Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2019 i Outdoor Photographer

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After finally witnessing a total solar eclipse and declaring it the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, I started hearing people say things like, “Wait until you see the northern lights.” So when fellow pro photographer Don Smith and I planned an Iceland photo trip to prepare for our upcoming photo workshop, we chose January because it’s in the heart of northern lights season. Could the beauty of the northern lights really rival a total solar eclipse? (Spoiler alert: Yes.) It Only Looks Like Magic The sun continuously bombards Earth with a “solar wind” of electromagnetic waves and particles. Each wavelength and particle in the broad spectrum of solar energy interacts differently with the atmospheric atoms and molecules it encounters. Some wavelengths bounce harmlessly back out to space; the narrow…

I was in a bit of a hurry this morning. I took a shower, got dressed, ate breakfast, threw my dishes in the sink and darted out the door. I left my bed unmade and the dishes for when I got home later in the day, and I’m pretty sure I left on a light or two. Life does this to us—sometimes we have time to finish what we’ve started, and other times we need to do things piece-by-piece. That’s life when we get busy, and it can impact what we do at home, at work and with our hobbies. And yes, it’s like that with our photo libraries, too. Truth be told, and much to my embarrassment, it seems like it’s always like that with my photo library. Personally,…

CAMERAS CAMERA OF THE YEAR: SONY A7R IV With its 61-megapixel back-illuminated sensor, the Sony a7R IV is not only the highest-resolution Alpha camera yet but it’s also currently the resolution leader in full-frame cameras. Considering the size and processing requirements of those files, it’s also incredibly fast, capable of capturing images at up to 10 fps while maintaining continuous autofocus and autoexposure tracking and sustaining that speed for seven-second bursts. The sensor’s big resolution also makes the camera’s APS-C crop mode more useful, recording 26.2-megapixel files with the advantage of the telephoto magnification effect that comes with crop-mode shooting. The high-resolution theme continues with the camera’s 5.76 million-dot UXGA OLED Tru-finder EVF. Sony has put a lot of thought and development into its EVFs, and it shows. Shooting with…

It has never been more difficult to make a truly notable landscape photograph. Yes, technology has made mastery of the photographic process more accessible than ever, but it has simultaneously become nearly impossible to create something unique. To stand on the shoulders of those who have come before without recreating the same work is no small feat. Yet that’s exactly what landscape photographer Ted Gore is doing. He makes images that are impressively refined and aesthetically unique, traveling to the far corners of the globe to photograph places both famous and unknown. The images here include mountain peaks from California’s Sierras to the Canadian Rockies, Hawaii’s Na Pali Coast to the Italian Dolomites. Gore will travel to almost any length in order to create truly notable landscape imagery. This goes…

Another Day At The Lodge “Winter in Minnesota often has us spending a lot of time indoors, so on a nice January day, I took a walk at Dunton Locks County Park in Becker County, about a half-hour from my home,” recalls photographer Penny Meyers. “I came upon this beaver sitting on the snow-covered ice near the edge of a pond. I watched for about an hour as it occasionally dove through a hole in the ice to retrieve twigs and roots and then sit in the snow to enjoy the fruits of its labor. “The light wasn’t ideal. The small mound of snow in the foreground was in sunlight, but the beaver was in shade. I took several shots using different exposures and ultimately chose to completely overexpose the…

Photography, as a medium, sits at the crossroads between interpretive art and objective documentary. For some, it’s too mechanical and literal to be considered a high art, while for others any subjective departure or manipulation on the part of the photographer borders on nefarious deception. Recently, during a panel discussion in which I was a participant, one of the other panelists, a prominent professional photographer, was strongly opposed to the repeated suggestion that photographs should be made with some practical purpose toward the betterment of the world as their reason for being, that they should be literal and factual and not simply something beautiful for the sake of beauty. The photographer rejected this assertion, stating that his prime motivation was simply the joy of making images. Certainly there’s room for…

Location Christmas Meadows is located about 4 miles off the Mirror Lake Highway between Kamas, Utah, and Evanston, Wyoming, in the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest. The dirt road, which can be a bit rugged, ends at the secluded Christmas Meadows campground at an elevation of 8,800 feet. The Stillwater Fork of the Bear River meanders through the meadow, and on a windless day, you’re rewarded with a reflection of the 12,718-foot Ostler Peak looming in the background. Visitors are required to purchase a recreation pass to use the facilities along the Mirror Lake Highway. Weather Mirror Lake Highway is a seasonal byway; it’s open through the fall until the snow is too deep to plow. and then it opens again once the snow has melted off the road. The dirt road…

I live in Miami, Florida, because it’s as far away from sub-zero temperatures as I can get without leaving the country. So, when work took me to Bismarck a few winters ago, the fact that North Dakota tops the list of coldest states in the United States hadn’t escaped me. It’s not that I hate the cold; the problem is that it triggers an irresistible desire to curl up in bed and hug the covers all day. Add to that a forecast of cloudy conditions for the duration of my stay, and it didn’t look like I’d be taking too many photographs on my trip. But the lure of fabulous fresh snow proved harder to ignore than my aversion to its side effects. Foregoing my preferred photography hours of sunrise…