luxBorealis.com January 2011 Photo Newsletter

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Paris Moraine, Winter EveningPhoto Newsletter – January 2011

Welcome to 2011! How’s that diet going –not so well? Consider setting some photography goals for yourself this year, instead. Is there a par-ticular destination you want to photograph or have you set yourself a theme or two to work on? Maybe it’s a foray into black-and-white or learn-ing about printing images effectively. Perhaps there’s a marriage or special birthday you wish to commemorate with a photo book, calendar or slideshow.

You’ll notice that I haven’t mentioned the “g” word, yet. Some enthusiasts set their goals by the gear they acquire (ooops, I said it) – the next lens or flash or perhaps an updated body (wouldn’t we all like that!)

But photography is about seeing.. Sure some equipment might help you capture what you see more precisely, but, gear has never made a great photograph – that can only come from the vision of the photographer.

Try setting yourself some visual goals this year. Personal projects work best for keeping you motivated: capturing a specific park or neigh-bourhood or local river in four season, or learning a new technique – stars or fireworks or close-ups of wood grain…now is the time to set some goals.

This Month:

Winter PhotographyOf all the seasons, there is something special

about winter that makes photography particularly satisfying. Winter is so completely different from the other three seasons: it’s stark, yet, depending on the light, colours can be either sombre and muted or breathtakingly vibrant. Places you have come to know in spring or summer are completely transformed with snow blanketing the ground. As always, lighting is the key, and in winter it can be challenging: without the sun shining, snow be-comes pasty-looking with few features and no tex-ture. Yet, with sunshine there is the challenge of high contrast and heavy shadows. Achieving cor-rect exposure becomes a matter of balancing the whiteness of snow without losing details in the highlights.

Overriding all of this, however, is the small matter of successfully overcoming the cold! It’s great to be outside in the bright snowy world of winter, but if you’re uncomfortably cold, it’s no fun. As I’m sure you’ve heard hundreds of times – dress in layers. The more air you can trap in lay-ers, the warmer you’ll be. And, if you start to get

too warm, you can unzip to vent and/or remove layers.

When working with a metal tripod, your hands are especially vulnerable to cold. Ideally, you al-ways want to have gloves on; I often wear a thin pair of gloves with a thicker pair of mittens or nylon/GoreTex overmitts. Gloves with rubberized or textured fingers and palm help to grip cold equipment. I do all my set up with both layers on, then take off the overmitts to work the finer cam-era controls. Some photographers prefer fingerless gloves, but I’ve not found them warm enough when my fingers touch a cold camera.

The other part to keep warm is your feet. If you’re like me, you’ll find yourself standing around waiting for the ideal light or the wind to stop blowing. An extra thick pair of socks inside good felt liners will keep your toes toasty. I also put on a pair of silk socks liners for added com-fort.

In fact, having a good set of long underwear is essential. Cotton is good but it absorbs sweat and makes you clammy rather than wicking sweat away from the body to keep you warm like poly-propylene does. Silk, too, is wonderful: it’s a natu-ral fibre and not more expensive than a good set of polypropylene.

Follow my Blog at luxBorealis.wordpress.com. My website is it luxBorealis.com and my Gallery can now be found at QuietLight.caNote: All the words in green type are hyperlinked to the corresponding website or email address. Just click and go – but do come back and continue reading!

luxBorealis.com photography by Terry A. McDonaldinfo@luxborealis.com 79 Vanier Drive, Guelph, ON N1G 2K9 519.265.4151

luxBorealis.com January 2011 Photo Newsletter

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The layer you wear over your fleece or wool top and bottoms really needs to be windproof. I find that a windproof anorak or coat and trousers is more important than having inches of insula-tion. It gives me the flexibility to cool down when needed and, unless I’m in –30°C weather and standing for hours, I’m fine in long underwear with a turtle neck and good fleece top with fleece pants all covered with GoreTex. As soon as I start tromping or skiing to the next photo, I’m warm

again in minutes. As I warm up, I vent excess heat by unzipping or loosening cuffs.

Now that you’re toasty, it’s time to head outside into the field. Your gear is fine in a zip-up camera bag.; I tend to use a waist pack or my shooting vest in winter to keep things handy and up out of the snow. Keeping your spare batteries in an inside coat pocket will keep them warm and active, but your camera should not be kept in your coat. All your body moisture is in there – moisture that can end up freezing inside the camera when it sits on a tripod for even a few minutes. You’ll also end up with less condensation in the lens if you keep the cam-era outside in the cold. To prevent condensation when you go back inside, keep your equipment zipped up in your camera pack or vest until it has warmed. If your battery dies in the cold, just replace it with a spare. Once the “dead” battery warms again, it will probably still have juice.

Just like the rest of the year, I prefer early mornings or late af-ternoons for nature photography and landscapes: warm tones and low sun angles create great col-our contrasts and shadows. The nice thing about winter is that sunrise isn’t until 7:30 or 8am – a much more realistic time than summer! Also, with lower sun angles, shooting can continue through the morning. For my

style of photography, afternoons are a bit dull un-til around 3pm. That being said, a lot depends on the subject. Wooden buildings and barns might just be ideal with higher sun angles.

The problem with winter photography, though, is how to tame the highlights. If you rely solely on your light meter, snow will be underexposed by 1½ to 2 stops and shadows will be black. Try it! Take a picture of

snow only: your image will be grey and your his-togram will be all bunched in the middle – not ideal for full-toned images. While it can be recov-ered in post-capture processing, you have literally thrown away half of the most usable pixels of light: as you increase exposure on computer, you are “stretching” the middle pixels to fit into the

In winter, the mantra“Expose to the right!”is even more critical.

Snow, Dorset 120mm; ƒ8 @ 1/30; ISO 200On overcast days, shift your focus to shapes, textures and tones and avoid the blank white sky as much as possible. Be sure to exposure to the right raising ex-posure values to take full advantage of limited tonality.

Hoar Frost and Snow, 44mm; ƒ8 @ 1/640 ; ISO 100The beauty of hoar frosty on clear, sunny day. When shoot-ing this, I raised the exposure by +1 to maintain the true white of the snow.

luxBorealis.com January 2011 Photo Newsletter

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highlights which introduces noise in the shadows and reduces colour information.

For this reason, in winter, the mantra “Expose to the right!” is even more critical. Turn on the “highlight clipping” option in your playback menu and watch your histogram (see the Novem-

ber 2010 Newsletter). After your first exposure, keep adding exposure by dialing in exposure compensation until the highlights start blinking. Small specular highlights will become overex-posed first but that’s okay. It’s the expanses of snow and sky you don’t want to lose to pure white.

But enough of the technical, photography is about seeing images. In winter, I am most often trying to take advantage of the shapes and tex-tures I see to build them into the scenes in front of me. Often, it’s a shape or texture or dramatic lighting that catches my eye and becomes, for me,

the key element or focal point. I will then work towards composing an image which accentuates that key element within the larger landscape.This is predominantly a mental-visual process, aided by looking through the viewfinder or a shooting card – a black rectangle of card with a rectangle cut out, like a frame or mat. Visualizing the image ahead of time is critical for two reasons:1.from a visual perspective, the more I work off-tripod in composing the image, the less hassle I have in setting up the tripod in the correct spot at the correct level;

2. in a more practical sense, I don’t want to be stepping on and leaving footprints in places where I want pristine snow!

For this reason, I often approach a scene thinking carefully about the foreground and what role it will play in the image then gradually work my way into the scene being careful not to ruin the snow for other images.

The biggest difficulty in winter photography is with overcast skies. The snow becomes pasty-looking with no texture. If the sky occupies a large expanse, as it might in land-scapes, the photograph can look drab. In these situations, I reduce or eliminate sky and I use snow as an accent: clinging to tree limbs and branches creating their own designs.

Careful metering is also important – you need to raise the values as high as possible to ensure you have enough tonality to play with in processing. The initial capture will look washed out, but by increasing the “Blacks” you can create the con-trast needed.

Winter also holds wonderful surprises, such as waking up one morning to fresh snow and sun-shine or, better yet, hoar frost. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it is truly magical. The world is sugar-frosted, but lasts for only a short while before the morning sun melts it away. The key is being prepared. Get out in the snow and get practicing to develop a better understanding of how to stay warm, correct metering and creat-ing dynamic compositions under difficult condi-tions. m

Winter changes the landscape so dramatically that even familiar places take on a completely new character. Low sun angles produce great long shadows and intricate texture.

Winter Dawn, Killarney Provincial Park 200mm; ƒ8 @ 1/60; ISO 50Early morning is magic and, at 7:30am, not too early. Colour contrasts are especially evident with cool shadows and warm highlights.

luxBorealis.com January 2011 Photo Newsletter

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Flurries 72mm; ƒ8 @ 1/40; ISO 100

Eramosa River, Winter 24mm; ƒ11 @ 1/200; ISO 100

Cedar & Snow 80mm; ƒ16 @ 10sec ISO 100

Latest ImagesI spent much of the Christmas season visiting with friends, spending time with

family and, of course, eating! I would have preferred to be out photographing, but the snow conditions were lousy and shortly after Christmas we had rain and a high of 10°C! That gave me a good excuse to stay in and work on a new online gallery of my work at QuietLight.ca. “A gallery of fine art photographs celebrating the art in-herent in nature” which pretty much sums up my motivation for photography. How-ever, I have managed to get out to do a bit of shooting. Here is what caught my eye.

More Recent Work >

Blustery Day 64mm; ƒ16 @ 1/200; ISO 100

Evening Light, Rockwood64mm ƒ/11 @ ⅓; ISO 100

luxBorealis.com January 2011 Photo Newsletter

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PhotoNews & LinksWith CES International having just finished, there is a whole slew of new gear to whet your appetite. Yes, photography is now firmly entrenched in the “electronics” world of stereos and game-boys. dpReview.com has put together a great summery of all the announcements.

CES on dpReview >

With their website The Big Picture, the Boston Globe seems to be doing today what Life maga-zine once did from the 1940s to the 1960s – pub-lish compelling images of events from around the world. Have a look at some truly remarkable im-ages that tell the story of lives lived the world over.

The Big Picture >

Featured PhotographerCharlie Waite is, perhaps, the consummate

photographer of English landscapes. He must be a patient man, for he captures the land at the su-preme moment when light creates a new reality. Whether he’s working in black and white or col-our, Charlie Waite’s photographs are true por-traits, revealing new aspects of commonly-known landscapes .

He’s also humble about his work and the grand vistas around us. His website opens with: “I often think of that rare, fulfilling joy when I am in the presence of some wonderful alignment of events. Where the light, the shapes, the colour and the balance all interlock so beautifully that I feel truly overwhelmed by the wonder of it.”

Charlie Waite Gallery >

A Call for Submissions

Either you haven’t been photographing or you’ve fallen off the face of the Earth! Send in your images, your ideas, your questions! Show us your latest shots, tell us about interesting places to photograph. Your contributions are welcome – just drop me an email – terry@luxborealis.com

Thinking big?

Think posterjack.caWhenever you order enlargements,

canvas photos and framed photos from posterjack.ca, enter the voucher code

luxBux to receive a 15% discount!

Hilton Falls, Winter 28mm; ƒ8 @ 0.4sec; ISO 100

Hot SpotHilton Falls is a fairly large conservation area located just north of Hwy 401 and east of Campbellville.

There is an extensive trail network traversing a large expanse of mostly deciduous forest. About 1km from the parking lot is Hilton Falls, itself – a small waterfall dropping 10m over the Niagara Escarpment – not spectacular by Tews or Spencer Falls standards, but picturesque nonetheless. A morning or afternoon spent wandering or even cross-country skiing around the park should yield some dynamic images. Try to get there soon after a snowfall to ensure you get undisturbed snow. M

Conservation Halton – Hilton Falls >