BetterPhoto Instructor Insights

Photographing Northeastern Ohio

© Brenda Tharp All rights reserved.

I was just in northeastern Ohio to give a one-day seminar, and flew in a few days early to explore and photograph the area. What a beautiful place! Rolling hills, farmlands, great parks with streams and slate ledges that the water normally trickles over - it was terrific. Unfortunately, we had gray, drizzly days and pouring rains, too, but we persevered and managed to make a few good pictures from it all. I had wanted to see the Amish countryside, a place with bucolic farm scenes and rolling hills of corn and oats. I had also always wanted to capture one of those scenes with a horse and buggy going through it. But it was not to be this trip - the weather made the skies too bright and lacking in detail, and the mist created a too-soft situation for distant shots. We wandered about nonetheless, looking at all the options "if only" the weather was different. I do this alot - scouting, "sketching" sometimes with a snapshot or to, to plan ahead. While doing that at one stop, I liked how the trees curved over a dirt road and said to my colleagues "wouldn't it be nice if a horse and buggy came over the hill through those trees?" They agreed, and to our amazement, about 5 minutes later, one did! I liked how it was silhouetted against the space behind, which was open fields grayed out by the mist. But as it dropped below the crest, the buggy disappeared in the dirt of the lane and the picture was not as strong. Still pondering the change, I was about to miss a good photo-op when my brain suddenly kicked in and yelled "they're coming straight towards you - get ready for a closer image!" I quickly moved to the right of the road and pulled back on the zoom lens to capture a moment when they went by - and had only one chance as they were now hurrying along. But that one chance worked out, because I had it on continuous frame shooting mode, to get several frames as they went past me. Only one worked - with the little boy looking straight at me in all his sweetness and the father looking off to see the intersection with another road.

© Brenda Tharp All Rights Reserved

Sometimes you get lucky - but our "luck" was because we had not given up the search for good photos, knowing they were out there in spite of the weather. And sometimes, "bad" weather creates good photo ops - as in the creek with falls and leaves. So all in all it was worth the daily tumble out of bed for exploring in the wet grayness, and thanks to my new friends in northeastern Ohio, I have seen an area of the country I never explored before.

© Brenda Tharp All Rights Reserved

Have a great week of photography, everyone!

Brenda

Autumn dream

by Jim Zuckerman

The blog I posted last week showed some fall color images I did while stuck in traffic on an Interstate. This time, I had given a seminar in Pittsburgh and was about a half mile from the airport to catch my plane home when I spotted this beautiful composition. I stopped on the highway to photograph it, and then when I got home I used some of the enhancement capabilities in Photoshop to make it more of a fine art fantasy.

First, I softened the image by using Filter > blur > Gaussian blur, and then I pasted the blurred image over the original and lowered the opacity of the floating layer in the layers palette. What you see is a combination of the sharply defined original plus the blurred copy. Next, I used Image > adjustments > hue/saturation to boost the color and finally, in Image > adjustments > color balance I shifted the color bias toward blue. I thought the combination of the reds and yellows with increased blue would be very unique.

Wildcat in the Sky

By Jim Zuckerman

I have been photographing clouds since I bought my first 35mm camera in 1968, but I’ve never seen such a unique cloud formation as this one. The profile of what would be a big cat is so clearly defined that it’s truly astonishing. The sunset afterglow enhanced the sky at the same time, making the shot even more remarkable. I’ve been to 66 countries, and yet this beautiful sight occurred right over my home.

I watched and photographed as the shape changed and then disappeared. The whole process took just a few minutes, but what a thrilling thing this was to witness. I shot wide open because depth of field was irrelevant when everything was at infinity (at least as the lens defines 'infinity'), and with the f/2.8 lens aperture on my image stabilized 70-200mm Canon telephoto I could use 1/125th of a second without the need of a tripod.

MS-8571 Cloud formation, Middle Tennessee © Jim Zuckerman All rights reserved

Compositional Possibilities

By Jim Zuckerman

A couple of days ago I was stuck on Interstate 40 near Knoxville,
Tennessee due to a truck accident. The freeway didn’t move for an
hour and a half, and after I got over my frustration, I started to
look around at the spectacular autumn foliage on my side of the
freeway. At seventy miles an hour, it’s impossible to photograph
anything, and there was no place to stop safely.. But, in a traffic
tie-up, I realized I had a lot of compositional possibilities. I
turned off the motor, got out of my car with my medium telephoto zoom
(70-200mm f/2.8 IS Canon) and started shooting. The weather was
foggy with a light drizzle, perfect for capturing the brilliant
autumn foliage colors. Suddenly my frustration was gone and I was
hoping traffic didn’t move for a while.

MS-8559 © Jim Zuckerman All rights reserved

MS-8558 © Jim Zuckerman All rights reserved

MS-8557 © Jim Zuckerman All rights reserved

Aerial vantage

by Jim Zuckerman

I’ve taken hundreds of thousands of pictures in my career, and every once in a while I forget about one of them. It doesn’t happen often because my visual memory is pretty acute. Just this morning, however, I ran across this picture I took from a cliff high above the Southern California coast on the peninsula of Palos Verdes. I had forgotten all about it – it turned up at the bottom of a cabinet drawer. I remember hearing on the news that there was going to be a gathering of tall ships in Los Angeles, so on that Sunday I drove to the point where viewing was supposed to be very good. Every time one of the spectacular tall ships came into the harbor, an armada of pleasure boats accompanied it. It was a dazzling sight, especially from an elevated point of view. There is nothing like aerial photography – or at least photography from an elevated vantage – to add drama to an already dramatic situation.

WILDLIFE ENCOUNTERS AND MORE IN ITALY

I've just returned from Italy, Tuscany and Umbria, from yet another wonderful adventure. As many times as I've been there, I keep finding new and interesting things to photograph, and meeting more and more friendly people. But there are dangers to consider in Italy: the cats and dogs in the street - they are vicious, unpredictable animals!!! This picture proves that point. OK, so many I provoked the little kitty by playing around with it atop the car - but I certainly wasn't expecting it to jump on my shoulder and head! Needless to say my partner was quick with his camera and we got a funny picture from the experience.

Cat Attack, Italy.

On a more serious note, there is such value in returning to the same places, time and again, during different light, different seasons. You see the same familiar doors and lanes, and fields, but the light is always different, and the colors change throughout the year on the landscape. You also encounter different events - such as the one in Lucignano celebrate Memories of the Past. This musician was great - and he had such a classic look and natural pose. I couldn't miss on getting a great picture of him while playing at the event.

We spent more time at twilight, too, looking at the villages after the tourist crowds has disbursed to their hotels and restaurants, and found many places very interesting by twilight and artificial lamplight. This square in Cortona is a great example of the value of working the edges of day and night. The pictures from before showing it in daylight pale compared to the rich colors of the twilight image. So it pays to go back to a location, if you can, - even the local park or town center where you live, and view it under different conditions of light, weather, and with a set of fresh eyes.

Cortona, Italy.

Enjoy your week,

Brenda

'Zero Generation' photography

by Jim Zuckerman

I was looking through some of my old black and white work from the darkroom (does anyone still remember what a darkroom is?) and I came across this print of a dragonfly wing. It’s what I call a ‘zero generation’ image, meaning I didn’t make this picture from a negative or slide. In fact, no camera was used at all. Instead, I printed the wing directly on the paper using an enlarger. I placed the wing itself in the negative carrier and made prints on high contrast paper. The reason the wing venation is white against a black background is because the wing was a positive, and the resulting image was a negative.

The print I made several years ago showed some of the specks of debris stuck to the original wing structure, but in Photoshop I used the paint brush tool and just eliminated all the white imperfections. That could have been done in the past by spotting the print, but now we can so effortlessly make it perfect with a few minutes at the computer.

I’ve always appreciated the beauty of dragonfly wings, and in this graphic shot the design is revealed in all its perfection.