I'm so excited to announce this very special, all-inclusive fall workshop. I'll be taking a group of eight photographers to one of the world's truly great cultural celebrations in one of my favorite locations.
Why I Prefer Fluid Heads For Photography, Part 1
I'm frequently asked what the weird looking tripod head in my training videos is and why I use it. I use fluid heads. Wondering what a fluid head is? Watch this video to see why you might prefer one too. If you know about fluid heads, but you think they are too expensive, heavy or complicated, watch this video to see me debunk that. I think that anyone who regularly uses a ball head will have a hard time going back after using a fluid head for just one photo shoot.
Update: Part 2, Connecting Your Camera
Here's a list of the gear I feature in this video with Amazon links.
Manfrotto MVH500AH Fluid Head (1.9 lbs /$135 It's an insane deal on a better head)
Spare Fluid Head Plate (for long lenses, etc)
Arca Swiss Clamp (I screw this to the head's mounting plate)
2nd Clamp (clamp this into the clamp above to fit lens foot rails at 90 degrees)
Induro Grand Stealth Carbon Tripod (choose the style & size)
Induro Leveling Adaptor (leveling bowl and flat mount that I use)
Alternate bowl and leveling adaptor (a little cheaper)
Leveling adaptor for non-bowl Tripod (if you want to use this with center-column legs)
Acratech Ultimate Ballhead (my ultralight setup)
Wimberly Sidekick (the gimbal ballhead adaptor I show at the end)
Cheaper alternative to Sidekick (I haven't used this, but it gets good reviews)
Sachtler FSB-6 (my favorite head, but 4.4 pounds and over $1200)
Gitzo GT3543XLS (my favorite tripod, so tall, light, versatile, and expensive)
My First Day With Google's New Pixel Phone
Our new Google Pixel phones arrived Saturday. Here's a video with my impression after using this flagship Android device for the first day. Yeah, the phone is amazing and it's camera is fantastic.
Here is a dropbox link for you to download a few full resolution shots from yesterday. These are straight out of the Pixel's camera with no edits.
Be sure to buy your Pixel phones direct from Google for the reasons I state in the video.
Must have accessories:
- USB-Micro to USB-C adaptor: You don't need to buy all new cords with these.
- Case: I'm using these nice cheap ones until Google gets it's nicer cases back in stock.
- Portable Quick Charge 3.0 Backups. Amazing deal on a compact one and/or a large capacity one. These will both take advantage of Pixel's super fast charging ability.
Here are some pics...
Read MoreTime & Shutter Speed: from My Landscape & Travel Series
This video is one of a much larger video series course on landscape and travel photography that I created for the ON1 Plus photography community. The course has 14 videos covering everything from photography basics to time-lapse and HDR capture and runs over 5 hours of content.
How can you access these videos? You need to be part of ON1's Plus photography coaching community.
RIGHT NOW MEMBERSHIP IS ON SALE FOR JUST $59.99 FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR!
Those of you who are members know that you get streaming and offline access to 100s of videos by Matt Kloskowski and I on everything from editing in ON1 and Adobe software to field technique training as well as regular photo critiques, private forum discussions, photo challenges, and topic discussions by us and frequent guest coaches. It's a really unique, vibrant, interactive and collaborative community. It's also a sweet deal and you can grab it here...
Gearing Up: South Padre Island with Pike
This Tuesday Stacey, Pike, a few friends and I head out for a Kitesurfing and photo adventure on South Padre, a barrier island just off Texas. It's a place with warm water and steady wind. At seven weeks old it's Pike's first big trip and I'm stoked to capture not just landscape and action photos, but also of to document his first beach island experience. How much gear do we need for this? We made this one minute video to highlight the challenge of packing for air travel with photo gear, kite gear and Pike's accessories. I'll be posting on Facebook and Instagram along the way.
Fast and Light: Skiing & Photographing Mount Saint Helens 2016
Join me and some northwest friends for a spring backcountry-ski and split-board trip up 5,800 feet to the crater rim of Mount Saint Helens. In this five minute video I cover the camera gear I carry for this kind of fast-and-light photo/video adventure and how I carry it to both protect my gear and maximize accessibility. I also briefly discuss my approach to photographing fast moving action such as snow-sports.
I keep getting the question, "what about the baby?" I had to discourage Stacey from carrying Pike part way up on snowshoes because of the weather, but we did take him kiteboarding on the coast last week. ;-)
Gear: Below is a list of links to the photo/video equipment I carried on this trip.
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Capturing and Editing Still Photos for Timelapse
WHY TIME-LAPSE?
As photographers we constantly make creative decisions involving time and movement. We use long exposures to accentuate motion over time. We freeze time with fast exposures to capture the power of athletes in motion. Creating time-lapse video is another really fun way to visually dramatize time. It allows us to dabble in a new realm and capture the world of movement that we see around us in new and exciting ways.
Frequently students ask me if their digital cameras are capable of producing high-definition time-lapse and the answer is an emphatic yes. Film and video are simply a series of still frames played at 24 or 30 frames per second. Each frame of high definition 1080p video is only seven megapixels in size. Not only that, to keep file sizes small, digital video recording is so highly compressed that the ability to post process it is highly compromised. That means that a time-lapse created from a 14-megapixel still camera’s RAW images will be many times more editable than, as well as twice the resolution of, traditional video filmed in high definition.
FRAMES PER SECOND (FPS):
Before we delve any deeper I want to demystify the term frames-per-second (“FPS”) as it applies to video playback...
Read MorePANORAMIC MERGER IN DEPTH: TORRES DEL PAINE, CHILE
View in HD: The depth and enlargeability of an ultra-hi-rez panoramic-merger.
Panoramic Mergers. I stumbled across the technique a decade ago when I was wishing for a wider angle lens for my medium format film camera.
On an amazingly calm Patagonian morning last month this scene could have been easily captured with a single frame with my Nikon D810, but by instead making a panoramic-merger from 8 images I created this highly-enlargeable, 80-megapixel image. Have I mentioned that I love this stuff?
Check out this gallery of select panoramic mergers. You can view this image full screen there.
Patagonia Time-lapse: Cerro Torre While We Slept...
We had an amazing star show as we slept at Lago Torre in Argentina. Even more rare -- calm water in these wind ravaged mountains. It was a rare opportunity and I left both my Nikons (D810 and D750) running as we tucked into our tent that night. Watching this video makes me long to get back there.
Creating a Print in the Studio
I'm so pleased to be shipping this 24 x 36" print off to Joe Del Grosso who submitted the winning bid in a charity auction benefiting survivors of Washington State's wildfires. Here's a timelapse of it's creation in the new studio space.