Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2016 i Outdoor Photographer

Photographing at sea is a huge passion of mine, and something I do regularly for clients such as Ralph Lauren and Hilton Hotels. But working in this environment does have its fair share of problems: the damp, the salt, and of course the ever changing light. Shooting an 80 metre long wooden sailing boat from a fast moving speedboat is a far cry from traditional landscape photography; I love working at dawn on a misty lake, the peace and tranquility, the time to set up, the stability of a good tripod and a brace of essential filters, but I also adore shooting classic yachts; the speed, the excitement, testing yourself and your equipment as you bounce around the Mediterranean for 8 hours a day, it’s incredibly addictive! Because I shoot…

Ten Mile River Flow By Mark Scheffer “Ten Mile River wanders down through some beautiful forested valleys from Sherwood Peak and eventually empties onto Ten Mile Beach, part of Mackerricher State Park on the north coast of California. It’s a place I visit often, as the landscapes are ever-changing, providing many photographic opportunities—summer fog, storms, high surf, hidden coves and numerous sea stacks. I’m often rewarded with some beautiful imagery. “After the first big storms of the winter season, the Ten Mile River flows across the beach creating a channel, and thus, this beautiful flow of water offers much creatively. When I came across this scene, I wanted to create a minimalistic image that focused on the abstract nature of the water and the way it reflected the last light…

 I think black-and-white is the best choice for my photographic palette. The process by which I came to this conclusion—that removing color was the right path for me—is the result a lot of trial and error with printing, shooting and developing images both new and old, and through a lot of tedious struggling to reconnect with my work after a bad case of photographic writer’s block. “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” —EDGAR DEGAS Naturally, black-and-white isn’t necessarily the best choice for everyone. I’m not one who subscribes to the idea that one tool or palette or technique in photography is the right one versus the wrong one. I think it depends on many things. A set of tools, palettes or techniques are simply…

Right light, right place, right gear, right settings—how many of these conditions ever happen by chance? When all come together by luck, it really seems like magic. That wasn’t the case with this image, however; this was an image I “stalked.” To prepare for this image, I planned a trip to Mesquite Dunes near Stovepipe Wells, in California’s Death Valley National Park, in midweek of early spring, hoping I’d avoid the crowds. The afternoon before the shot, I drove by the dunes to figure out where I should park the next morning and to estimate how long it would take to drive from my campsite in order to get there at least an hour before dawn to hike out and set up. I drove back, checked the chart for sunrise…

Admittedly, when the press release for the Leica M Monochrom (Type 246) crossed my desk, I chuckled. Why, I wondered aloud to an empty room, would someone spend around $7,500 for a camera that’s incapable of capturing color images? A quick scan of forums will reveal that this is a common theme in the discussion of the camera, which of course begs the question, “Well, why would someone want to shoot with a monochrome-only camera?” I immediately set out to find the answer. In these heady days of digital photography, black-and-white images are an anachronism, not the norm. But landscape photographers, raised on classic images from Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, have an especially visceral connection to both the history of black-and-white imagery and the powerful emotions the technique conveys.…

MIRRORLESS MEDIUM FORMAT Though the sensor is nearly 67 percent larger than a full-frame 35mm sensor, the 50-megapixel Hasselblad X1D is comparable in size to (or even smaller than) a typical full-frame DSLR. It’s the world’s first mirrorless medium format camera, and will appeal to landscape photographers who want the benefits of digital medium format in a more compact system. The X1D is lightweight at 1.6 pounds, with dimensions of 5.9×3.9×2.8 (WxHxD) inches. Expected to be available in August, it can capture RAW, TIFF and JPEG image formats, as well as HD video, with an ISO range of 100 to 25,600, and dual SD card slots for storage. The X1D also features a 3-inch touchscreen LCD, WiFi and GPS. Along with the X1D, Hasselblad unveiled a new range of XCD…

After spending more than a decade photographing exotic wildlife and tribes across the African continent, I suddenly hit a plateau. I was still extraordinarily passionate about my subjects, but I was desperate to rejuvenate my creative vision. Infrared photography became the tool that unleashed my creative block, adding an element of mystery, excitement and grandeur back into my photography. The results were wildly unexpected and pushed the boundaries of my artistic style. Reflected infrared (IR) light produces a fascinating array of surreal effects that differ vastly from that of the visible light spectrum. With its longer wavelength, infrared is just beyond the range we can detect with our eyes. Anything that’s alive will reflect infrared light—leaves, foliage, grass and skin reflect the greatest amounts. Vegetation can appear nearly white, whereas…

Honored by the Arizona Arts and Humanities Commission as one of the 20 most significant artists in the state, platinum and palladium printer and monochrome photographer Dick Arentz brings into the new millennium formulas and techniques from the late 19th century. “I learn from my students,” Arentz says with a twinkling eye and gratified tone. He not only compiles his own findings, but he also incorporates the testing and discoveries of his students. This is why his book, Platinum & Palladium Printing, Second Edition, is known in online forums and industry magazines as the most comprehensive book on the subject. Arentz today chooses images to print using platinum and palladium, as well as Piezography processes, which display ambiance and other behaviors of light and texture. He keenly observes and portrays…

What equipment to bring and what to leave at home is a balancing act I perform every time I pack for a location assignment. If I don’t have it, I can’t use it, but carrying too much equipment can slow my response time to a photo op. Just missing a Cartier-Bresson “decisive moment” is a frustration that we all share. Anything I can do to reduce the frequency of those occurrences works in my photographic favor. I’ve found that having an up-to-date equipment checklist makes packing more efficient and lessens the chances of leaving important items behind. It’s one thing to find a replacement camera battery charger on Amazon.com ; it’s quite another to locate one when you’re in the actual Amazon. While not going to the…

Digital photography has made the art form more accessible and immediate for a new generation of photographers, but for many of us, black-and-white film photography was our introduction to the medium. The quiet, solitary time in the darkroom, processing film and exposing and developing prints, played a large part in my decision to switch majors in college and pursue a degree in art. Though primarily a color photographer, William Neill explains the growing presence of monochrome in his portfolio. Neill also studied black-and-white photography in college, but was drawn to color at the time. In his column, “On Landscape,” Neill recalls working as a staff photographer at the Ansel Adams gallery, where he had the opportunity for Adams to review his portfolio, who observed that Neill “sees in black and…

I developed my first roll of film and saw my first black-and-white print appear under the red light of a darkroom in 1972. I was 12 years old. My life would never be the same; I was hooked. Now, 44 years later, I’m still making prints in a darkroom, although my methods have changed. The rise of digital photography as a tool for making photographs has resulted in a paradigm shift in the making of the photographic image. For roughly the first century-and-a-half of its existence, the word photograph was more or less synonymous with the word print. If you wanted to see what the camera saw, a print had to be made. Sure, there were color slides, but those too were physical objects that could be held in one’s…

Some might think that because I’m a Canon Explorer of Light, I’ve always got a full stable of Canon’s latest, greatest cameras and lenses. In fact, I’ve got to make the same hard choices you do about photographic equipment purchases, and any upgrade has to be worth the cost in terms of advancing the capability and quality of my work. In landscape applications, I’ve looked for high-resolution, full-frame sensors and found my most recent dream machine in the 50-megapixel EOS 5DS R. But for action—be it flying birds, pronging antelope or humans engaging in outdoor recreation—I need speed, and Canon’s new EOS-1D X Mark II delivers. When I talk about a camera’s “speed,” I’m referring to a set of internal functions that enable the wildlife and sports photographer to capture…

What do you think the oldest part of your digital camera is? It’s certainly not the sensor—those get updated all the time. It’s not the circuit board, LCD screen, battery or processor, as these are also updated with every new version. You might be right if you guessed the mirror or the optical viewfinder, but there’s another secretly ancient component in your camera—the memory card. While the CompactFlash (CF) card and Secure Digital (SD) cards used in cameras are ubiquitous, they’re also anachronisms. The original specifications for Compact-Flash were released by SanDisk in 1994, the champion in a format war between a variety of formats that included MMC, Memory Stick, xD and more. Even the “newer” SD card debuted before the dawn of the current millennia, shipping to the public…