Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature

Red Alder Branch with New Spring Leaves

March 19, 2009 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A branch with new spring growth leaves above the ferns at Muir Woods National Monument.

The leaves were just appearing on the delicate branches of this tree hanging above the creek by a bridge at Muir Woods in early March. The curving shape of the branch caught my attention, especially set off against the darker background of ferns and other plants growing along the banks of the creek. I had to work quickly since the sunlight was just starting to make its way down through the trees – I wanted a bit of light on the foreground branch and leaves, but no direct light on the other plants beyond.

(I’m not good at plant identification. Despite being able to recognize by location, season, and form many plants and flowers I am awful at naming them. If any one knows what plant this is… I’d be grateful for help identifying it.)

(NOTE: Since I originally wrote this post – a week before it appeared here – John Wall pointed out that the plant is Red Alder. I’ve since taken a look at a plant guide that confirms this not only by appearance by the environment in which it was found. Thanks, John!)

This photograph is not in the public domain. It may not be used on websites, blogs, or in any other media without explicit advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

keywords: muir, woods, national, monument, park, marin county, nature, california, usa, winter, branch, delicate, curve, leaf, leaves, spring, new, growth, fern, bokeh, twig, stem, green, forest, bud, stock

Equipment, Technique

Canon EOS 5D Mark II: Live View and Night Photography

March 18, 2009 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

I have shot a few thousand frames with my Canon EOS 5D Mark II now. I’ve photographed a variety of subjects including a few days of rainy professional bicycle stage racing, several landscape subjects, and a productive evening of night photography with The Nocturnes at Mare Island Naval Shipyard. I plan to eventually write up something resembling a comprehensive report on my experience, but so far there hasn’t been time. With that in mind, here is a short piece on one new feature in this camera and my experience with it.

Among the photographic subjects that interest me is night photography, often of urban and industrial subjects, but occasionally of wild landscapes also. There are a number challenges to shooting in very dark conditions, but one of the more interesting is getting good focus in conditions where auto-focus often can’t find a target to work with and where it is too dark to manually focus. (I wrote a bit about this in a recent piece: “Hints for Night Photography.”)

During my last Mare Island shoot I discovered that Live View provides a very useful option for focusing at night. On the 5D II, the Live View mode raises the mirror and lets you look at a “live view” of your scene on the rear LCD. In very dim light the trick is to find something that might provide a manual focus target, center the rectangular LCD indicator over that “something,” zoom in to 10x magnification on this object, and then focus manually on the LCD image. I was amazed at the low light levels at which this works quite well. A vertical line in a wall, the edge of a window, a bit of cyclone fence, or a small light – any of these become decent manual focus targets using Live View.

When I started my Mare Island evening shoot, using this camera for the first time at night, I mostly did things the old fashioned way. By the end of the evening, in any very dim situation I was successfully and much more quickly getting good focus using Live View. I’m confident that night photographers are going to find that this is a very powerful and useful feature.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Night, Photographs: Structures and Objects

Nimitz Avenue at Night

March 18, 2009 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Night photograph of buildings and shipyard structures along Nimitz Avenue near the waterfront at Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Vallejo, California.

This is perhaps one of the “classic” Mare Island Naval Shipyard scenes, where the giant shipyard scaffolding crosses Nimitz Avenue from the shipyard buildings to the shoreline facilities, varieties of artificial light lend a warm glow to the view up the street, and faint star trails appear above in the dark sky.

I think that this is a good scene for first-time Mare Island night photographers to work with. It presents a lot of interesting challenges, but they can all be handled with some thought and care. You need to get the sky right – not too light and you want at least some star trails. I could have done a longer exposure since a bit more than three minutes left me with short star trails, though they weren’t my main subject. The dynamic range is absolutely huge, especially if you don’t take care to obstruct direct line of sight to some of the lights up the street. I had to look around quite a bit to find one small spot where the composition worked and the buildings and towers are positioned to block them. If you don’t block them you either completely blow out those highlights or else you must shorten the exposure to the point that the foreground roadway ends up almost completely black. The lighting also has to be just right on the structures at the top of the frame. On this night we were perhaps 3 or 4 days short of the full moon so a combination of moonlight and artificial light illuminated the structure. (A full moon might have been a bit better.) Then you need the right focal length to get the right parts of the scene into the frame. Here I used a 35mm prime on a full-frame DSLR and cropped the result a bit to eliminate some distractions along the right edge.

This photograph is not in the public domain. It may not be used on websites, blogs, or in any other media without explicit advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

keywords: mare island, naval, shipyard, minsy, night, photography, nocturnes, vallejo, california, usa, building, road, tracks, rail, train, shipyard, structures, minsy, brick, street, sky, star trails, smoke, stack, smokestack, truss, nocturnes, window, light, stock

Ethics, Ideas

Photo Contests and Protecting Your Rights

March 17, 2009 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

The Photo Attorney web site has a post on the subject of “rights grabs” associated with photography contests. (See “Photo Contests Here and Abroad Grab Rights“) This is a subject that has concerned me for some time, and about which I and many others have written from time to time.

The basic problem is this. In many of these contests (in most of them from what I’ve seen) the photographer who submits a photograph to the contest surrenders considerable rights to his/her work . Note that the loss of rights typically occurs whether or not the photographer’s work ‘wins’ the contest! In quite a few cases the language in the contest agreement gives full, unlimited rights for any imaginable use of the photographers submitted work without any compensation, control, or (in quite a few cases) credit to the company sponsoring the contest, the marketing firm(s) supervising the contest, and even to other businesses that they cooperate with.

This applies to every photograph submitted by every participating photographer – not just the winners. (Even if these onerous terms only applied to “winners,” one would wonder who actually “wins” in a situation where a whole team of corporate interests acquire free rights to the “winning” photographer’s work.)

No, I’m not making this up.

It is not without reason that many refer to these things as “intellectual property rights grabs” rather than as photography contests.

This is not to say that there are no legitimate photography contests. It seems reasonable that the work of contest winners would be displayed in some limited (as to time, medium, and so forth) manner directly associated with the contest itself – that would be mutually beneficial to the winning contestants and to those putting on the contest. But photographers who believe that their work has value should be very cautious about such contests, and they should read contest terms very carefully before submitting their work.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Red Alder Branch with New Spring Leaves

Canon EOS 5D Mark II: Live View and Night Photography

Nimitz Avenue at Night

Photo Contests and Protecting Your Rights

Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.