ensured you knew it was winter. The snow came down, and some areas got as much as a couple of feet.

Many went out in the last few days to make photographs of snow scenes, only to review the photos and see blue or gray snow.

Unfortunately, digital cameras aren't as good as the combination of our eyes and brains, which are fantastic at color and contrast correction and have a large dynamic range. Whether we see snow in the sun, or shade, or even at night, unless the light illuminating the snow is colored, we see the snow as white.

Cameras don't see the same way we do. They can be fooled by blue skies or shady conditions for snow scenes. The problem is, in snow conditions, the camera often can't set the image's white balance correctly. This is even true with expensive DSLR cameras.

Basic Composition 001

The best photos taken are the photos which are carefully planned.

Even while traveling, when we’re often rushed, when we’re preparing to go to the next site, or the next destination, taking the time to plan the current photo will produce the best photo of the current scene.

Sure, planning each photograph means setting the proper exposure, getting the focus right, and ensuring other technical aspects of the photograph, such as white balance, are as desired, but making a great photograph goes well beyond that.

Making terrific travel photographs, or any photographs, requires a well thought out composition. Carefully select your precise image and its design, order and presentation of the image’s subject matter to grab the viewer’s attention, and help them understand the photograph’s story.

Getting my camera ready for the day's travel photography

While traveling, or for that matter, during any photo shoot, for a variety of reasons, photographers may vary any number of major camera settings which control exposure metering, focus, shutter mode, etc. By the end of the day, one’s camera’s settings may be significantly different than when the day began.

The next morning, it’s likely we won’t remember how the camera’s settings were left at the end of the prior day. That can result in  photographs which need extensive retouching and repair, totally blown shots which can only be discarded and missing great shots all together.

At some point this happens to everyone, but it is avoidable.

Photographing Sacred Spaces

When we travel we certainly see and often visit churches, temples, mosques, synagogues, and other religious shrines. Many contain some of the world’s great artwork. Many are architectural gems unto themselves. Many have extensive grounds. Many are important for their history, or their part in historic events.

Some are the center of their town’s or city’s culture, and attract visitors from across their region, country, and some attract visitors from across the world.

Often we find shops, vendors, and other places supporting the sacred space. That means many photo opportunities besides the place of worship itself, and those of its grounds and interior.

Gaining access to a place considered sacred by those who maintain and belong to it, brings responsibility to behave with sensitivity to the place of worship itself, those who worship in it, and those responsible for running it. The building, grounds, and the people must be respected.

Panorama Photography Part II

In Panorama Photography Part I, I discussed what panorama photographs are, and why they’re so appealing.

Now in Part II, I discuss techniques for taking photographs for panoramas created from multiple photographs, and stitched together into a single spectacular image.

There are three major rules of thumb to ensure your images can be successfully mated to make a panorama.

1. You need exposure consistency in your photographs to ensure colors match from photo to photo which make up your image. One of the most common problems in stitching photographs together is differences in the color of the sky, due to inconsistent exposures photo to photo.
2. You need to ensure there is enough information in adjacent photographs that they can be successfully “glued” together. This accomplished by photo overlap.
3. You need to eliminate image parallax so that there are no ghosts in your final image and that lines in the panorama are aligned and look normal.

Here are my major guidelines for taking photographs to use in creating multiple photo panoramas:

• Use a tripod to keep all your photos in the same horizontal plane.
• If your panorama contains parallel vertical or horizontal lines, such as when the panorama includes a fence or building facade it’s important that your lens’ pivot point, or entrance pupil (the optical center of the lens), not the camera, be located directly over the central axis of rotation of the panorama. It’s relatively easy to locate the entrance pupil of a prime, or zoom lens (each focal point). By rotating your camera/lens over the pivot point, the problem of parallax, where the photographer can’t align vertical and/or horizontal lines in pairs of photographs when stitched together disappears. Really Right Stuff, the manufacturer of my panorama head has an excellent tutorial about locating a lens’ pivot point to eliminate parallax. (Please note, that while Really Right Stuff continues to call the pivot point the “nodal point,” which is an incorrect use of terminology, their method of locating the pivot point is the best way I know of to quickly locate and set the pivot point.)
• You need to keep your exposure settings uniform throughout your images, so their brightness and color will mesh, photo to photo. You should scan the entire scene making note of the aperture and shutter speeds your camera is suggesting, then pick one pair of settings in the middle, or slightly darker to make sure any sky details are preserved and manually set it, so that the settings will remain the same for each photographic image used in the panorama.
• Amply overlap each of the images in your panorama. You wouldn’t have liked my photo of Monument Valley with a white bar in it because I failed to overlap each photo enough. I overlap by 30% each time. Some say 15% works just fine, but I prefer more. Increasing the amount of overlap helps reduce “flaring” that happens when the software is forced to use all of the image frame, including the corners which may show distortion depending on your lens choice.
• Look for movement in your overall scene. While movement in a scene can make it more interesting at times, too many or large blurry areas in your photos can ruin your final panorama. When overlapping images have items which don’t precisely match, you get a blur, which can ruin the shot. I try to take each of my multiple images quickly to avoid the problem of movement. By the way, I do realize that some movement is unavoidable. You just need to minimize it.
• Shooting with shorter focal length lenses more often than not introduces problems of lens distortion. When there is lens distortion the stitching between side by side images can be unnatural looking. Many wide angle lenses suffer from barrel distortion to varying degrees. You can avoid this problem merely by shooting with longer focal length lenses.
• You should also minimize the use of filters, to obtain exposure and white balance consistency between the photos which will make up the complete panorama. Polarizing filters, in particular, often darken the corners of your photographs. Depending on the angle of light to the filter they can create a significant variation in sky color from photo to photo in the panorama, preventing you from creating a combined image which looks as one. I never use polarizing filters when shooting panoramas. For that matter almost any filter can add some vignetting to your images, which interferes with good stitching and the final image, so I normally never use a filter on my lens other than the UV filter which I keep on all lenses to protect them.
• I normally turn off auto focus and preset my focus manually for the entire group of images which will comprise my final panorama photograph. Image size can change with focus shift. If that happens, it’s likely you’ll never be able to achieve a high quality alignment of your stitched photos which make up the overall panorama image.
• I manually set my white balance of my DSLR to eliminate color shift from photo to photo so they will seamlessly stitch together. This is especially important for landscapes showing substantial sky.

Good luck. Let me know if these guidelines help you put together your next panorama.

HDR (High Dynamic Range Imaging): An Introduction

High dynamic range imaging (HDR) is a set of techniques which allows a photographer to produce a photograph displaying a greater dynamic range of luminances between light and dark areas, of  the scene to be photographed, than normal digital imaging. The idea behind HDR is to be able to accurately represent the wide range of light intensity levels found in the real world ranging from direct sunlight to shadows.

OK, so that’s what HDR is, but what we’re really seeing when we see an HDR image on a monitor, or in an HDR print, is a tone-mapped image of an HDR composite image.

Tone mapping is a technique used to process an image where we map a set of colors to an alternate set, to approximate the appearance of HDR images in media with a limited dynamic range, such as computer monitors, projectors, and printers. Each of these devices, and our digital cameras have a limited dynamic range which is inadequate to reproduce the entire range of light intensities present in many natural scenes which the human eye can discern.

In HDR/Tone Mapping the problem of contrast reduction from the scene to what can actually be displayed is handled, while preserving the image’s details and general color appearance.

So that’s the technical definition, but if you’re not familiar with HDR, I know you’re asking what the heck does that mean.

We often, as photographers, especially on bright days, come across a scene we’d like to photograph which has light intensities ranging from dark shadow to very bright whites. The photograph above is an HDR rendering of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, PA. Please note in the photo, that throughout the range of luminances (light intensities) the scene’s detail is preserved, from dark through light.

Take a look on the right. The three photos you see show the range of luminances which make up the HDR composite photo at the top of this article. In each photo, some detail has been lost.

When creating the final photo, I used the three photos on the right, plus two more, one exposed between the dark and center exposures, and one between the center and light exposures.

In order to create the five exposures I put my DSLR on a tripod and bracketed the exposure. I started with an exposure for the brightest light in the scene and kept increasing the exposure by decreasing shutter speed, until I had the right exposure for the darkest part of the scene.

The f/stop and iso remained constant for the photos which were taken within the span of just a few seconds. I set my white balance manually to the correct color temperature of the scene using an ExpoDisc.

By making these exposures, each one keeps the scene's detail for which the exposure was made, from dark to light.

To get the best results from your HDR processing, your exposure sequence must include photos which correctly expose highlights, and photos which correctly expose shadows. Exposing the shadows properly is especially important to avoid noise showing in the processed HDR image.

Then it’s off to the digital darkroom. I’m currently using Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended for my general photograph editing and retouching. For HDR work, I use Photomatix Pro from HDRsoft, which integrates with Photoshop. I use the stand alone version of Photomatix, not the Photoshop plug-in, as it’s more powerful.

There are two steps involved in creating and processing HDR images:

In step 1 the software merges your photos taken under different exposure settings into a single 32-bit HDR image. Because of its high dynamic range, the 32-bit HDR image will not display properly on conventional monitors.

In step 2 the software processes the 32-bit HDR image via its Tone Mapping tool. Tone Mapping will reveal the dynamic range captured in the HDR image and produce an image that can be properly displayed on conventional monitors and can be properly printed.

Once the HDR/Tone Mapping processing is complete, the composite photo is ready for final editing in Photoshop.

You can surmise from the 3 photos on the right, the luminosity range limit of the DSLR’s sensor. Clearly the range of luminosity in the scene is well beyond the capability of the camera’s sensor. It’s clear that without using HDR to create the photograph of Independence Hall with such a large range from dark shadow to bright white in bright sunlight, the photo could not include all the detail of each tonal area of the scene which our eyes see.

Without the use of HDR, I would have had to use the middle exposure, which isn’t a bad snapshot, but doesn’t include the richness of the final composite photograph.