Be sure to visit Trey’s Texture Tutorial to see how I make these kinds of photos. They are very fun, and anyone can do it!
This whole area around Guilin has become one of my favorite areas to visit and explore in China. The shapes around here are epic and timeless, and they put me in quite a creative and contemplative mood!
As far as I know, the best one is the badly-named “The Photographer’s Ephemeris”— and I just noticed on their website they have a desktop version —
I get to see this almost every morning from my studio when the moon sets. Of course, it’s not always at this time of day, but sometimes it is! I’m not one of those hardcore moon guys who knows where the moon is gonna be and stuff. Occasionally though, I have friends around me that know this stuff, and that helps tremendously!
How did the art director feel about me using a mirrorless camera? What kind of problems did I have on set with costuming? What happened when one of the hobbit-kids freaked out because of the prosthetic feet? What were the challenges in the post-processing?
Join me on the Hobbiton Movie Set in New Zealand as I do a photo shoot campaign for Air New Zealand. I almost never do client work, but since NZ is my new home, I made an exception. Besides, I like Air New Zealand!
You may remember a post from a few weeks ago where I showed the outside of what I consider one of the most amazing temples in the world. It was from Pattaya, Thailand, and one of the most remarkable things is how new it is. Can you believe all this has been built just in the last 20 or 30 years? It’s very Burning-Manish too inside, which is always a plus with me!
This was a little above me when I took the photo, so I used the Lightroom automatic lens correction to true up all the vertical lines. I don’t always do that, but if it is very close to vertical, I want to make it is as good as possible
I can’t totally take credit for this shot, as it was found on one of my random wanderings with Rene. He and I would rarely have any kind of a plan other than just meandering. There was always food in the mix. That’s a sure thing with him. It’s truly unbelievable how much food he eats… he’s like a Tardis! Anyway, here’s a little thing that he saw on the way so I grabbed my own photo!
Towards the end of this video I’m in the Shard with Stu and you can find out more about when I took this photo.
This particular location in The Shard doesn’t really have a very easy way to take this photo. The direction the sun was facing required some rather difficult window-maneuvering. They don’t really have any windows that face this direction except for one little bit that juts out.
I was able to get this focus trick working with the Leica 35mm F/1.4. Be sure to check out the Leica Lens Buying Guide here on the site!
Okay this is a really stupid title for this photo but I still like it! Haha! Yeah here we are back in the Beijing Planning Museum. All the big cities in China have these museums that are open and free. They are always totally empty too, allow tripods, and have limitless photos inside… one of my best possible hot tips for China.
One good idea for reflection shots is to make sure there is some kind of randomness or lack of symmetry in the bottom half of the photo. Otherwise, it will look like a straight up Photoshop fake-reflection!
This place near Mount Cook looks like the perfect idyllic clean lake, doesn’t it? Well, it isn’t! A bit more artifice here I suppose… but Stu and I spent the night in our truck right by the waste-water treatment facility! The water was actually quite disgusting, but it was a small enough waste-pond so that the water was nice and still. And, luckily, there was no wind!
Getting a good lightning shot often involves a bit of artifice. I’m certainly not above that! But I believe a lot of the truly amazing lightning photos you see are QUITE fake. First, a lot of compositing is often done, which is fine, just letting you know. If you see a ton of lightning bolts in a photo, chances are they are all combined with many different strikes. Also, if you don’t have one of those light-sensors to automatically trigger, you have to just keep taking photos until you get lucky. It’s like a lightning slot machine, so sometimes it doesn’t feel like that much skill is involved!
I love this area of China and right upon arrival there was a huge storm hitting. So exciting! I love a good storm. It was probably ill-advised, but Tom and I climbed up a mountain to get some photos. We were underneath the shade of an old pagoda, which kept us from getting wet… it was perfect conditions for storm shooting, really!
I went out to go get a bunch of reflection shots and made a few videos! I did a fun deal with WD to help promote it too, which was a pretty fun thing… anyway, you can see more below!
Here’s one of the many reflection shots I got that day… that was fun! It’s not like I need an excuse to run around and shoot, but I thought putting together some tips on getting a reflection shot would be a good idea and mission!
This has been a very fun experiment and gets bigger every month! See the Lightroom Presets page for more. This month features a fresh 10 presets, just as new and idea-provoking as the previous months. The special deal we do to reward the hardest core of the fans of these is to do half-off just on the first day of the month. So, for 24 hours, it’s only $2.50 instead of $5.
And here’s a little video more about them!
Every pack comes with at least one Black & White preset, and this is a pretty good example of one. I took this photo out of the window of the CL-130 as I was still about 2 hours (after 8 hours already in the air) from Antarctica. I started to get excited as I looked down to see the sea ice melting apart in the middle of summer. I particularly liked all the layers of clouds floating on top…
