In the Moment:
Michael Frye's Landscape Photography Blog
by Michael Frye | Aug 10, 2011 | Travels and Stories
Rising Moon, Gates of the Valley
Not every photo has an interesting story behind it, but the approaching full moon reminded me of the eventful day I had before making this image from Gates of the Valley in Yosemite.
I had been skiing at Badger Pass, and while gliding to the top of the Red Fox run I saw a snowboarder out of the corner of my eye. He was facing left, making a right turn into my path, and moving fast. He clearly didn’t see me and I didn’t have time to turn, so I yelled, “Look out!” and braced for impact.
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by Michael Frye | Aug 7, 2011 | Advanced Techniques, Night Photography
Juniper and star trails near Olmsted Point, Yosemite
Here’s a new image, made last Tuesday evening near Olmsted Point in Yosemite. My friend Mike Osborne calls this the “Bowsprit” tree. What? I didn’t get it either until he explained that a bowsprit is the bent figure with arms splayed back at the bow of old sailing ships. Okay, yeah, this does sort of resemble that.
Anyway, I “painted” this wonderful tree with a flashlight, and used the image-stacking technique to get noise-free star trails. With image stacking the idea is to take a series of short exposures and blend them together, rather than doing one long one. The total exposure time here is about 90 minutes, but one exposure that long would end up being quite noisy. Instead I took 24 four-minute exposures, with only a one-second interval between them. So each of those four-minute exposures has little noise.
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by Michael Frye | Aug 3, 2011 | Yosemite Photo Conditions
Corn lily circle
A heavy winter, wet spring, and late snowmelt have all conspired to delay the wildflower bloom in the Yosemite high country, but it’s now in full swing. It’s a fantastic year for corn lilies—those plants with the sculpted, photogenic leaves and tall stalks of white blossoms. The Crane Flat Meadows are full of them, more than I’ve ever seen before, but these flowers are abundant in all the meadows between 6000 and 8000 feet right now. I made the accompanying photos in McGurk Meadow, where I found a nice mix of corn lilies and paintbrush.
These displays just the beginning. With all the residual moisture from melting snow, it promises to be a good—though late—wildflower year. Some spots may not peak until the end of August or even the beginning of September.
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by Michael Frye | Jul 27, 2011 | Critiques
"Steptoe Beauty" by Greg Speasl
This week’s photograph, titled “Steptoe Beauty,” was made by Greg Speasl in the Palouse country of eastern Washington. The image is an interesting study of how a telephoto lens can compress space and create patterns.
Light
Sidelight is usually a great way to bring out textures, and here the low-angle, late-afternoon sun raking across the fields from right to left brings out the beautiful textures and forms of the landscape. The alternating patterns of green and amber also create a nice color contrast.
Composition
Recently I wrote about depth in photography, and how wide-angle lenses can help create an illusion of depth, while longer focal lengths can flatten the perspective and emphasize patterns. This is a great example of the latter—Greg used a telephoto lens (210mm on a full-frame sensor) to zoom in, compress the space, and pick out an intriguing pattern in the sculptured hills. In fact we see two overall patterns here, one formed by the interplay between light and dark, the other created by the color contrast between regions of green and amber.
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by Michael Frye | Jul 21, 2011 | Light and Weather, Yosemite Photo Conditions
Sun breaking through mist, Tuolumne Meadows, last Friday morning
Landscape photographers have to be flexible. You can try to plan—to be at a certain place at a certain time when you expect the light to be just right. But you can’t control the weather, and the best-laid plans of photographers often fizzle behind a bank of clouds.
So when things don’t pan out the way you’d hoped, you have to adapt. We did a lot of adapting last week during my Hidden Yosemite workshop. With our heavy winter and late spring, there was still a lot of snow at higher elevations. Certain areas were just inaccessible; the Saddlebag Lake road, for example, was closed, and I heard the lake was still mostly covered in ice.
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by Michael Frye | Jul 12, 2011 | Composition, Photography Tips, Vision and Creativity
Redwoods and rhododendrons—telephoto view
A Tale of Two Photographs
Reading David duChemin’s eBook A Deeper Frame got me thinking about how we perceive depth and space in photographs, and how lens choice affects that perception.
David says that because photography turns “a world of three dimensions into two,” that “if we aim to create photographs that create within the reader a deeper, fuller, longer experience, it falls to us to recreate that depth.”
There’s no question that wide-angle lenses are better tools for creating a sense of depth in a photograph than telephoto lenses. Telephotos make objects appear closer together than they really are, compressing space and flattening the perspective. Wide-angle lenses make objects appear farther apart than they really are, expanding the sense of space, and, if used correctly, creating an illusion of depth.
These two photographs from my recent trip to the redwoods illustrate the difference. Both images include the same rhododendrons and redwoods.
In the top image I stepped back with a telephoto lens (130mm) and isolated part of the bush against two redwood trunks. It looks like the rhododendrons are only a few feet in front of the trees, but they’re not. They’re at least 20 feet away—illustrating the compression effect of the telephoto lens. The sense of depth is minimal.
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by Michael Frye | Jul 8, 2011 | Photography Tips
Cascade Fall, Version 1
Living near Yosemite I often photograph moving water—big, thundering waterfalls, small cascades, and everything in between. If you watched me photographing some of these scenes, you’d see me pressing the shutter over and over again without moving the camera or changing any of the settings—just click, click, click, click, click…
Am I just wasting space on my Compact Flash card? No—there’s a method to this madness. Water moves. A waterfall or river changes from one second to the next. In fact it’s never exactly the same twice. So while my composition, shutter speed, and aperture may be the same, each photograph is different, and some are bound to be better than others.
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by Michael Frye | Jun 30, 2011 | Photography Tips, Vision and Creativity
Redwoods, ferns, and rhododendrons near the northern California coast
Last week my wife Claudia and I visited our son Kevin in Arcata, California (he goes to Humboldt State University there). Arcata is just north of Eureka, along the northern coast of California, in redwood country.
Eleven years ago we’d camped in this area, and hiked a beautiful trail through the redwoods (nine-year-old Kevin complaining the whole way, especially on the steep climb back). The next morning I returned alone with my camera, found the forest enveloped in dense fog, and made one of my favorite photos ever.
I’d never gone back to that spot, but forecasters predicted patchy fog for last Wednesday morning, and it seemed like a good time to go. So we rose early and drove through fog, then sun, and back into fog. As we neared the trailhead I caught a glimpse of a roadside redwood grove that took my breath away. In the fog it was just so beautiful, so… primeval. I felt I’d traveled back in time a million years.
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by Michael Frye | Jun 29, 2011 | Reviews
A Deeper Frame
I think David duChemin is one of the most refreshing voices in the world of photography today. While most of the photographic world seems to talk about equipment, or the latest way to make your photographs “pop” in Photoshop, David prefers to talk about vision, and emotion, and the art of photography. Radical stuff.
David, as some of you may know, is the founder of Craft & Vision, the publisher of my eBook Light & Land: Landscapes in the Digital Darkroom—as well as over twenty other eBooks. It’s been awhile since David wrote his own eBook, so I was excited to hear that he was working on a new one.
This book—A Deeper Frame—is now available, and it lives up to my high expectations for David’s writing. In this volume David examines an aspect of photography that most of us have probably thought about at one time or another: depth. But in typical fashion, David offers fresh perspectives, and (pardon the pun), a deeper look at this vital subject. He certainly got me thinking with passages like this:
The more a photograph recreates the illusion of reality as we experience it, the deeper the potential experience, the longer the memory of the image, the greater the possible impact on their hearts and minds. Deeper photographs give us a means to create more engaging one-frame visual stories.
Of course there’s also plenty of more practical advice about how to create depth in your photographs, including an interesting discussion of perspective, placement of elements within the frame, optics, and focus. Then he moves on to some less-obvious ways to create depth through color and light.
If there’s one thing missing from this volume, it’s how to flip this concept around: to deliberately flatten the perspective in a photograph—something I do frequently. Maybe I’ll post something about that here in the future. But in the meantime, I highly recommend you read this eBook. If nothing else it will get you thinking about the whole concept of depth in photographs, something that most of us—myself included—pay too little attention to.
As always, this Craft & Vision eBook is only five dollars. What’s more, until midnight, July 2nd, you can get A Deeper Frame for $4 (discount code DEEP4). Or you can buy 5 eBooks (including Light & Land, if you don’t already own a copy!) for the price of 4 (discount code DEEP20). And, for the first time, an even bigger volume discount: 12 eBooks for $40. Use discount code DEEPER12.
by Michael Frye | Jun 22, 2011 | Yosemite Photo Conditions
Half Dome and oaks in flooded Leidig Meadow, June 16th
Last Thursday Claudia and I rose early and drove up to Yosemite Valley to see the high water. When we arrived, we found Swinging Bridge almost completely submerged, and large portions of Leidig and Chapel meadows resembled lakes.
I wanted to make a photograph that “said” high water—that really showed the flood. But when the water is this high, many of the best viewpoints are under water! I found a spot in Leidig Meadow that looked great, with two of my favorite Yosemite Valley oaks rising out of the pond. But there was no way to photograph these trees from dry ground without contending with intervening branches and trunks. If I wanted this photograph, I’d have to wade in.
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