by Michael Frye | Apr 30, 2021 | Light and Weather
Poppies and foothill pines, Sierra Nevada, California. 91mm, 1/60 sec. at f/11, ISO 100.
We didn’t get any storms here in the Sierra between mid March and late April, and therefore no chance to photograph interesting weather. So what else could I photograph? What was happening that might provide opportunities to make a compelling photograph? Well it’s spring, so… flowers? That would seem logical.
But by California standards, it hasn’t been the greatest year for wildflowers. We had a dry winter, so the desert and semi-desert areas that sometimes display vast carpets of flowers have stayed brown. No “superbloom” (a word that seems to get applied to any above-average wildflower season these days).
Yet Claudia and I managed to find some beautiful patches flowers in the Sierra foothills. Around here, sometimes drier years produce good blooms, while in wet years the grasses can quickly grow tall enough to crowd out the flowers.
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by Michael Frye | Apr 20, 2021 | Digital Darkroom, Vision and Creativity
Aspens in fog, White River NF, Colorado. I used a bit of negative Dehaze to slightly soften this image.
In preparing my recent presentation for the Out of Chicago Live conference, I was digging through my archives for examples to use, and found some interesting images I had overlooked. In some cases I had put them aside, too busy to process them at the time, and then just forgot about them. In other cases I think my perceptions had changed. And sometimes I could see the potential to process an image differently, using new tools and new skills.
One of those tools is the Dehaze slider in Lightroom. It’s not that new (2015), but didn’t exist when I initially processed some images, and can sometimes make a big difference – especially with fog. I’m a big fan of fog for forest scenes, and these days I’m often using Dehaze selectively with the Adjustment Brush to cut through fog in one part of an image, or thicken fog in another area to hide or deemphasize something. (Just to be clear, you can’t create fog where none existed; there has to be some fog to begin with. But you can make some tenuous fog look a little more substantial. I show how to do all this in my latest Lightroom course, Landscapes in Lightroom: Advanced Techniques.)
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by Michael Frye | Apr 1, 2021 | Announcements
I hope you can join me at the upcoming Out of Chicago Live online photo conference!
I really enjoyed both of the Out of Chicago online conferences last year. It was a lot of fun interacting with everyone, and I loved watching all the presentations from the other instructors.
The next edition of Out of Chicago Live is coming up soon: April 9-11. They’ve gathered an amazing lineup of instructors in all genres of photography. In the landscape-photography world that includes Alister Benn, Brooks Jensen, Charlotte Gibb, Chuck Kimmerle, Cole Thompson, Colleen Miniuk, Daniel Kordan, Francesco Gola, David Cobb, David Johnston, David Kingham, Eric Bennett, Erin Babnik, Franka Gabler, Ian Plant, Jennifer Renwick, John Barclay, Joshua Cripps, Mark Denney, Martin Bailey, TJ Thorne, Nick Page, Sarah Marino, Sean Bagshaw, and William Neill. It’s a quite a lineup, and it’s an honor to be part of this group.
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by Michael Frye | Mar 28, 2021 | Light and Weather
Oak in a snowstorm, Yosemite. 253mm, 1/15 sec. at f/11, ISO 400.
In my last post I described how the most recent snowstorm led to some beautiful light and clouds – especially late in the day.
But when I arrived in the valley that morning it was still snowing. So I did what I always do: I asked myself, “What’s happening now?” In other words, what was interesting or unusual about that moment? What was unique and special in this place I’ve photographed so many times before?
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by Michael Frye | Mar 21, 2021 | Light and Weather
El Capitan emerging from clouds, Yosemite. 78mm, three bracketed frames, each at f/11, ISO 100, blended with Lightroom’s HDR Merge.
You can make a photograph without a camera, or lens, but you can’t make a photograph without light. The word “photograph” literally means “drawing with light.” Light is the essence of photography.
If light is our medium, it stands to reason that exceptional light has the potential to lead to exceptional photographs. It’s not a guarantee, of course; you still need to find a composition that works with that light, and execute the photograph technically. But the potential is there.
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