In the Moment:
Michael Frye's Landscape Photography Blog
by Michael Frye | Sep 22, 2016 | Composition
Rocks and reflections along the shore of Tenaya Lake, Yosemite. This image features both curves and circles.
I really like curved lines. I was reminded of this last weekend when my friend Mike Osborne showed me some of his junkyard abstracts on his iPad. All the photographs were wonderful and imaginative, but the ones I liked best often had curves. And many of my own favorite photographs have curves too. Curves look organic, and sensuous, and add a certain visual flow to a photograph that’s hard to generate without them.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 11, 2016 | Night Photography
DeChambeau Hotel and I.O.O.F. Hall at night, Bodie State Historic Park, CA, USA
On the last night of our recent Starry Skies Adventure workshop we went to Bodie, which is always a great place for night photography. As the Milky Way moved into the southwest that evening it lined up well with these two buildings along Main Street, the DeChambeau Hotel and I.O.O.F. (Independent Order of Odd Fellows) Hall. I had never photographed this view of Bodie before so decided to try it, and was joined by several other people in the workshop.
I knew the lighting would be complicated, but that’s part of the fun of photographing Bodie at night. You can do relatively simple light-painting there, or, if you’re up for a challenge, try something complex. Here we wanted make it look as if the buildings were lit from the inside (even though the interiors were locked and inaccessible to us). That’s not really hard to do – just shine flashlights through the windows. The hard part was figuring out how to keep yourself out of the frame while doing so. The solution was to do each part of the lighting in a separate frame, and then mask off the unwanted areas of that frame (like a person holding a flashlight) in Photoshop.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 8, 2016 | Critiques
Yosemite Valley View by Srinivasa Punnamraju
The Photo Critique Series is not dead! It just took a long vacation. 🙂 This time we’ll look at a photograph by Srinivasa Punnamraju from Tunnel View in Yosemite.
Light and Weather
Srinivasa was lucky to catch some dramatic weather at Yosemite’s most iconic location, Tunnel View. There were plenty of interesting clouds overhead, and some nice mottled patterns of light and dark on the cliffs – especially the striped bands on El Capitan to the left.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 7, 2016 | Night Photography
Jeffrey pine and the Milky Way, Yosemite NP, CA
We conducted two more workshops last week, our second editions this summer of the Inside Bodie and Starry Skies Adventure workshops. We had a lot of fun once again, with great conditions and really nice people.
I made this photo on the first night of our Starry Skies workshop near Olmsted Point in Yosemite. Several members of our group and I framed views of this photogenic Jeffrey pine with the Milky Way and Half Dome in the distance. We made some exposures with just starlight, then tried to light the tree with a flashlight. Later we did some more complex lighting, but I ended up liking this simple version with just one flashlight aimed at the tree. We used a homemade snoot on the flashlight to narrow the beam and prevent too much light from spilling onto the rocks below the tree.
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by Michael Frye | Aug 28, 2016 | Night Photography
Star trails over the Methodist Church, Bodie State Historic Park, CA, USA
We’ve been able to take workshop groups into Bodie at night several times in recent years, which is always a lot of fun. But I’d never captured star trails there, mainly because star trails take a long time, and I’d wanted to spend my limited time there doing other things with the class. But during our last night session there a couple of the participants and I decided to try photographing what’s become a Bodie classic – star trails over the Methodist Church. The church works perfectly for this because you can line up the steeple with the North Star and create concentric circles overhead.
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by Michael Frye | Aug 25, 2016 | Announcements
Autumn Sunrise, Half Dome and the Merced River, Yosemite National Park, California
“Within National Parks is room – glorious room – room in which to find ourselves, in which to think and hope, to dream and plan, to rest and resolve.”
— Enos A. Mills
Happy 100th Anniversary to the National Park Service!
— Michael Frye
by Michael Frye | Aug 21, 2016 | Composition, Vision and Creativity
McMillan House interior, Bodie State Historic Park, California. The high contrast of this scene required using Lightroom’s HDR Merge. Also, I deliberately avoided having sunlit areas touch the borders of the image. A bright spot along the edge would pull the viewer’s eye out of the photograph.
As I’ve explored this place, I’ve realized that I’m not as interested in the abandoned mining equipment and machinery, as fascinating as some of those things are. I’m drawn more to the places where people once ate and slept and drank and socialized, and left behind the artifacts of their lives – furniture, cooking utensils, books, magazines, pictures, cans, bottles, a baby carriage, a bird cage, sewing machines, coats, pants, hats, shoes…
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by Michael Frye | Aug 16, 2016 | Night Photography
Moon setting over an alpine lake, Yosemite, 1:00 a.m. Friday morning
After our trip to the Alabama Hills Claudia and I drove back up to Yosemite, and on Thursday night we hiked up to an alpine lake to view the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. Knowing that the moon wouldn’t set until nearly 1:00 a.m., we didn’t start hiking until well after dark, and arrived at the lake around 12:30 a.m.
The moon setting over the lake was a beautiful sight. As the moon sank lower it turned orange, just like the setting sun. It also became dimmer, so the stars came out. The extreme contrast made photographing this scene difficult, but when the moon reached a point right above the horizon the contrast dropped just enough, and I was able to capture the image above. In many ways this looks just like a sunset photograph – except for the sky full of stars.
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by Michael Frye | Aug 14, 2016 | Night Photography
Arch, meteor, and the Milky Way, Alabama Hills near Lone Pine, California. 2:13 a.m. Thursday, August 11th.
After the workshops Claudia and I decided to head down to the Alabama Hills. I’ve been wanting to do some night photography there, and the Perseid meteor shower was nearing its peak. This is typically one of the best meteor showers of the year, but this year was supposed to be exceptionally good, with up to 200 meteors per hour during the peak time early Friday morning.
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by Michael Frye | Jul 31, 2016 | Composition
Fiery sunset over Mono Lake, CA, USA
Many books and articles about landscape photography advocate using a wide-angle lens and a low camera position. Certainly wide-angle lenses have their place in landscape photography (though they are not, by any means, the only choice). And getting a wide-angle lens low to the ground and close to some foreground objects can create an exaggerated near-far perspective that gives the photograph a sense of depth.
But a low camera position can also foreshorten the foreground and middle-ground, scrunching them together and merging objects that could and should be separated visually. A higher camera position can often create better separation and spacing between foreground and middle-ground objects, and a better flow to the composition.
Two photographs from Mono Lake might help show what I’m talking about. I made these earlier this summer when some clouds appeared out of nowhere in the middle of a stretch of clear, dry, cloudless weather. In the first of these images (above) there was a spectacular sunset going on above the lake. I might have preferred to have just water and reflections in the foreground, with no rocks, but that wasn’t an option: there were too many rocks, and no way to keep all of them out of the frame if I wanted any water at all in the picture. So I had to work with the rocks, and find a way to incorporate them into the composition.
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