Beyond The Traditional Print

Making images that appeal to collectors and photographic prints that sell well is the goal of many nature photographers to share their craft, earn an income and get a return on investment for the gear, time and travel that this passion requires. Yet for the vast majority of photographers, even the most impactful, contest-winning types of images often sit unsold when they are mounted and offered for sale. Why are many of the very best images out there unsellable—especially when photographers frequently hear fans say their images are good enough to be sold?

High-key techniques can be a good choice for prints that sell to interior designers and collectors. To make this photograph of a bison, I was positioned low to the ground and composed the shot so that nothing but the foreground and the lake reflecting the gray skies was in the frame. The image was 2.3 stops overexposed. Spot metering can help more easily obtain the proper exposure for this look, but over-exposing may still be required.

Veterans in the field often feel the market for nature photography as art is minimal. This is not because nature as décor has become out-of-vogue. In fact, incorporating elements of nature continues to be on-trend for 2020 among numerous interior design-related references touting what is hot—and not.

The Mindset Of Interior Design

One important reason for sluggish print sales may not lie in image quality but rather in how photographers misperceive the rules of engagement to sell in today’s market.

Many photographers shoot impressive, high-quality images that could easily grace the cover of this and other publications, images that are intense, vivid and impactful, like bears catching salmon, a scarlet macaw in flight or a colorful landscape filled with flowers and a rainbow. Yet if you asked interior decorators which of those photographs they would choose, they will likely pass on them all. The color palette, amount of negative space and potential for the photograph to be incorporated into the décor of the entire room makes most nature and wildlife images incompatible. These images tend to be shot in “classic ways” that traditionally adhere to well-established rules familiar to most seasoned photographers that qualify them for contests, magazines and calendars. Yet they are often 180 degrees from the criteria decorators use to stylize home or corporate interiors.

Pine grosbeak. Use backlighting and overexpose by one to three stops to blow out background.

For example, a relaxing design of a living room might incorporate a three-color palette of breezy whites and soft blues accented by a pop of yellow. The materials and colors used in the paint, furniture and accent pieces are chosen to support the design and visual flow of the room. Hanging an exquisite print of a bear catching a bloody salmon in his mouth over the sofa just isn’t going to work, no matter how technically superior the image. Even a peaceful landscape shot with fields of lilting yellow flowers is disqualified because of the additional colors it contains in the rocks, sky, greenery and more. Prints that sell well lend themselves to principles of interior design.

Prints That Sell: Shooting For The End Use

This then brings nature photographers to a fork in the road. Shoot for magazine and calendar-style work or shoot for interiors? If the latter is chosen, how is that accomplished? Most nature photography clubs, contests and critiques have helped us refine our techniques and style for the former. It is nearly unheard of to have a critique done on images of nature with the intent to give feedback from an interior decorating standpoint. Therefore, new knowledge and “rules of engagement” are necessary to understand key tenets of what tends to be more desirable for interior décor.

Photographers are used to thinking exclusively of how well their images are composed within the frame itself—not how well it will fit within the greater composition and décor of a room. A few questions may help reframe how we think about what we photograph:

• Is this image to be used as a focal piece versus an accent piece in a specific room?
• Does the room need a series of images that tie together, such as a triptych or gallery?
• What is the color palette of the room, and how can the image capture those colors or be post-processed to replicate those colors?
• Does the room’s design require images with expansive negative space to keep the room from feeling cluttered? Or does it perhaps require an intense, bold abstract pattern that is used as a statement piece on an otherwise empty wall in a lobby, for example?
• What is the mood of the room, and does the image support that mood?

Deep coverage of the criteria for interior artwork is beyond the scope of this article, but keeping the question “Where is this image going to live?” in mind before you shoot can help bring both inspiration and intention into your photography—regardless of if it may someday reside on a living room wall or magazine cover. When shooting artwork for interiors, try first perusing interior design articles and attend to what types of styles, colors and palettes are used in the artwork and décor within those designs. It will help inform your photography in the field.

What To Look For In The Field

Before: Original capture of a coastal brown bear and cub.

After: The final image of a coastal brown bear and cub after post-processing and sepia toning.

Many times, images with clean, simple compositions and very simple palettes of two to three colors will work best. Reviewing principles of color theory will also give photographers an advantage. Images utilizing high-key styles, negative space and strong but simple subjects are desirable by consumers. Avoiding graphic images of animals with prey or images with intense action is a good idea when shooting for residential settings, as most consumers want to create a peaceful ambiance in their home. Energized images are better suited for magazines than most interiors.

High-key photography, which contains unnaturally white or bright elements with a reduced contrast ratio, can be an exciting style to try as you build your portfolio for interiors. You can now utilize light that is typically viewed as terrible for capturing classic magazine-style images. Drab, overcast skies and backlit subjects are ideal for high-key shots. You can now maximize all daylight hours by using this technique and others listed below. Positioning strong subjects to be backlit—then over-exposing by one to three stops—will bring your subject to the correct level of exposure and blow out the sky or background, as shown in my image of a pine grosbeak.

It is also helpful to consider a subject’s background, working to ensure it is uncluttered and without objects that merge with your subject. My original capture of a coastal brown bear and cub shows how shooting a backlit subject on a sunny day, using a reflective, mid-toned mud flat as the background, can be blown out in the same way as a gray sky. Over-exposing the image to bring the subject into proper exposure washes out the mud flats. Even so, exposing to the point of clipping the ground was not quite possible without losing detail in the highlights on the topline of the bears. Thus, post-processing was used to finish the look, along with adding a sepia effect to make the image ideal for a rustic interior.

Processing The High-Key Look

When it comes to processing, forget about the traditional rules and restrictions around the minimal editing of nature images. Clients will not typically care if the image is post-processed in a way that makes it an outstanding fit for their home or office. They will be delighted that nature is brought into the interior and that it was created with contemporary taste and style in mind. Do the best job possible in-camera, then use masking, layers, exposure adjustments, adjustment brushes or other tools to finish the artistic vision. It is possible to honor the beauty of the subject yet still adhere to the guidelines of art that is desirable for interior décor.

I used a piece of white foam core propped up behind the poppies to achieve the clean white background.

If drab, gray skies are ideal for high-key images, but you are shooting in weather with abundant sunshine, consider in-the-field alternatives that mimic what you could accomplish in a studio. My image of poppies was shot in the field, midday, with a piece of white foam core propped up behind the flowers. There are two ways to accomplish this shot:

1. Position the sun so that it directly hits the board and flowers, but the angle of the board and/or your stance is shifted slightly until the strong shadows fall outside of your composition. This is the technique I used for my poppy image.
2. Position the flowers directly between the sun and yourself. Face the sun and insert the white board behind the flowers, so they are shaded by board. Focus on the flowers, and then turn your histogram or highlight alert on. Over-expose by typically two to three stops.

In either approach, you will want to ensure you clip all the highlights around the flowers—but not so much that the RGB values in the flowers are clipped, or you will lose detail, a common problem when photographing bright colors on a sunny day. If needed, expose for your colors to preserve detail and make post-processing adjustments to finish the white background. This technique works best with darker subjects and will result in soft shadows and less contrast for an almost a watercolor-style look.

Try Compositing Multiple Shots

Compositing is another way to create wildlife photography that works in interiors. While frowned upon in the nature photography community for documentary purposes, compositing is a hit for interior décor because clients prioritize a certain look over worrying about whether the final piece was shot using a combination of one or more images. This creates yet another opportunity to review your archives and repurpose elements of images that otherwise would not quite make the grade for traditional photography—a nice benefit.

For my image of hummingbirds, they were photographed individually using multiple strobes with a white foam-core background. The flowers were shot separately on-location via portable studio lighting and a white backdrop. The three images were then composited to create the final image.

This image of hummingbirds is a composite of three separate shots. When creating artful images—as opposed to documentary photographs—don’t feel confined to capturing every element in a single frame.

This simplified palette and image style is not limited to wildlife. It can work well with certain landscapes, too. It requires contrasting subjects amidst very light sands, grasses or snow, as shown in my pair of images from Monument Valley, Arizona, after a snowfall. The starkness of the snow showcases the trees and rocks and simplifies the palette. It made for a complementary pair of black-and-white images that I adjusted to a soft sepia tone to fit the interior. This piece was created for a gallery showing in Arizona containing about 40 pieces that all were of a similar style.

Go Beyond Traditional Frames & Mounting

To enhance the artistic effect and make the art pieces desirable for my gallery showing in Arizona, I considered the style of interior décor used locally across many upscale suburban and rural homes here. The use of rustic chic, ranch-inspired and Santa Fe styles is not uncommon. That trend inspired my artwork, materials and photography for this exhibit using subjects that were photographed throughout Arizona.

By using local subjects—and locally sourcing the materials for each hand-crafted mounting—I increased the desirability and perceived value by potential clients. My style is inspired by earth tones and rustic textures. To create the vintage look, I first processed and printed the images using my Canon PIXMA PRO-10 printer on Inkpress 300gsm warm-tone cotton rag paper, then hand-deckled the prints using a tool called “The Ripper.” Those images were then each mounted on top of a larger sheet of deckled handmade mulberry paper to add to the look. Locally sourced reclaimed wood was used to make backdrops that support the two-way glass frames used for each image. Weathered branches were added to finish the look for the Monument Valley piece.

This diptych of photographs from Monument Valley, Arizona, shows how combining high-key images with a vintage sepia treatment and handmade elements can create a much more collectable artwork than a basic print and frame.

If you’re wondering whether this effort truly makes a difference in sales versus traditional nature photography, it does indeed. I have exhibited in several galleries and art shows using traditional nature photography of a very high caliber. Each time, I would get many “oohs and ahhhs” but only sell perhaps a handful of images. I switched to creating my now-signature style of “vintage wildlife” photographic art about two and a half years ago. In one example, I was invited as a guest-exhibitor for 30 days at a local gallery. I sold about 40 large pieces with strong profit margins and had to quickly create more pieces to fill the empty walls before the month-long exhibit ended.

Since that time, this has led to additional sales and sprung new projects with interior design firms, boutique retail stores and more. It continues to be a learning process—which is not unlike what we do with traditional photography as we refine our craft. This has helped define my photographic style. The creative process has brought print sales back as a source of income, inspiration and joy from photography that would not otherwise be possible to achieve.

Expanding Your Creative Options

I still photograph in the “classic nature photography” style on a regular basis, but developing a new style and market for my work has enabled me to shoot throughout the day, given purpose to what I shoot, allowed for far greater creativity and satisfaction—and increased my income as a full-time professional photographer to the point where I have grown my studio and workspace to accommodate more craftsmanship and innovation.

Photography as art is incredibly rewarding if we remain flexible and creative, develop our own unique style, and seek new possibilities. Always ask yourself when you are out in the field, “Where will this image live?” Then, enjoy all of those inspired possibilities and strive to find your work a permanent home beyond your hard drive. You can do it!

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See more of Lisa Langell’s work at langellphotography.com.

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Monsoon Photography In The Southwest

Lightning over Natural Bridge formation in Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah.

The sky darkened and the lightning flashed. I set my camera on my tripod for a stable platform, attached a lightning trigger to my flash connection, engaged mirror lockup to eliminate delay and waited. The storm cell moved toward me, the air took on a greenish tinge, the sky lit up and a tremendous thunderclap exploded. My reward was a dramatic monsoon photo of lightning striking Natural Bridge in Bryce Canyon.

With the air still glowing green, and me being the tallest point in the parking lot and standing next to a metal tripod, I decided to make a fast exit to my Jeep. Welcome to summer monsoon storm photography. It’s challenging and can be dangerous if you don’t respect the elements. It requires some special equipment to capture the best images, along with patience and luck.

The Challenges Of Monsoon Photography

The first challenge is determining when to visit to optimize your potential for storms. For monsoon photography in the American Southwest, where these images were taken, checking weather reports and contacting the staff at Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon and Arches National Parks is recommended.

Using these resources, I made trips over five summers to Bryce and Grand Canyon before I got my monsoon. But when it finally happened, it was amazing. I have never seen skies like that. The pre- and post-storm light was perfect; the skies and clouds were dramatic, ominous and powerful. The post-storm rainbows were spectacular.

I captured magnificent mammatus clouds above the Bryce formations and the Aquarius Plateau that greeted me on my fifth summer visit. A wide-angle lens, secure tripod mounting and a cable release kept the vibrations from the wind and the mirror slap to a minimum to maximize sharpness of the hoodoos. The sky was very dark, and the hoodoos were lit by the setting sun, so a graduated neutral density filter helped me even out exposure. You could achieve similar results using two exposures, one for the clouds and one for the hoodoos, and combine them in post-processing. I just like the “old-fashioned” way.

Mammatus clouds and thunderstorm over Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah.

This brings up the next challenge. Violent storms wreak havoc on your vehicle and your gear, so proper preparation is mandatory. You can utilize shuttle buses to reach the overlooks, but I use my Jeep. It gives me the most options and allows me to carry all my equipment. Make sure your vehicle can handle slick-rock dirt roads and check for flood conditions before driving to the more remote areas, like Devil’s Garden in Escalante Grand Staircase, Fantasy Canyon in eastern Utah and even the North Rim Grand Canyon roads. Check with park service or BLM personnel for current road conditions and weather reports for potential torrential rain. Keep emergency supplies in your vehicle.

When photographing in the elements, watch for lightning. Don’t tempt fate for that ultimate photo. I left Natural Bridge fast when the lightning got close. I may have missed a photo, but I lived to talk about the ones I got. Wear waterproof raingear and hiking boots, and layer your clothes—these areas can get cold. Protect your camera and lenses with rain covers, and keep a cloth handy that will not damage lens elements to wipe off your gear. Tripods are usually necessary for lower-light conditions, but keep a tight hold on yours so it doesn’t blow over in the wind. I forgot one day, and several thousand dollars’ worth of equipment crashed to the ground. I lost both the gear and the ability to photograph.

A technical challenge is photographing the lightning itself. You can’t press the shutter fast enough to capture lightning strikes. Leave the shutter open, and you get fuzzy lightning. The solution is to use a lightning trigger attached to your flash connector. Put your camera on a tripod with settings on manual, turn off auto-focus, lock up the mirror and the device triggers the shutter when lightning strikes, even at great distances. I use The Lightning Trigger from Stepping Stone Productions. You can test the device by triggering it with your flash unit before using.

Rainbow over the Aquarius Plateau after a monsoon thunderstorm, Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah.

The monsoons lasted several days, giving me the opportunity to photograph the violent weather and post-storm, soft light from several overlooks along the main road providing different perspectives of the hoodoos and storms. Most overlooks face east. If the storms break up to the west, you can photograph late-afternoon, golden light on the hoodoos with dramatic skies to the east. Storm edges also produce magnificent rainbows, adding to your overall image. In one of my favorite monsoon images, a rainbow appears to rise out of the Aquarius Plateau formation far to the east, adding another element to this dramatic landscape.

Recommended Places For Monsoon Photos

Grand Canyon is another great location for monsoon photography. I prefer the North Rim. It’s less crowded, and the storm photography is great. This is high desert country, so layer accordingly. Facilities at the North Rim include a lodge, campground, restaurant, snack shop, market and gas station. Monsoon storms kick up in the afternoon, and photography right from the lodge can be spectacular. Summer reservations for the campground or lodge are mandatory.

The road to the North Rim heads south from Jacob Lake. A very convenient way to create a great two-stop monsoon landscape photography trip is to head south on Highway 89 from Bryce Canyon through Mt. Carmel Junction and Kanab to Fredonia, Arizona. In Fredonia, take Highway 89A southeast to Jacob Lake and the road south to the North Rim.

Monsoon storm forms over the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona.

There are two great monsoon photography overlooks on the North Rim, Point Imperial and Cape Royal. Both are some distance from the lodge, so driving is necessary. The road from the lodge splits, going to both overlooks, which are in opposite directions.

Point Imperial overlooks the far east edge of the Canyon. To the east is low and flat, so sunrise can be spectacular, especially if storm clouds are present. I have seldom seen clouds light up like they can here after a storm. It’s approximately 11 miles to Point Imperial from the lodge, so allow yourself plenty of time to arrive before sunrise and find your composition. Elevations are over 8,200 feet, so it can get cold, and roads, although paved, can be icy. There are numerous pullouts along the way, so watch for additional landscape opportunities.

A rainbow over Cape Royal on the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona.

Cape Royal is in the opposite direction from the road split and is about 23 miles from the lodge. With a 270-degree angle of view, this overlook is great for photography most of the day. If there is a storm, late-afternoon light turns the sheer cliff face of Wotan’s Throne golden red. As a storm dissipated, I captured this beautiful light just as a rainbow formed over the cliffs. Plan on three to four days in each location to successfully capture the storms.

If you have extra time and the monsoons are cooperating, there are additional, although out-of-the-way, locations that offer opportunities for seldom-photographed landscapes. Devil’s Garden, south of Escalante, Utah, is a small but interesting area noted for the rock formations called the “Trolls.” They can be great subjects framed in dark, ominous skies and lightning strikes. The road is slick-rock dirt, so check with the BLM office in Escalante for road conditions before driving.

Fantasy Canyon, in the middle of a working oilfield near Vernal, Utah, is fascinating, and storms can make it magic. The formations in this 1-acre plot are off white during the day but turn golden yellow in late afternoon. I found a great formation and waited for late-afternoon light. A rainbow formed over the sandstone adding a key element to the overall scene. This image was a result of patience and luck. Remember, luck favors the prepared!

Monsoon storm cell over the high desert near Kanab, Utah.

For an expanded trip, consider other locations, like Capitol Reef, Cedar Breaks and Arches National Parks, as well as Goblin Valley.

Don’t forget to keep a camera setup by your side as you drive. You never know what you might see along the roads. A distant, violent storm cell appeared just after a curve in the road. I was on my way to the North Rim. Stopping along the road for just a few minutes, I framed desert grasses as a foreground element and captured a powerful, high desert landscape.

Opportunities for monsoon photography abound in the Southwest, but there are chances for summer storm photography in many areas of the country. Check the weather, pack your camera rain gear and head out this summer to see what dramatic images you will create.

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See more of Dave Welling’s work at strikingnatureimagesbydavewelling.com.

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Focus On The Details

I have been drawn to macro photography almost from the first time I picked up a camera. Macro photography allows us to photograph the details in nature—which are endless. As we come in closer and closer to our subjects, it is a new world that we are seeing and photographing, sometimes for the first time.

Camellia blooms fallen onto the ground and covered with skeletonized leaves. Taken on tripod with cable release using the Canon EF 180mm f/3.5L Macro USM on Fujichrome Velvia 100 film. Exposure: 1/4 sec., ƒ/22.

At one-to-one or 1x magnification, the physical size and the image size are the same. I consider macro photography to mean anything rendered at one-half life size (0.5x) or greater within the frame.

It may be that you would love to do some macro photography but don’t know where to begin. I am here to say that with some time and effort—along with using the macro photo tips that follow—you will become a successful close-up photographer.

Basic Equipment For Macro Photography

In my camera bag for taking macro photographs are lenses and accessories that allow me to get close and focused on small details. If you’re just getting started, check out the macro lenses available for your system. These will typically be in the 80mm to 100mm range. Lenses designated as “macro” lenses are the surest bet, but you can do close-up photography with a variety of lenses if they provide suitable magnification and close-focusing ability.

As you become more experienced, you might find yourself choosing among several lenses, depending on the subject. I use the following Canon lenses for macro work:

• EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM
• EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM
• EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM
• EF 180mm f/3.5L Macro USM
• TS-E 90mm f/2.8 Tilt-Shift

At times, I also will use a more specialized lens, the Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5x Macro Photo. This lens magnifies an image from life size to five times life size (5x).

Dahlia flower design. Using my Canon TS-E 90mm f/2.8 Tilt-Shift lens tilted, I am able to work from an angle—not straight down—and still get everything in focus.
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, Canon TS-E 90mm f/2.8 Tilt-Shift. Exposure: 0.5 sec., ƒ/32, ISO 320.

In addition to lenses, I highly recommend extension tubes, which allow you to focus on subjects closer than the lens can without this accessory (more on this below). I use the Canon Extension Tube EF 25 II with all of the lenses listed above. And for even greater magnification than the lenses are capable of by themselves, you can add a teleconverter such as the Canon Extender EF 1.4x III that I use. Most camera systems today have teleconverters available.

Top Macro Photo Tips

In no specific order, here are some of my best tips for making macro photos.

Extension Tubes

Extension tubes are an inexpensive way to enter the world of macro photography as they allow you to move in closer to the subject with any lens. The closer a camera can come to the subject, the greater the magnification. So, when I use an extension tube with my non-macro lenses like the 24-105mm or 100-400, it allows me to come in closer, thus magnifying the subject even more. I also use these extension tubes with my macro lenses and the 90mm Tilt-Shift lens. You can stack two or more together, giving you even greater close focusing.

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Skeletonized Chinese lantern seed pods placed together to make an interesting design. Taken outdoors on an overcast day using Kodak VS100 film with the Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM at ƒ/22 for greatest depth of field.

Invest In True Macro Lenses

If you decide to do a lot of macro work, I highly recommend that you invest in a true macro lens. Macro lenses have a flatter focus field than typical lenses, meaning they will be sharper edge-to-edge, which is especially important for close-up objects. They also allow you to get 1x magnification without using extenders or extension tubes, where most other lenses do not let you come in that close to the subject. I use the 180mm Macro lens in about 80 percent of my macro work. This is because it gives me more working distance from the subject and also a much narrower view, thus showing less of the background.

Use A Tripod Whenever Possible

A tripod really helps you to work the composition versus hand-holding. You can make adjustments to the composition, depth of field, focus, shutter speed and ISO much more easily while on the tripod. Also, as you get closer and closer to your subject, you lose light and depth of field, requiring slower shutter speeds that potentially you can’t handhold.

When on the tripod, I like to use my camera’s 2-second self-timer to release the shutter so that I am hands-free and not introducing movement by handling the camera. You can also use a cable release or remote control smartphone app if your camera has one.

If shooting with a DSLR, the mirror movement can also cause vibration; use the camera’s Mirror Lock-up mode with shutter speeds slower than 1/30 sec. to avoid camera shake.

Tailless swallowtail butterfly from South America. Three light sources were used: natural light, Canon Macro Twin Lite MT-24EX flash and a light with a soft box at 45 degrees from the butterfly. The key to a composition like this is to watch your focus and make sure that the focal plane is parallel to the subject.
Canon EOS 5D Mark III, EF 180mm f/3.5L Macro USM, Canon Macro Twin Lite MT-24EX flash. Exposure: 1/20 sec., ƒ/8, ISO 400.

Work In Live View 

While on the tripod, I recommend that you use Live View if shooting with a DSLR. I use it not as much for the composition of the image but to check for sharpness from edge to edge. I can magnify the image in Live View from 1x up to 10x to check for sharpness and toggle it around the image to make sure key elements are in focus.

Keep Your Camera Parallel

Make sure your subject is in focus and parallel to the back of the camera. Even being just ever-so-slightly off from parallel may cause some critical portion of your photograph to be out of focus.

Manual Focus

For macro photography, I always manually focus if at all possible. In close-up photography, the depth of field can be so shallow that the camera can’t autofocus properly or fails to focus on what you want to be in focus.

This dahlia close-up photograph was taken outdoors on an overcast day to give it that nice, even lighting.
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM at 300mm. Exposure: 1.20 sec., ƒ/19, ISO 500.

Vary Your Focus Points

By moving in closer and closer to your subject, you are making it bigger in the frame. I like to take several photographs at different distances and focus points, then select which images I like the best in the editing process.

Check For Critical Focus

If you have two subjects in your image, make sure they are both sharp. If both are not in focus, I simply do not keep the image. An exception might be if the second subject is totally out of focus and in the background and does not draw too much attention away from the main subject.

Lighting Macro Subjects

We have not mentioned lighting to this point, but along with sharpness and simple backgrounds, lighting is a key in creating a successful macro image.

Lighting can come from natural light (I prefer overcast days), flash, a combination of flash and natural light (fill flash), soft boxes, diffusers and reflectors. I use all of these light sources, often in combination with each other.

Petrified dinosaur bone close-up. Taken indoors using two daylight-corrected soft boxes for my lighting. Keeping the camera and dinosaur bone on the same focal plane allows for the image to be sharp from edge to edge.
Canon EOS 5D Mark III, Canon EF 180mm f/3.5L Macro USM. Exposure: 3 sec., ƒ/22, ISO 200.

My flash equipment is the Canon Speedlite 600EX II-RT and Canon Macro Twin Lite MT-24EX. The Twin Lite is especially good for macro photography, as the flash head unit is mounted onto the front of the lens. This allows the light to come in closer to the subject. Also, the Twin Lite flashes can be rotated and angled in or out from the subject. You can even adjust their output strength independently.

Ring lights are another option for macro work, though I am not personally a fan because of the flatter light that these typically produce—I like a little more contrast.

Rocks in a dish with water to give it the color punch. Taken outdoors in the shade to control the highlights. A polarizing filter was used to cut down on the glare.
Canon EOS 5D Mark II, Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM at 99mm. Exposure: 1/10 sec., ƒ/22, ISO 400.

Usually with my flash photography, I am dialing back the power from full flash to a -1 or -1.5 output setting and using both the natural light and flash. My goal is for the viewer not to know that it was a flash photograph. An example of this is the tailless swallowtail butterfly image shown in this article.

Full flash is sometimes necessary, like in the case of photographing the emerald-eyed tree frog, which was done at a workshop indoors. Using the Twin Lite MT-24EX flash, I got a 1/200 sec. shutter speed to stop any movement of the subject or camera shake and the needed depth of field at ƒ/27.

Emerald-eyed tree frog (Hypsiboas crepitans), South America. Use of a fill flash helped ensure I would freeze the frog’s movement and also allowed the use of a smaller aperture for the needed depth of field.
Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM, Canon Macro Twin Lite MT-24EX flash. Exposure: 1/200 sec., (the camera’s flash sync speed), ƒ/27, ISO 400.

I use one or two soft boxes for lighting at home with subjects like butterflies, rocks, flowers and feathers. I especially like the nice, even illumination when using soft boxes. Make sure the lights are daylight balanced.

Your Lens Affects Working Distance

Get close to the subject—but not too close, in some cases. Working distance is important when it comes to many of the live subjects you might want to photograph. When I did a Macro Frog workshop with Jim Zuckerman last year, I found that many of the participants were using 50mm macro lenses, and when they came closer to the subjects, they were bumping into them. I used the 100mm macro and did not have that problem.

Crop & Resize If Needed

Another way of coming in closer is to make sure to take a very sharp image and then crop in during your processing of the image. When we crop, we are losing resolution, so I find myself more and more using Topaz Gigapixel AI software, which lets you resize your image without losing detail.

Scarlet macaw shoulder and wing feathers arranged in a pattern. When the macaw molts its feathers, you can purchase them and do layouts like this.
Canon EOS 5D Mark II, Canon EF 180mm f/3.5L Macro USM. Exposure: 0.5 sec., ƒ/22, ISO 320.

Use ISO Settings To Adjust Exposure

I photograph in aperture priority mode and use evaluative metering. I always want to control the depth of field with my macro work. I set the ISO to where it will give me a fast enough shutter speed for the subject I am photographing. If it is a rock, for example, I can set a lower ISO as the shutter speed is not as much a factor, especially when I am on a tripod. But with moving subject, like a butterfly, shutter speed becomes much more important. I will set a higher ISO, giving me both the needed shutter speed to stop the movement and the aperture necessary for my desired depth of field.

With these tips in mind, I encourage you to try photographing some close-up images. A great subject to start with is flowers, which can be photographed year-round. They can be in your garden, a friend’s or a public garden nearby. You can go to a nursery, florist, conservatory or your local grocery store. During the winter, I will buy my wife a bouquet of flowers—but I have to photograph them first.

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See more of Darrell Gulin’s work at gulinphoto.com.

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How To Use HDR For Nature Photography

Photographers have always struggled with photographing high-contrast scenes often found at sunrise or sunset. High dynamic range, or HDR techniques can help you capture those scenes with greater detail and a “natural” look, if you use the technique properly.

This image from Glacier National Park was shot with a Singh-Ray GND filter way before HDR came of age. While the GND filter worked well for the composition, I wish I had predicted the future and also bracketed frames for future use when HDR became easer.

Back in the film days, photographers like Galen Rowell helped to pioneer the use of rectangular graduated neutral density filters (GND filters) that were clear on one end and dark on the other. These filters were primarily applied by landscape photographers to darken skies or mountains in order to balance with foreground exposures more closely. Use of these filters made it possible to photograph high-contrast scenes that were previously impossible to properly expose in a single frame.

This image illustrates how a graduated neutral density filter can be used to darken the sky to match the foreground.

While technically possible with film, the advent of digital photography brought with it the new technique of blending multiple exposures of the same scene to create a single HDR image. This new technique quickly caught on and became wildly popular, so much so that it created an entirely new style of images showing more detail in the shadows and highlights than the human eye could see in real life. While this trend became popular, it also created a bit of a backlash among more traditionally minded photographers as well as photo editors. We would hear things like, “that image doesn’t look real” or “that photo looks Photoshopped.” I would argue that it also helped erode the general public’s appreciation of a truly well-crafted, properly exposed—and natural-looking—landscape image.

As someone who often works with photo editors, I noticed that some outright banned the submission of HDR images of any kind. At the time, I was a big user of graduated neutral density filters, with my goal being to make scenes look as natural as possible, but I discovered that in many situations, by carefully and tastefully merging multiple images into HDR files, I could actually create images that looked more realistic than if I had I used my trusty GND filters. So realistic, in fact, that I (and many other photographers) was guilty of quietly sending natural-looking HDR images to big-name publishers with no HDR policies and regularly having them chosen and published. At the time, I was mainly using GND filters, but it was clear that the future was going to be with HDR once the process became easier.

This photograph from Carson Pass near Lake Tahoe is one of my first successful HDR images. While I also shot the scene using a GND filter, I ended up being able to create a more natural-looking image by blending the bracketed files in Lightroom versus the harsher GND-filtered image.

HDR Photography Today

Those first few years of HDR were a bit of the wild west as people discovered what was possible, and some way-over-the-top material gave HDR images a bad name. But fast forward to 2020, and now HDR images are the norm rather than the exception. Software that was once overly complex and often created garish images just a few years ago is now so easy to use, making it possible to shoot high-contrast scenes that photographers just a decade ago wouldn’t even have bothered shooting.

This shot from Joshua Tree National Park is a prime example of a scene where HDR works better than a GND filter. Bracketing for HDR allowed me to hold the sky exposure and also open up the shadows of the rocks. While a GND filter would have worked to darken the sky, I wouldn’t have been able to open up the shadowed rocks nearly as much.

With Adobe Lightroom, we have the ability to create a single blended image from multiple exposures with a click of a button. The composite image can then be further adjusted with all of Lightroom’s tools, but now with much more dynamic range than a single exposure would have—I can open shadows or save highlights many stops beyond what a single RAW file from even the best cameras available can produce. And I’m able to make these adjustments locally as needed, rather than only being able to adjust exposure globally as with GND filters. There are more complicated, specialized HDR programs that might give you a slight edge over the Lightroom method, but Lightroom is so quick and so user friendly that I don’t even bother using those programs anymore.

How To Use HDR

Because of the ease of HDR, one common mistake I see now when working with my workshop students is that they bracket nearly every single composition, even when their camera sensor can easily handle the contrast range of the scene. There are times when HDR is useful to gain information in the highlights and shadows, but there are also times when you are just wasting card space—and, more importantly, your time when editing. When you bracket exposures of every scene, you have that many more frames to wade through when selecting your best images.

In this photo from Glacier National Park, bracketing for HDR allowed me to control the exposure more naturally in select areas of the image far better than if I had used a GND filter.

The easiest way to see if you need to start bracketing for HDR is to frequently check your histogram to make sure you are properly exposing your scene, and also if you are losing information on one or both ends of the tonal range. Once you begin exceeding the range of the histogram, that is when you start bracketing for an HDR image.

When bracketing, I typically shoot groups of three images (not five), with one shot underexposed, one properly exposed and one overexposed. My exposure adjustment between frames is slightly scene dependent, but typically I bracket in two- or possibly three-stop increments.

Also, remember that what your meter says is properly exposed isn’t always the case. Check that histogram, especially in complicated lighting situations.

Traditional Filters Are Still Useful

You might think the days of carrying graduated neutral density filters are over, but the reality is that no matter how good the abilities of HDR have become, situations do still arise when a GND filter is better.

For most static, tripod-based shooting of landscapes, HDR is usually the best option, but remember you have to bracket multiple frames for blending later. What if you are shooting hand-held or shooting a fast-moving subject? Some or all of your bracketed frames won’t line up correctly anymore. There is some great software magic that deals with “ghosting” or helps line up images, but any time movement is involved, using a GND filter to bring the scene’s contrast back into the range of the sensor is still the way to go.

This is one of my favorite images of Denali National Park and is from my very first trip with a digital camera—way before I started bracketing images for HDR. While I used a GND filter with a 6-megapixel camera to create this image back in the early 2000s, it still is regularly published and sells as a print despite being from such a low-resolution camera. If I were to shoot it today, I would bracket for HDR and use a much higher resolution camera, but in the end, the image would look nearly exactly the same.

While we aren’t there yet, looking toward the future, I do see a time when even action shots may be possible without the need of a GND filter. Imagine a camera sensor with more dynamic range than the human eye or a camera that shoots so quickly that it can create an in-camera HDR of a fast-moving subject. I doubt these technologies are very far away. Continuous shooting rates are improving, and sensors get better every year. I would guess that within 10 years, we won’t be talking about HDR images anymore, and none of us will even remember carrying and using graduated neutral density filters.

I know I said you can’t shoot moving subjects with HDR, but this is a shot that breaks that rule. I was already shooting HDR brackets from a tripod when the three swans swam quickly into my frame. With no time to grab a GND filter, I just kept shooting bracketed frames at a fast frame rate (so they would lineup as close as possible). I was blown away how well Lightroom was able to blend the bracketed images using its “deghosting” option to create a single image with three sharp swans.

What a great time to be a photographer. We can create images now that weren’t even possible just a few years ago, and it’s only going to get better.

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Night Landscape Photography

Learning the basics of night landscape photography will open up a whole universe of photographic possibilities. Combine your new knowledge with solid preparation, the right gear and good field technique, and you’ll able to photograph the Milky Way, star trails, meteor showers, lunar eclipses, the aurora and the landscape by moonlight.

Milky Way near the Joint Trail, Needles District, Canyonlands National Park, Utah. Exposure time for Milky Way images (in locations far from city lights) is 30 seconds at ƒ/2.8 and ISO 6400.

Preparation begins with deciding what type of nighttime landscape photos you want to make, then deciding when and where to go. Regardless of your nocturnal quarry, you’ll have better luck if you get as far away from city lights as possible.

Basic Timing Considerations

The best time to shoot the Milky Way and meteor showers is when the sky is fully dark. The sky reaches its darkest point at astronomical dusk, when the sun is 18 degrees below the horizon, roughly 1.5 to two hours after sunset at the mid-latitudes; it starts to lighten again at astronomical dawn. Both the Milky Way and meteors are quite dim, so you’ll want the darkest possible sky as a background to help these faint objects stand out, which means shooting when the moon is below the horizon.

By contrast, I’ve photographed star trails and the aurora successfully under all phases of the moon. Moonlit landscapes are easiest to shoot under a full moon, and of course the moon is always full during a lunar eclipse. Sun Surveyor for iOS and Android smartphones is my favorite app for data on astronomical dusk and dawn, as well as data on rise and set times and azimuths (compass bearings) for the sun, moon and the galactic center—the most photogenic part of the Milky Way. PhotoPills (iOS and Android) and the Photographer’s Ephemeris (iOS, Android and desktop) are also good sources.

Planning For The Weather

Clear skies are essential for most night landscape photography. The exception is landscapes lit by the full moon, which often benefit from the presence of clouds. My favorite site for weather forecasts is weather.gov. Enter the name of the city closest to your shooting location in the search box at the top of the home page. Scroll down the page to the map, then click on the location of your shoot. The site will display a forecast for an area of roughly 4 square miles centered on the point you clicked. These point forecasts are particularly valuable in mountainous country because the weather in the closest city will be radically different from the weather high on a peak.

Look below the map, and you’ll see a link to an hourly forecast. In addition to useful predictions for temperature, wind speed and chance of precipitation, you’ll find a forecast for the percentage of the sky that will be covered by clouds. ClearDarkSky.com also provides forecasts of sky cover.

Sand dunes and the Sangre de Cristo Range by moonlight, Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado. Moonlit landscapes can benefit from the presence of clouds to add interest to the sky.

Essential Gear & Safety

It’s surprisingly chilly standing around next to a camera in the dark. A 40-degree night feels much colder than a 40-degree day because you have no sunshine soaking into your clothing. Be sure to bring plenty of extra clothing, including windproof layers for both your legs and your torso. Snacks will keep your body fueled, and a thermos of hot coffee or tea will taste like the nectar of the gods around 3 a.m.

There is no such thing as gloves that are both thin enough to let you push your camera’s buttons easily and thick enough to keep your fingers toasty in sub-zero weather. My solution is to wear heavy gloves and bring an unsharpened, new pencil with a good eraser. Drill a hole through the leaded end, tie a thin piece of string through the hole, and hang the pencil from your tripod. It’s easy, even with heavy gloves on, to use the eraser end of the pencil to push a button. Use your gloved thumb or forefinger to spin the dials.

Many people find the prospect of night landscape photography intimidating. To dispel those fears, visit the area where you plan to shoot in daylight. Look for hazards that might be less obvious at night, such as cliff edges, old mine shafts or the slippery banks of streams or lakes. Pay close attention to landmarks along the trail leading to your location. Remember that you don’t have eyes in the back of your head. The trail will look very different on the return trip than it did when you were hiking to your location. Turn around periodically during the hike to your location and memorize what key junctions and landmarks will look like when heading back to your car. Bring a companion along on your shoot, and let someone know where you’re going and when you plan to be back.

Bring trekking poles when hiking at night. Becoming a quadruped again will help prevent skinned knees and sprained ankles. Use a headlamp instead of a flashlight so your hands are free for trekking poles or camera gear. Many headlamps offer both white and red LEDs. I always use the brightest white LED for hiking and setting up the shot. When I’m ready to start shooting, I switch to the red LED and turn the brightness way down to let my eyes adapt to the dark. The key to preserving your night vision is to use a very dim light. A bright red light is worse than a dim white light. Full dark adaptation takes about 30 minutes.

The best lens for your first foray into the night is a fast, ultra-wide-angle optic such as a 14mm or 16mm f/2.8, or a wide-angle zoom such as a 14-24mm f/2.8 or 16-35mm f/2.8. Recent cameras have better high-ISO capabilities than older ones. You’ll want a camera body that offers ISOs of at least 6400, preferably higher. A solid tripod is another must for night photography.

Basic Technique For Night Landscape Photography

Your first challenge is focusing the lens at infinity. You’ll probably be shooting wide-open, which means depth of field will be shallow and focus will be critical. Turn off auto-focus completely, even if you use rear-button focus. It’s way too easy to accidentally hit that button with a gloved thumb and not notice that you’ve ruined your focus.

Aurora over Tombstone Mountain, Tombstone Territorial Park, Yukon Territory, Canada. A basic starting point for aurora photos is a 10-second exposure, but the right exposure time can vary significantly, so trial and error is required.

With few exceptions, you can’t simply rack the lens to the physical stop because most modern lenses allow you to focus past infinity. Nor can you simply set the index mark on the lens to the infinity mark and assume you’re critically focused. The easiest solution is to focus the lens at infinity in daylight, then tape the lens with gaffer tape, which doesn’t leave a residue. If you must focus at night, point the lens at a bright star or planet, enlarge the view to about 10x (turn on Live View if shooting with a DSLR to do this) and manually focus on the star. Then shoot a test frame, being sure to include a bit of skyline in the frame. A slightly out-of-focus star just looks like a bigger star, but an out-of-focus skyline will be obviously blurry. Then tape the lens and test again.

Exposure at night is a matter of (educated) guess-and-check. Your meter will be useless; use manual exposure mode and ignore the meter. For most night images, you’ll want to keep the stars reasonably round, which means your shutter speed must be short enough to prevent the stars from becoming streaks due to the rotation of the earth.

One convenient way to calculate the maximum shutter speed is the “500 rule:” divide 500 by the focal length of the lens to get the maximum shutter speed. For example, if you are using a 20mm lens, you would divide 500 by 20 and get 25 seconds—the maximum shutter speed to keep stars reasonably round. Note that this rule is a compromise between two goals: keeping stars round and keeping noise under control. If you enlarge the image to 100 percent, you will see that the stars have made short streaks. You can use a tighter standard for star roundness (for example, use 200 instead of 500 when dividing by the focal length) and compensate for the shorter shutter speed by using a higher ISO, but the price will be more noise.

Exposure Settings For Night Landscape Photography

In a dark-sky location, far from city lights, the correct exposure for the Milky Way is 30 seconds, ƒ/2.8, ISO 6400. You’ll need a 16mm or wider lens to use that long of a shutter speed without obvious star trails. Those settings will give you a correctly exposed Milky Way straight out of the camera. Some recent cameras may give slightly better results if you use a much lower ISO, such as 1600, then correct the exposure in processing software. These cameras are said to be ISO-invariant. Test your own gear to see what gives you the best results.

My standard Milky Way exposure will render the land very dark. To get better detail in the land, I usually shoot two frames, exposing one for sky, the other for land, then put the two frames together in Photoshop. As a rule of thumb, the correct exposure for the land in a Milky Way image (assuming no snow on the ground) is about two stops brighter than the correct sky exposure, or about two minutes, ƒ/2.8, ISO 6400.

An intervalometer will let you set exposures longer than 30 seconds. This is much more convenient than using bulb mode and timing your exposures with your watch or phone. Using an intervalometer also allows you to change exposure without touching the camera and potentially causing the tripod to move in between exposures, which would prevent the images from aligning perfectly.

The exposures for other night subjects will vary.

Geminid meteor shower over Monument Basin, Canyonlands National Park, Utah. This composite image shows 86 meteors captured over 8.5 hours.

I usually use 30 seconds, ƒ/2.8, ISO 3200 for capturing meteors.

My starting-point exposure for the aurora is 10 seconds, ƒ/2.8, ISO 3200, but the correct exposure can vary by several stops in either direction from those initial settings.

The correct exposure for the moon itself during a lunar eclipse also varies widely, from about 1/125 sec., ƒ/11, ISO 200 for the fully illuminated moon, to eight seconds, ƒ/8, ISO 1600 at deepest totality. Moonlight varies in brightness depending on the phase of the moon and the moon’s altitude (angular elevation about the horizon).

For a landscape lit by a full moon high in the sky, start with 30 seconds, ƒ/2.8, ISO 400 and adjust as needed. This exposure will render the moon itself as a blown-out blob, so you’ll probably want to exclude the moon from your composition.

In the film era, you could shoot star trails by setting your largest aperture and opening the shutter for hours. Unfortunately, using the same technique with a digital camera will typically cause unacceptable noise. The solution is to shoot many shorter exposures back-to-back, then put all the frames together using a free or low-cost star-trails program like StarStaX. On a moonless night, I generally choose an aperture between ƒ/2.8 and ƒ/4 and an ISO between 200 and 400. Your shutter speed can be as long as your camera allows without generating excessive noise; for a Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, that’s four minutes. I use an intervalometer to set the exposure and specify the number of frames. Your exposures will need to be shorter on nights when the moon is bright (50 percent or more illuminated). On nights with a moon, shorter exposures reveal more stars. On nights with a full moon, use exposures of 15 to 30 seconds. Limit exposures to one or two minutes when the moon is 50 percent illuminated.

Once your eyes are dark-adapted, the image on your LCD will give you a misleading impression of the level of detail in the land. Turn down the brightness of your LCD to compensate. As always, your histogram is your best guide to correct exposure.

Star trails over the Titan, Fisher Towers, Utah. For star trail photos with less noise, shoot many shorter, consecutive exposures and combine them using software such as StarStaX.

I always use daylight white balance for my night landscape photography because I want to preserve the colors of the stars and planets that I see when I’m dark-adapted. Lightroom and Photoshop ignore in-camera high-ISO noise reduction settings. I leave high-ISO noise reduction on only because it makes the JPEG-rendered preview on my camera’s LCD look a little cleaner.

Long-exposure noise reduction works by making a second exposure of the scene with the shutter closed, then subtracting the noise in the dark frame from the actual image data. It’s effective, but it doubles the time to take each picture, so I turn it off.

Composing at night requires trial and error, since you probably won’t be able to see much through the viewfinder. Be sure to level the camera left to right using the level on your LCD. Crooked horizons are a common mistake at night. Shoot a test frame, examine the image on your LCD, make adjustments and try again.

To compose more quickly—without having to wait 30 seconds to see each test shot—crank your ISO up to 25,600 temporarily and reduce your shutter speed to match. Once you’ve perfected your composition, lower the ISO, adjust the shutter speed and make the shot.

Throughout your shoot, check your images periodically on your LCD. In addition to verifying your composition, double-check sharpness and exposure. Tape can get dislodged, and wide swings in the temperature of the lens can change the focus point slightly. It’s easy to bump a camera dial in the dark and accidentally change your aperture or shutter speed.

Lunar eclipse over Longs Peak and Mt. Meeker, seen from the summit of Twin Sisters, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado. The correct exposure time for a lunar eclipse can vary widely, from a fraction of a second to several seconds.

If your images look soft after checking focus, inspect the front of the lens. Condensation on the front element will ruin every shot. I carry old-fashioned paper lens tissue to dry the front element. Polyester microfiber cleaning cloths are great for cleaning off smudges and fingerprints, but they don’t soak up moisture well.

One final tip: Batteries fail more quickly in the cold. I always keep a couple of spares warm in an inside pocket.

I hope this brief introduction to night landscape photography will inspire you to start exploring this exciting genre. For a thorough discussion of all facets of night photography, please see my book Dusk to Dawn: A Guide to Landscape Photography at Night, published by Rocky Nook. Then grab your gear and go. If you’re well-prepared, your photographic adventures under starry skies will be filled with wonder.

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Subtracting The Universe

Aurora borealis, Scoresbysund, Greenland. Nikon D810, Sigma 24mm F1.4 DG HSM Art, Really Right Stuff TVC-24L tripod and BH-55 ballhead.

Imagine a painter—say, Georgia O’Keeffe—staring into a blank canvas. Working from an image in her mind’s eye, she steps to the canvas and sketches out the basic composition. Then she adds paint, in various colors, tones, layers and blends, building up the composition stroke by stroke. When she decides the image is complete, she stops adding paint to canvas.

Now imagine a 26-year-old Michelangelo, contemplating a massive rectangular block of white marble weighing several tons, from which he has been commissioned to complete a sculpture of David for the city of Florence within two years. Every move he makes will involve carving away, removing unwanted material, in order to extract the form he visualizes as “trapped” inside the raw rock. Once he has removed all the material that isn’t David, his creative work is done.

Though photography and painting on canvas are both two-dimensional art forms that function according to the same fundamental principles of composition and design, I would argue that most photographers operate rather like subtractive sculptors—like Michelangelo.

The painter’s work is additive, beginning with an idea and a blank canvas and rendering an image with the addition of content. A painter with the skill to do so can draw from the full scope of his or her imagination to render, with the application of paint to canvas, a novel image that emerges entirely from within the artist.

In contrast, rather than a blank canvas, we photographers begin with a very full canvas indeed—the universe—or at least the parts of it that we can see. Channeling our intellect, imagination and emotions into creative goals for making a picture, our job then is to apply perspective, juxtaposition, framing and timing—our “visual chisel”—to carve away at space and time until we are left with only the subjects, quality of light, graphic elements, relationships and the decisive moment of our choice.

Michelangelo had it easy with his block of marble. To make our art, we have to subtract most of the universe! And, though a photograph can be made in an instant, the process leading to the creation of a true masterpiece often takes years, whether we are talking photography, painting, sculpture or any other art form.

The Cuernos del Paine over Lago Pehoe, Torres del Paine National Park, Chilean Patagonia. FUJIFILM GFX 50S, FUJINON LENS GF32-64mmF4 R LM WR, Singh-Ray LB Polarizer and 5-stop Mor-Slo ND filter, Really Right Stuff TVC-24L tripod and Arca-Swiss D4 geared head.

The notion of subtraction can be usefully applied to virtually all steps of the photographic process and workflow, from initial concept to visualization, pre-editing, photo composition, decisive moment, selection of keepers and trashing of rejects, image development and processing, picture selection for specific applications and final edit by end users of photographs. In all cases, it’s a matter of distilling down, cutting away the extraneous, refining the best possible expression of the photographer’s vision and the purpose or function of the photographs.

Conceptual Development & Visualization In Photography

Beginning with the initial conception of a single photograph or body of work, we can consider what we wish to express, what stories we want to tell, what vision of the world we want to share with others. We prioritize some ideas, abandon others or hold some in reserve for additional conceptual development. Then we can proceed to considering what can be photographed in order to achieve our conceptual priorities.

Visualization of imagined pictures not yet seen with the eye helps us as we consider possibilities, practicalities and the suitability of various subjects, settings and locations, as well as factors such as conditions of light and weather. As we eliminate options from consideration because they are inferior to others or logistically impossible, we are left with a concise list of picture possibilities that are—we hope—strong in concept and vision.

Pre-Editing: Learning When Not To Shoot

Once we have narrowed our concepts and vision, we can further hone our efficiency by pre-editing on location. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never particularly aspired to be the proverbial “monkey with a camera,” blazing away indiscriminately at 12 frames per second, hoping to find a few frames among the chaff that can be cropped into a meaningful picture. I only care about making a relatively small number of strong photographs, and my personal standards are high.

On our wildlife photography trips, I often remind the participants that if you care about quality and uniqueness in your photography, there is little point in flying halfway around the world to make a mediocre portrait of, say, a jaguar sleeping in harsh midday sunlight (though understandable if it’s your first-ever jaguar). We don’t go there to make the greatest volume of pictures; we go to make a few great pictures. So rather than wasting limited time and energy making pictures that we can anticipate will be either mediocre or even outright failures, we can learn to skip sub-par photographic opportunities, moving on to something more interesting and productive. I’ve spent many hours of my life trying to optimize compositions that I ultimately realized were just never going to work out, but with the benefit of experience, I am now able to look at a situation, evaluate its potential and make a sound judgment as to whether it is worth my effort. If there are stronger images waiting to be made, why waste precious time on a marginal situation? Once again, this subtractive process makes us more efficient and effective as photographers.

Sunset over saltpan pools, Death Valley National Park, California. FUJIFILM GFX 50S, FUJINON LENS GF32-64mmF4 R LM WR, Really Right Stuff TVC-24L tripod and Arca-Swiss D4 geared head.

It can be useful to ask oneself, “What qualities of light, weather, atmosphere or other circumstance do I choose to avoid when photographing this scenario?” For instance, one might avoid photographing inside a forest on a sunny day because the dappled sunlight creates hot highlights and deep black shadows that break up the elegant line and form of trees and plants in the scene, making the graphics overly complex and cluttered. It follows, of course, that photographing the same forest when the light is more diffuse—such as in fog, overcast or in twilight—will solve the problem.

Principles Of Photo Composition

A major component of photographic composition is subtracting complexity—moving in the direction of simplicity, distilling essence, imposing order on chaos, and thereby directing the viewer’s attention and perception. Beyond the subjects, quality of light and graphic elements that the photographer chooses toinclude in the frame, the timing, camera position and framing are equally defined by what the photographer chooses to exclude. We begin with a broad set of available visual raw materials, select a more limited set from among them (subtracting, therefore, those that we choose not to use), and apply the creative tools at our disposal to organize a composition and render a work of art from the more limited set.

Likewise, one might ask, “What objects, forms, lines, tones and other elements present here do I want to eliminate from the scene?” Perhaps it’s a landscape that is about the relationship between the foreground and a mountain range in the distance, while the sky is not really part of the statement the photographer is trying to make. In that case, one might choose to place the top edge of the frame just above the mountains, leaving only enough sky to frame the peaks, with a bit of room for the eye to comfortably traverse the top of the frame without feeling like the peaks are pinched tightly against the edge. This reinforces the intended juxtaposition, rather than dividing the viewer’s attention between foreground and sky in relation to the mountains.

By the way, one compositional aid that I recommend for seeking and refining compositions is what I call the “Universal Subtractor Tool.” It’s free, and there’s a very good chance you have one already. To find it, make a fist, stick out your index finger straight, and then bend your middle finger down, so it forms an “L”-shaped 90-degree angle with your index finger. Do the same with your other hand. Overlap the two “L”-shapes to make a rectangle. Your left hand forms the top and left side of the box, and your right hand forms the bottom and right side of the box. You have just created a very effective crop tool, which can be made to fit any image proportions from square to panoramic in both horizontal and vertical orientations, as well as zoomed by moving it in and out in relation to your eye. I use mine regularly to find the precise perspective and framing of a composition before I bother to set up my tripod or pull my camera out of the bag, which saves a great deal of time in the field.

Subtraction By Focus

Focus is inextricably linked to composition but in two different ways: focus of attention and placement of focal plane. The first type refers to defining a specific primary point in the scene to which the photographer wishes to direct viewers’ attention. This involves the second type: positioning the optical plane of focus within the scene, which determines what is resolved with the greatest acuity in the picture and also what areas get softer with increasing distance from the focal plane. Thus, placement of focus helps create a hierarchy of content, making clear the primary subject and establishing other elements as secondary subjects in regions that are somewhat less in focus. By throwing areas farther away from the focal plane greatly out of focus, we can also define content that is not important in terms of detail but that still provides important context, mood or background field.

Mother elephant and calf, Tarangire National Park, northern Tanzania. Nikon D810, AF-S NIKKOR 70-200mm f/4G ED VR.

You often see this selective focus technique applied to reduce visual complexity in the background, which aids in directing viewers’ attention to the main subject. Just as we can subtract elements from a composition using perspective and framing (either eliminating them or reducing their importance in the visual hierarchy), we can do the same with blur.

The Decisive Moment

A popular romantic notion about landscape photographers is that we are so committed to our art that we regularly wait ages until the light is right to make a single perfect exposure, whiling away the hours by stroking our beards and waxing poetic about the fluttering of aspen leaves, the marching of ants or the murmur of a nearby stream. Smart landscape photographers, however, figure out in advance when and where the conditions are most likely to be right to make the pictures they have visualized. Doing so determines the time by which they need to be set up and ready to make a given picture.

While it can be wonderful to peacefully contemplate the universe while waiting for the light, as long as we are ready to trip the shutter at the right moment, we don’t need to spend valuable time waiting around. The important thing is determining the right time to make the exposure, discarding other possible times. Embracing this form of pre-editing, we avoid shooting hundreds of frames that were destined for the trash can from the get-go.

Initial Picture Edit

The notion of subtraction applies once we’ve finished a shoot as well. A painter wouldn’t create thousands of new works with the intent of discarding the bulk and keeping only a handful of the best, though photographers do this all the time. A photographer’s unedited shoot is a bit like Michelangelo’s block of raw marble. The most successful fruits of the artist’s labor have yet to be separated from the chaff.

Photo editing is an art in itself. To master it, study photography and two-dimensional art through history, learn what the real state of the art is today in whatever genres you favor, maintain high standards for your work, and practice brutality when deciding which images make the cut. Your work will ultimately stand out in stark relief above the crowd.

As I review a new set of images for the first time, my priority is to identify top selects and images that are candidates to become limited-edition prints. These get backed up to an additional hard drive immediately. The next round identifies any other images that I consider worthy of keeping for my archive. All the keepers then get backed up, and everything else gets deleted. 

Morning light on the Cirque of the Towers from Horseshoe Lake, Wind River Range, Wyoming. FUJIFILM GFX 50S, FUJINON LENS GF32-64mmF4 R LM WR, Really Right Stuff TVC-24L tripod and BH-55 ballhead.

Development Of Select Images

In the processing stage, too, I typically ask myself which elements of the picture I wish to call attention and which do I want to diminish in visual priority? Do I want to darken the edges of the frame slightly to enhance the visual prominence of content nearer the center? Do I want to burn in an area to pure black to eliminate distracting texture or form in shadows, or make a background pure white, to render a minimalist composition that focuses all attention on the main subject? Rendering background as black or white is subtractive, eliminating unnecessary information from the photograph and creating negative space.

Last Steps

If you’ve ever traveled with me on a Visionary Wild expedition, you might have heard me say, “You only need one.” Personally, if I come away from a dawn landscape photography session with just one image that meets my high standards for inclusion in my limited-edition print portfolio, then I consider the outing a success. If I make two or more print-worthy images in a session, then I am over the moon.

The process of incorporating an image into my print portfolio takes quite a while. First, I “live with” the image for a matter of weeks or months, reviewing it periodically to determine whether it truly is worthy or if I am simply emotionally attached to it. If it makes the final cut, then I carry out final color-managed image development to create the fine-print master file.

Over time, some images that I’ve made available as limited editions have been retired, either by selling out the edition or because I’ve decided that they no longer represent my best work—another round of subtraction. From millions of exposures I’ve made in my lifetime, my active Lightroom library has been edited down to approximately 300,000 images, and my current portfolio of limited edition images totals only about 300 photographs that remain after carving away the universe.

Beyond that, the winnowing process continues as pictures get selected in sets from my portfolio or library for specific projects, whether a print exhibition, a book project, a magazine article, a blog post or submission to an advertising client. Curators, picture editors, art directors and designers working on these projects make final decisions about which pictures to include. At this stage, the photographer typically hopes this further visual distillation of the universe will result in his or her pictures being included in the final product, rather than being subtracted out entirely, as though David had been reduced to a pile of rock dust.

Alpine wildflowers in a glacier-carved valley, Tian Shan mountains, eastern Kyrgyzstan. Nikon D810, AF-S NIKKOR 18-35mm f/3.5-4.5G ED, Singh-Ray LB Polarizer, Really Right Stuff TVC-24L tripod and BH-55 ballhead.

Considering the subtractive aspects of photography can help you to make stronger pictures in the first place, while ensuring that your process funnels your work into a strong and continuously improving portfolio that represents a fairly concise statement of your personal vision of your world in your lifetime. After all, photography can be life-long practice, a never-ending learning experience that enriches the way we perceive the world, enables us to engage with space-time in an intimate way and adds incalculably to our purpose and meaning in life, even if we do have to subtract the universe in the process.

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