Taking Your Camera on the Road

Driving up towards Yosemite National Park in California, the sunset turned incredibly intense. Recent forest fires had left particulates in the air which turned the sunset intense reds and oranges.
Brent VanFossen quickly pulled over, looking for any subject to frame as a silhouette against this vibrant backdrop of color and found he was in a [...]

I recently stumbled across this photograph I took in one of the many markets of Istanbul, Turkey, and I wanted to share its story with you.
We love photographing markets. Everywhere in the world we travel, we look up open air, covered, above ground, underground, and ancient markets. Fish markets, cheese markets, meat markets, [...]

Risk. Danger. Anticipation. And nerves of steel. These are the thrills and spills of photographing water droplets. There is a constant threat of danger as they dangle, so close to the edge, hanging on until the last second...then splat. Gone.
We love photographing water droplets. They are lenses within your lens, offering a new [...]

There is "something" about a door. Growing up in Washington State, it was a summer and winter ritual of ours to stop along the way, crossing over the mountains to Eastern Washington to visit friends and family, at The Alps. The Alps was owned by a German immigrant family and they offered a rest stop for fun, candy, and toys. Originally a small part of their home, it has now grown into quite the complex, but in those early days, it was a magical place for children.

Alongside the highway, the home hung over the embankment and down to the river below. We'd climb down the narrow stairs to the grassy yard alongside the river turned into a small park-like setting. There were chairs to rest upon and chairs swinging under trees. A small playground and sandbox was for the smaller children. And there, in the middle of it all near the river, stood a framed door. Just a door. Nothing special, just a simple wooden door. It was weathered and slightly bowed from years of exposure to the harsh Cascade Mountain weather, paint peeling slightly, and a handle waiting to be turned.

I could look around the door. I could see everything beyond the door. But the door itself begged to be opened and passed through. You are supposed to open doors and walk through them. My mother never told us we weren't supposed to walk through walls, but after a few experiments, you understand the logic of her lack of explanation. You understood clearly that to get beyond the wall, you had to use the door. Even though this door had no walls, the compulsion to use it was fierce. It "begged" to be used. It said, "Open me."

Our language often uses windows as a reference to openings and gateways. "Eyes are the windows of the soul." In reality, it is the doors that get you where you are going. Let's examine the art of photographing the door.

Most people think of photography as a "visual" art. It is, but it also represents a "verbal" art form. Photograhy often expresses what most people hard find to say.

One of the most popular email joke forwards that makes its rounds every month or so is the collection of animal pictures that express a lot of feeling. Pictures of smiling cats and dogs, animals sleeping in amusing positions or crawling through shoes, hanging from branches, or sitting in front of the television with the remote on its lap. We look at them, impose our verbal language perceptions and go ooo and awwwww. "Look, she's laughing!" "How cute! The dog is reading the newspaper."

Photography inspires us to "feel" something. An eagle soaring makes us want to feel strong and proud. A kitten tangled in an akward position makes us shake our heads and agree, "been there, done that".

We put words on the photographs to interpret them in our minds. Why not use the words to inspire the photographs?

You have to get up early in the morning to catch dew on most things, but especially early when tracking down dew covered spider webs.

Spider webs are incredibly fragile, yet their construction and structure is the strongest of all structures in the world, even manmade. Inch for inch a spider web is stronger than steel, yet they are exceptionally elastic, stretching more than 40% of their length.

Yet, the slightest wind, heavy rain storm, or human crossing a spider web path can destroy it. For a nature photographer, finding the precious preserved spider web covered with dew is a combination of luck, weather, and planning.

Brent spotted a sheet web in the middle of the city, in a vacant lot covered with scrub and grasses. When he arrived early in the morning, luck was with him as the dew of the morning and light misting rains from the evening had collected water drops across the entire surface of the web.

When you think of Alaska, don't you imagine it as the last refuge for large wild animals in the Northern Hemisphere? A place where elk, caribou, moose, and bear still wander wild and free? On our first trip to Alaska, we were sure we would return with film covered with all things wild and woolly.

Instead, we found mosquitos, rain, and empty fields and mountain ranges. Nothing.

By the end of the first week, rain pounding our tent, we were angry and frustrated, biting and snapping at each other. The truth was we were disappointed. We didn't find any great herds of elk, caribou, moose, or even the wandering lone bear. Just a few Arctic ground squirrels, soggy and boring. Nothing close to our stereotypical vision of the last wilderness frontier. What a waste.

After a week of sneers and stabs, we called a truce. "We're in Alaska!" I shouted, "Who cares about anything else!"

We rearranged our thinking and changed our photographic mood to photograph what was THERE, visible to the eye, not to keep looking for what should be there.

In our article on backgrounds in the Composition section of our Learning Zone, we introduced you to the importance the background plays in composing nature photography images. In this behind the scenes example, we go behind the scenes to study the artistic photography techniques of creating and choosing backgrounds for your photographic composition. We show you examples of why backgrounds are important and how they influence your subject. We tell you the story, the how to, the whys, and the becauses to make these images possible, and the approach we used to capture the final image. This indepth look at backgrounds provides a great training ground to understand the role backgrounds play and how to play with your backgrounds.