August 2008 The Great American West Photography Newsletter

August 2008 Newsletter Links

Upcoming: Photo Workshops and Photo Safaris
The Bottom Line: Finding your lenses "Sweet Spot"
Photoshop Tricks: Creating a Digital Split Neutral Density Filter
Image Gallery: A Little of Everything
Contact Information
Newsletter Archives

Welcome!

Thanks for being patient with me on the long delay since my last newsletter. Many exciting things have happened in my personal life that have distracted me from getting the newsletter out - though not from my photography. I was married on February 1st, 2008 to a beautiful lady named Jacqueline. With that dramatic personal change has come many others - the most exciting being the move I'm making with my business to California. I grew up in Gilroy, California but have lived in Utah since 1981 and, to be honest, have grown accustomed to its beautiful mountains and deserts, its close proximity to many national parks (especially Yellowstone) - and its slower, safer pace of life. But marriage means sacrifice - and sacrifice takes us to a higher plane of existence, an existence I don't feel we can achieve alone. So I'm returning to my home state of California - to Tulare - the lifelong home of my wife, about three hours southeast of Gilroy in the southern San Joaquin Valley between Fresno (north) and Bakersfield (south) on Highway 99 - just a couple of miles from Visalia. As a corporate VP and with her four adult children living closer to her than my four live to me (except my oldest son and his wife who live in Cache Valley), it made sense to go in that direction.

So I have swapped the Wasatch Front and Cache Valley for the Sierra-Nevada Mountains and the agriculturally rich San Joaquin Valley. I've exchanged the red rock towers of Zion for the granite monoliths of Yosemite - transitioned from the nearby Mojave desert to nearby California coast. I can see nothing but new opportunities - new country to discover for myself and new animals, birds, and scenic locations to photograph. Over the past year I've added many seal species, sea otters, shorebirds, and scenic locations to my stock library and website galleries - all because of my many trips farther west. The newsletter image gallery will have some of the best of these images and I look forward to continuing, and enlarging, the digital nature seminars and safaris that I do.

In the past eight months I've spent every opportunity shooting areas of Utah and nearby regions that I have wanted to photograph but haven't yet made trips. The one with the most impact on me was 9 Mile Canyon (Fremont Indian Petroglyphs, Pictographs, and ruins) northeast of Price, Utah. This amazing stretch of dirt road, more like 40 miles long, is a gallery for Fremont Indian rock art. Bill Singleton, Jim Halay, and I spent an entire day working the valley walls. There were granaries, watchtowers, pit house ruins, petroglyphs, pictographs, etc lining the hillside next to the road. Classic Fremont Indian "panels" were easy to find and photograph - though I imagine we missed as many as we saw.

In mid February Utah was under a deep freeze of arctic air. With night time temps even colder, normally nocturnal barn owls began to hunt during the day to survive. While shooting bald eagles at Farmington Bay Wildlife Refuge I was able to capture some of the most amazing images of these owls hunting on the wing. While the barn owls hunted alongside the short-eared owls in the marsh, a few hundred yards away on the frozen pond ice of Farmington Bay 175 bald eagles held court in a constant dance of fishing, fighting, and flying. Aerial acrobatics were common as they fought each other for fish and did close fly-bys of the few photographers present.

I spent a great deal of time crossing through southern Utah on my trips out to California. On many of those trips I spent time shooting the lush wildflowers and blooming cactus in the Beaver Dam Wilderness Area, Leeds Creek west of Silver Reef, and Snow Canyon State Park. I traveled out to Tuweep on the Arizona Strip to shoot the overlook to the Grand Canyon and the spring flowers and one Gopher Snake in particular. But what truly amazed me were the Claret Cup Cactus blooms on Gooseberry Mesa just south of Zion National Park. I've shot so many images in the first six months of 2008 that I've outstripped my ability to get them into my stock library quickly - and onto my website.

Jackie had never been to Yellowstone so I was excited to take her with me on a photo shoot. We saw 22 bears (8 grizzlies) in just less than two days working the northern park roads. But while the bears were putting on a great show at Dunraven Pass - it didn't compare to the wildflower extravaganza that was taking place throughout the park. In my 25 years of photographing Yellowstone I have never seen flowers in such dramatic numbers - lupines, balsamroot, columbine, fireweed, geraniums - the list could go on. We were in the park later than I normally go - mid July - but as following the pattern this year, the late snows had pushed everything back 2-3 weeks.

The 16th of August will mark my last scheduled portrait shoot in Utah. Fittingly, it will be a wedding, my 742nd wedding. While I've been spending considerable time in California already getting situated - the following Monday will be the office move - with all my camera equipment, computers, desks, etc making the final move with me. Thus will begin a new phase in my life with new opportunities and new adventures. There are always new places to see and new experiences to enjoy just around the corner or over the next hill. BRP

Upcoming: Photo Workshops and Photo Safaris

Scheduled Date

Cost

Details

Meet-At Location

Saturday,
September 13th, 2008

$60

Digital Photo Seminar

Click here for more information.

Pre-register by e-mailing me at brent@amwestphoto.com.

Hampton's Inn Conference Room, in Tulare, CA from 9am to 1pm.

Sunday and Monday
November 2nd and 3rd, 2008

$350

Nature Safari shoot to Southern Utah and the Zion National Park area.

Click here for more information.

Pre-register by e-mailing me at brent@amwestphoto.com.

Meet at the Zion Park Motel parking lot in Springdale, Ut a mile before you drive in the park - at 7am.

How to: Finding your lenses "sweet spot"

Lets dispel a few common rumors first. All lenses, modern or not, are not created equal, and stopping the lens down does not make your image subject sharper. There is a difference between subject sharpness and image depth-of-field (DOF) though I've seen them used as synonymous terms in many photography articles. The quality of the lens, prime lenses or zooms, can be a major issue in how sharp the lenses is when focused on a subject. In the past some photography magazines made a point of including the raw empirical data on lens sharpness when reviewing new lenses as they were being sold to the public - I don't think many people probably cared - lots of numbers and difficult to understand terminology. What are line pairs per millimeter (lp/mm) anyway? But that data made a point - some lenses are better than others. Here are some rules to finding the holy grail of image sharpness, and the proverbial, though little understood, lens "sweet spot".

One of the seminal sayings in modern photography vernacular is "... F8 and be there." This brief bit of photographic wisdom is literally the application of a lenses sweet spot and your ability to be in the right place at the right time - to get the sharpest images possible. Why F8? What that raw empirical test data showed was that all lenses have a particular f-stop that provides the greatest degree of image sharpness - as measured by line pairs per millimeter. Without getting too technical - lp/mm is the ability of the human eye to see line pairs in one millimeter of space. The highest quality lenses can produce high (over 100 lp/mm) quality results, while average lenses produce somewhat less. Human beings can generally see about 10 lp/mm - though at 48 years old I can't see any without glasses, or even a loupe. All lenses are different, but one thing is always true - one F-stop is sharper, producing more lp/mm than any other F-stop of that lens. That particular F-stop is the lenses "sweet spot". Here is a test example I was able to find on the internet:

It is not hard to see which F-stop is the sharpest. This test was done with a standard 50mm lens. The sweet spot, as a general rule, is 2-3 stops down from the lenses widest setting. Therefore, for this F1.8 50mm lens - its F5.6 - 3 stops down (F1.8 to 2.8 to 4 to 5.6). For my Nikon 500mm ED lens its F8, 2 stops down from its widest setting at F4. To find your specific lenses "sweet spot" go online and search for test results - sometimes the lens maker will supply them. Remember, the highest lp/mm rating at a specific F-stop is the "sweet spot".

Steps to Improving Subject Sharpness

     1. Higher quality lenses produce less distortion and aberration at different F-stops than do lower quality lenses. These lenses are usually more carefully engineered tolerances, built from better materials, and have multi-coated glass, such as Nikon's ED (Extra Low Dispersion) glass and Canon's "L" series lenses.
     2. Lenses that have image stabilization features will improve the sharpness of your images.
     3. Prime lenses produce sharper images than zoom lenses. Prime lenses (telephotos) have fewer moving parts and fewer glass elements and less opportunity to promote aberration and distortion. Prime lenses are also usually "faster" lenses than zooms and have bigger F-stops and produce fewer diffraction issues.
     4. Third party lens makers are after the amateur photography market and produce less expensive lenses that appeal to some amateurs decision to buy based on price, not quality. Canon and Nikon make better lenses than Tamron and Sigma. Canon and Nikon produce lenses meant for both the amateur and professional photography market.
     5. Images shot with a sturdy tripod will be sharper than images that are hand held. Both the use of cable or electronic releases and using the mirror lock-up feature will also reduce vibration even further in your quest for the holy grail of photography - improved subject sharpness.
     6. Shoot at the lowest ISO settings possible. High ISO settings have a direct impact on the quality of the digital image and its sharpness.
     7. Print on the finest grain papers possible - the grain of the paper has a direct effect on the apparent sharpness of the image. Also, remember that the greater you magnify that image to print the greater the loss of sharpness. Magnification increases with image cropping.
     8. And, last but not least, shoot at the lenses "sweet spot" when practical.

Don't be the weak link in subject sharpness - use all the tools at your disposal to shoot the sharpest images possible.

Photoshop Tricks: Creating a Split Neutral-Density Filter

This little photoshop trick has been around for awhile and I've seen a number of articles published detailing how to do it. My way is kind of a collage of those articles. Here is a step-by-step explanation on how to create this valuable digital tool. As always, I suggest creating an Action (shown in Red) for these steps to streamline the process. The commands are for a windows pc - for a mac substitute the Command key for the Ctrl key, and the Option key for the Alt key.

Begin Recording Your New Action here: (in the Actions Palette select Create New Action, give it a name, then click Record)

1. Set your foreground color to black by hitting the D key.

2. Select a new Gradient Layer by going to the Layer menu, clicking on the New Fill Layer, then selecting Gradient ....

3. Click OK, then when the Gradient Fill dialog box comes up, click on the down arrow next to the Gradient box and select the second gradient. It goes from solid gray to transparent. At the bottom of the Gradient Fill box click the empty box next to Reverse - so there is a checkmark there. Then click OK.

4. You now see a graduated dark gray gradient at the top of your image. In the Layers palette you now see a new fill layer above your background layer called Gradient Fill 1. Highlight this layer and in the Layer mode box change the setting from Normal to Overlay.

End Your Action Here by clicking the Stop Playing/Recording button in the Actions Palette. These following steps will be different for every image.

5. Now double-click on the Gradient Fill box next to the "eye" to open up the Gradient Fill dialog box again. With the Gradient Fill dialog box open, double-click on the Gradient box that shows the shaded gradient inside of it. The Gradient Editor dialog box will open up.

6. Now make sure this dialog box is not covering your image, move it farther to the side or down so you can view the top of your image. You see a large box showing the gradient - this box has four sliders on it at each corner. Click on the White, top-right slider, and drag it left. You will see the Gradient move up farther in the photograph. Adjust this slider until the Split ND Gradient is positioned as accurately as possible in your image. Click OK. Then click OK again to close both dialog boxes.

7. Using the Eye button for the Gradient Fill 1 layer, flash it on and off to make sure your location is optimum. Now comes some tweaking. If the Split ND Gradient is too strong, you can reduce how much of it appears by reducing the Opacity of the Gradient Fill 1 layer below 100%.

8. In the examples below, you see that in the processed image I have a hill of trees sticking up into the ocean. When I placed my Split ND Gradient to cover the ocean beyond the kelp beds, my hill of trees went too dark. My solution was to select the paintbrush tool, click on the white mask in the Gradient Fill 1 layer, and (remember - Black conceals) painted out the Split ND Gradient where it covered the hillside of trees. I did this very gradually, with the paintbrush tool opacity set to just 10% and a smaller than necessary brush. I did not allow the paintbrush tool to conceal the Gradient where it hit the ocean - this would leave a fine line or possibly add a halo effect around the trees.

The three images below show 1) an unprocessed image 2) processed image 3) processed image with a Split ND Gradient applied and tweaked. The coastal layer of fog messes with my horizon a little, but I think the effect is obvious.