by Michael Frye | Sep 15, 2019 | Smartphone Photography
I.O.O.F. Hall, Bodie SHP, California. I love to photograph the light streaming through the windows of the curtain-less, abandoned interiors of Bodie.
Bodie is such a fun place to photograph. I had a chance to go back to Bodie at night in early August, and then at the end of August we were able to get inside some of the normally-inaccessible interiors during our good friend Robert Eckhardt’s iPhone-photography workshop.
Smartphone cameras keep getting better and better. This time I was using an iPhone XR, which performs much better in low light than my previous iPhone. And I mostly used raw mode to get the best image quality and the most flexibility in processing the images.
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by Michael Frye | Aug 18, 2019 | Light and Weather
Creek flowing into the Pacific Ocean, Oregon coast. 26mm, five bracketed exposures at f/16, ISO 100, blended with Lightroom’s HDR Merge, then blended back with one of the original images in Photoshop to eliminate ghosting.
Summer is fog season along the west coast. Currents and upwelling bring cool water to the surface near the shore, and when warm, moist air blowing off the Pacific encounters that cold water the air temperature near the surface drops to meet the dew point, creating the right conditions for fog formation.
Usually that fog layer lifts above sea level, so along the shore it looks like a low overcast. That stratus deck might break up late in the morning, but often starts to re-form toward sunset, building back into a solid overcast by morning.
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by Michael Frye | Aug 14, 2019 | Announcements
Sunset over Yosemite Valley with Cathedral Rocks, El Capitan, and Horsetail Fall, Yosemite
This is a friendly reminder that my print prices will be increasing on August 18th – just four days from now!
My matted, signed, limited-edition 16×20 prints will increase from $325 to $450. 20x24s will go from $475 up to $650, 24x30s from $750 to $975, and 30x40s from $1100 to $1350.
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by Michael Frye | Aug 13, 2019 | Travels and Stories
Sunset and sandstone formations, Oregon coast. 16mm, five bracketed exposures at f/16, ISO 100, blended with Lightroom’s HDR Merge, then blended back with one of the original images in Photoshop to eliminate ghosting.
Recently Claudia and I visited our friends Gary and Charlotte Gibb up near Mt. Shasta, where they were renting a house for the week. We had a great time hanging out with them for a couple of days. And then we thought, we’re so close, maybe we should visit the Oregon coast. So we did.
I’ve never spent much time along the Oregon coast, but it’s a beautiful area, and a popular photography destination for a reason, so it’s one of those places that I’ve wanted to explore more thoroughly.
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by Michael Frye | Aug 4, 2019 | Night Photography
Old truck and shed underneath the Milky Way, Bodie. Nighttime photography can get pretty complex, often requiring multiple frames to reduce noise, or create intricate lighting. Here I captured twelve frames of the Milky Way, and blended them together with Starry Landscape Stacker to reduce noise. Then I took that image into Photoshop, where I blended it with seven light-painting frames – the truck from two sides, the shed from two sides, a frame for the interior lights (small lights placed inside the shed and against the truck windows), and two frames for lighting the headlights.
On Thursday I had an opportunity to photograph Bodie at night. I’ve done that many times before, but always while leading a workshop group. This time I joined a small group of photographers on my friend Rick Whitacre‘s permit, and the five of us had this amazing ghost town to ourselves for an evening.
It’s always fun leading a group in Bodie, but it was nice, for a change, to just concentrate on my own photography. I had a mental checklist of images I hadn’t been able to try yet, and this was the perfect chance to do that. We also had a couple hours of daylight to scout, and I found several new possibilities. The most intriguing of these, to me, was a star-trail image of wagons in an old barn, which I ended up trying – it’s the first image below.
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