Category Archives: Morning Musings

Equipment, Morning Musings, Technique

Lenses for Landscape Photography (Morning Musings 1/12/15)

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This isn’t exactly a regular “morning musings” post, but I wanted to share this stuff and it seemed like a good pretext! This post concerns two related articles at the website:

From time to time I share new posts in my “Photographic Myths and Platitudes” series. These articles deal with common ideas about photography that range from “open to question” to quite wrong. I try to look at these issues from a perspective that is both objective and based on actual photographic practice.

I wrote the first of these two articles about lenses for DSLR landscape photography back in 2010 after reading one too many claims that wide-angle lenses are landscape lenses and that longer focal lengths are not good ‘landscape lenses.’  It shouldn’t be a surprise that I disagree. The first article goes over reasons to consider a wide range of focal lengths for photographing landscape.

When I wrote that first article I realized that there was another notion about landscape photography that needed a closer look, a belief that prime lenses are better than zoom lenses for landscape photography. This long-cherished idea probably has its roots back in an earlier period of photography when all photography (not to mention all landscape photography) was done with prime lenses, and in a somewhat later period when early zoom lenses had some serious shortcomings. But things are a lot different today, and most of the excellent contemporary DSLR (and a great deal of medium format) landscape photography that you see and enjoy today was done with zoom lenses.

Knowing what a sensitive issue this is for some photographers, I delayed writing part II for over four years! I’ll acknowledge in advance that there are some reasons to shoot landscape subjects with non-zoom lenses, and that my perspective is not The Truth about landscape photography lenses. However, I’m certain that the majority of landscape photographers will be best served by today’s excellent zoom lenses.

In any case, part II deals with this issue, and it is available now. I hope you’ll enjoy it and perhaps learn something new.

Morning Musings are somewhat irregular posts in which I write about whatever is on my mind at the moment. Connections to photography may be tenuous at times!

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Morning Musings

Digital Exposure: Some Basic Rules (Morning Musings 1/10/15)

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Earlier this week I read Alan Ross’s fine article about the zone system and the possibility of adapting it for use with digital photography. (“Can the Zone System Go Digital“) It is a fine summary of some very important principles of exposure, and it is one of the most straightforward and readable explanations of the basics concepts of zone system exposure I’ve seen. It also offers a useful way to apply zone system principles to shooting with digital cameras.

Shoreline Reflections, Tenaya Lake
Shoreline Reflections, Tenaya Lake

I don’t use the zone system, but I do expose in ways that often have the same goals, especially when faced with subjects that have a very wide dynamic range (risking a loss of shadow and/or highlight detail) or, oddly, a very narrow dynamic range (where metering systems can try to turn everything neutral gray.) As I read his article I thought it might be fun to try to distill some of my basic principles for exposure down to a very short list. Here it is:

  • Protect the highlights! — Overexposed highlights and bright areas can completely lose detail if they are overexposed with digital photography, and these details may not be recoverable in post.
  • Watch out for dark tones that are too dark — If dark tones go too dark, they may need to be pulled back up in post, and noise, banding, and other artifacts can be the result of radical lightening of dark areas.
  • Consider the most important values in the scene, and adjust exposure to favor them — You may want to compensate for the camera’s tendency to want to make black and white tones end up gray in narrow dynamic range photographs
  • If important, subtle tonal variations are found in the shadows or in the highlights, consider offsetting exposure to protect them — You may want to underexpose just a bit to retain differences among tones in the bright areas. If there are a lot of important details in very dark shadows, you may wish to overexpose a bit.
  • Use the danged histogram — The RGB histogram display quickly tells you a lot of important things about your exposure.
  • Use the camera as the meter — Go ahead and make an exposure to test your settings. While there is a certain historical macho that says you should get it right in a single exposure, or that you should use a handheld meter, modern digital cameras can provide just as much information as external meters.
  • Don’t be afraid to bracket — Sometimes it is simply faster to make several bracketed exposures rather than to figure out one “perfect” one. That may sound like a photographic blasphemy to some… but it works!

Do you have other basic exposure rules that can be applied in a general way?

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Morning Musings

If You Can’t Say Anything Nice… (Morning Musings 12/20/14)

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Something came up recently that reminded me that I’ve been meaning to write about a complicated topic, namely our natural inclination to see work that doesn’t impress us and wonder, “How can people like that?! And how come my work doesn’t get that kind of response?”

It is a natural reaction, and no one is immune to it. I confess that I am not. In fact, what follows may be as much a reminder to me as it is a post for others…

The explanations for how it is that some work that seems unworthy gets tremendous acclaim are complex and diverse. They range from taste to marketing and even may tell us something about ourselves. I’m not going to try to sort all of that our here. (Hmmm… that sounds like another possible post.) In truth, simply “wondering” about how and why this happens isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I would like to consider what kinds of responses are or are not useful. It is tempting to want to speak out and let the world know that “the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes!” Continue reading If You Can’t Say Anything Nice… (Morning Musings 12/20/14) →

Morning Musings

Testing? Testing? (Morning Musings 12/8/14)

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Aperture Test Image
Aperture Test Image (1)

This morning I saw an article over at The Online Photographer (which you should be following) about a particular camera/lens combination and the process of doing a quick and informal test of that gear… right there in the kitchen.

I read a lot of photography questions about how this or that thing works, which setting is “best” for a particular result, what shutter speed range works for hand-held photography, how much the shadows can be pushed, whether a lens is sharp enough for some particular usage, and much more. Folks are often looking for quick answers — and who wouldn’t in most cases. However, the quick answers often turn out to be less clear than they might like, and sometimes the simplest questions can end up in controversy.

A simple answer is to simply try it out yourself!

The answers to many of the questions that we ask are too complex to lend themselves to absolute answers. Yet, we can often get a very good and quite accurate feeling for these things by just giving them a try. In some cases the “testing” can be very informal, while in others it might require just a bit more care and organization. But in our modern photographic world of digital cameras and computer post-processing and display the testing is much easier than it might have been in the past, and it is well within our grasp to do it ourselves.

I recall one of the first times I put this to good use with a digital camera. Continue reading Testing? Testing? (Morning Musings 12/8/14) →