First and foremost, a happy new year to all of you, my lovely readers. Whether you check in now and then or have been a reader for several years, it is solely for you that I do this. Believe me, when I talk to myself I don’t do nearly as much editing.

Anyway, what better way to ring in the new year and to step back from the commotion of life, if only for a moment, to appreciate the bigger picture than… With a picture? A picture exactly one year in the making, in fact.

Michael Chrisman, a 31-year-old photographer living in Toronto, set up a small pinhole camera on January 1, 2010, overlooking the city’s skyline. On new year’s eve, he collected it. The developed picture is shown to the right, and I have to say, I love it.

In the image you can clearly see the trails of the sun across the sky, each one tracing a slightly different path as the Earth tilts on its axis through the course of the year. You can see the reflections in the water, and you can easily make out the CN Tower, Toronto’s most distinct fixture.

Think about this for a minute. A tiny pinhole sat open for 31.5 million seconds, sending beams of light toward a piece of photographic paper, capturing an image that by itself represents a year of activity. Three hundred and sixty five revolutions of our planet around its sun.

It’s a great way to put life in perspective, I think. I wish you all the best in 2012, stay tuned for more photography talk in the coming weeks.

Please read more about Michael’s creation on thestar.com: Year-long exposure of Toronto skyline produces ‘dreamy’ image

Dennis Calvert shares a really neat light painting technique on his blog that he calls “Man on Fire.” It basically involves creating a darkened silhouette by firing a remote flash behind a subject to overexpose the background behind them, and then “painting” in the silhouetted area with some neat little light wands.

I’m sure you could do this with subjects other than people and with light wands other than the ones Dennis uses. The result, I think, is pretty spectacular. Because the background is blown out, bits of light trail that go outside of the silhouette area become wispy and look very cool.

Believe it or not, the image is straight out of the camera, no post-processing or alterations at all.

Go check out the whole article on Dennis’s blog where you will also find a time-lapse video of the making of the image, which is pretty neat in its own right.

I’ve posted about this before, but there is something so romantic about being able to do professional-looking product photography right in your kitchen and sharing the images with the Internet at large and watching them fumble all over themselves to figure out which studio you hired.

This is essentially the culmination of the progressively tumbling costs of photography equipment and exploding mindshare of innovators on the Internet. There are now low-cost solutions to problems that were insurmountable to the layman until only a few years ago and we have not only the actual photographic technology to thank for that, but also sites like handmade spark, who provide marketing advice to Etsy sellers.

I won’t delve too deeply into what Etsy is for anyone who may not know because it’s a bit beyond the reach of my topic here, but it is a marketplace of sorts, and thus it benefits greatly from well-executed product photography.

In any case, handmade spark posted an article about how to set up a really simple aluminum foil reflector setup that uses natural light to illuminate your (small) product subject and when I saw it I immediately thought (I’m really not kidding), This is exactly the kind of stuff my SSP audience would love to see.

This is miles beyond the whole Strobist crowd with their SB800s and their watt-seconds and their multiple white balances. There is a time and a place for off-camera flash, but check this out… We are lighting a product on our kitchen tables with aluminum foil-wrapped cardboard and we are getting sweet results.

Alright, I feel as though I’ve gushed about this enough. Read it for yourself: Studio Quality Product Photography with a $12 Set Up

Here’s a little taste of what the final product looked like using his techniques (this is a 100% crop of the final photo, click for the full size version):

Head over to Alex’s blog to see his lighting setup and read his tips on how to pull this off.

Why? Because there is more data in the brightest few stops of sensor attenuation than in the rest of the entire range, which is to say that there will be more detail, less banding, less noise, and so forth, within the brightest areas than there will be in the darkest ones. But you’ve observed that before, right? You’ve seen how terrible shadow areas can look when you try to brighten them up.

“It’s better to overexpose a photo than to underexpose it.“—Will Greenwald

Then there’s this guy Will Greenwald. He just posted a whole article about this in which he says “it’s better to overexpose a photo than to underexpose it.” Awesome, I agree. But neither of us are saying you should “blow out” any of your image; definitely don’t do that.

Strangely, most of the people who commented on Will’s article disagreed with him. Those people are amateurs.

Why would I say that? I don’t even know them, and I am not prone to hyperbole or dirt-kicking. I’m really not. I’m also sure that all of those people are well-versed, smart individuals. It’s just that… I guess they don’t “get around” much in digital photography circles.

You see, I know something they don’t, and I learned it from an article by Michael Reichmann written some time back around 2003. I don’t need to tell you who Michael Reichmann is, do I? This information is not bleeding edge, it’s not new news. When Chris Blake and I teach our photography workshops, which I plug on this blog shamelessly and regularly, one of the first things we talk about is “exposing to the right,” and we’ve been doing that for three years.

Michael’s article is titled, with tongue pressed firmly into cheek, Expose Right. He means “to the right of the histogram” as much as he means “correctly.” Read that article if you want all of the technical “nitty gritty” involved in digital sensor attenuation and so forth.

You’ll read about how Michael was chatting with Thomas Knoll. You know, the guy who wrote Photoshop. You’ll learn about how they came to agree upon the fact that more detail lives in the brightest areas of an image than in the darkest ones. That’s all you need to know. You don’t need to get any deeper into the technology in order to use this rule.

Okay, so…

How do you use this rule?

I’m glad you asked. This is all you need to remember.

If possible, increase your image’s overall exposure until the histogram touches the right edge.

There are plenty of reasons that you may not be able to do that including subject motion, lack of light, and so on. Do the best you can. Tend toward the right of the histogram.

The image shouldn’t be clipped, which means that if your camera shows little blinking spots where things are overexposed, that’s still bad, but get that graph to move over to the right as far as you can without compromising the image.

If, like me, you operate in aperture-priority or aperture-value mode (Canon Av, Nikon A) all you have to do is use your “exposure value,” or EV, setting to increase the exposure of the image as far as you can up until the histogram data touches the right edge of the graph. If you can’t get it all the way over there without compromising the shot, don’t worry about it. This is a rule of thumb only.

Then what?

Then you take your photos home and import them into Lightroom and use the Develop module to adjust the overall brightness of the image using the exposure slider and curves and anything else you need to until it looks good to you. That’s really it.

Here are some things that you are going to complain about, and why you shouldn’t:

• On your camera’s LCD screen, an image exposed to the right may look very bright, and may look desaturated. It’s OK. There is just as much color data in the image as there was when it was center-exposed, and when you bring it into Lightroom you can draw that color out, but this time with more detail than ever.

Okay, so that was only one complaint. If you have other complaints, leave them down there in the comments!

Do you expose to the right already? Do you like it? Do you hate it? Leave a comment and let us all know!

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m out here in the great American west—“big sky country,” if you want to call it that—and some of the sights I’ve seen were nothing less than demanding of a panoramic treatment. On top of that, I suffer from a devastating case of technolust and wanted to really put “AutoPano Giga” through the paces. Well, I sure did. I also probably melted the heat sink off my poor laptop’s CPU…

Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In the case of AutoPano Giga, I think he was wrong; I think it actually is magic. I have tried a few panorama tools out there; the free and open-source Panotools, a couple of Mac-exclusive ones, and so on. AutoPano Giga is so easy and so fast and so accurate, it blows them all out of the water. Of course it also costs an arm and a leg, but at least you know why.

After the break, actual panoramas!

One of the awesome things about AutoPano Giga is that it reads the EXIF data from your photos to figure out what kind of lens you used, and then adjusts for distortion based on that information. Essentially, this makes it totally kick ass at stitching together fisheye photographs, which normally do not directly overlap whatsoever. The edges have to be flanged out before two fisheye photos taken side-by-side will match up.

This one, taken at “Black Sand Basin” in Yellowstone, was stitched together from only two 15mm fisheye images (I wanted to limit the number in order to take them rapidly because the steam was moving quickly and when parts of the scene move a lot from one image to the next it can cause ghosting and stitching issues). Click for a larger view.

I think you get more of a sense of the vastness of a space from a good panoramic image. This place is as big as it looks.

While leaving the Grand Teton national Park earlier in the week, we stopped by the site of the “Cunningham Cabin,” which is exactly what it sounds like it is. The cabin itself, though, wasn’t much to look at. I was more intoxicated by the mountain range in the distance and the clarity of the sky and clouds. My New England brain, drunk on what is actually a somewhat average afternoon sky in Wyoming, required the capture of a panorama.

Of course, what you can’t tell by looking at it on this blog is that at actual size, it’s this big:

The total dimensions of this panorama are 11,154 by 3,186 pixels. I could make a very respectable five-foot-wide print of this image with perfect clarity!

Finally, on the last morning in Yellowstone, I wound up on this snow-covered road on the east side of the park and just had to try a crazy panorama. By “crazy” I mean that I didn’t just turn around, taking each photo beside the last. I tossed in a total of 53 images, some pointing up, some down, some tilted to the side a bit… Just to see what AutoPano Giga could do with them.

Click to embiggen!

I did this one on my laptop, so in order to make it possible I exported the original 53 images from Lightroom at about 800 pixels wide. If you look closely on the right side, you can see a little stitching error causing a notch in the far side of the road. I am convinced that this happened because of the limited detail in the smaller input files; when I get home to my big desktop I will attempt it again with 53 full-size 22-megapixel images.

Some of the things about AutoPano Giga that make creating these panoramas easier (or in some cases possible) include:

• The ability to augment the software’s automatic “control point” detection, which is how it links features in one photo to those in another (the core of the “stitching” process); for what it’s worth I’ve almost never had to use it, the SIFT key extraction of APG is extremely good,
• Center point, horizon detection, and vertical correction tools, which allow you to basically coach the software as to what you want the center point to be, or what feature(s) you ultimately want to be horizontal or vertical,
• Numeric yaw, pitch, and roll adjustment, which permits you to tweak the projection of the final image such that the perspective appears the way you want it to,
• Mercator, planar, spherical, and cylindrical projection models, which—although my understanding of projection is limited—essentially gives you a few basic effects to choose from when mapping the images into a flat environment.

With regard to the projection models, cylindrical tends to work best when you have one or more rows of images taken very evenly, whereas spherical and Mercator tend to work better when the images are somewhat more chaotic. I know that’s not an entirely accurate statement, but if you want to know more about projection models… Wikipedia is your friend.

The real challenge of panoramas is that once they’re stitched together, you inevitably wind up with a weird patchwork of images that needs to be cropped down. Here is what the Cunningham Cabin panorama looked like before cropping:

As you can see, you generally want to photograph beyond the edges of what the final panorama will include, because after distorting and stretching the images to fit together, you lose a lot of corners.

One other thing I should mention, although I haven’t yet tried it myself, is that if you bracket¹ each image in your panorama, AutoPano Giga will also “fuse” the exposures, preserving more highlight and shadow detail. Now, you don’t have a ton of control over that process; it’s very hands-off, unlike Photomatix Pro or some of the other actual “HDR” software out there, but it sure makes the whole panorama creation easy!

That’s all I have right now for panomania!, but if you folks have any questions or comments, there are a couple of boxes down there at the bottom that you can use to share them, and I continue to encourage it!

1. Bracketing means taking the same photo with different exposure settings, generally something like -1 EV, 0 EV, +1 EV

Over on the right you see a photograph taken by Michael “Nick” Nichols (and his team) for National Geographic, which is on the cover (well, part of it is on the cover, it’s a huge photograph) of the October issue of the magazine.

The image was made by jigsawing 83 separate photographs together (which you can probably tell by the jagged edges), each of which was taken by one of three DSLR cameras mounted on a gyroscope-leveled, pulley-lowered rig that Nichols and his team designed for the purpose. You can check out the photo on Hack a Day of Nichols with his rig; it looks like they’ve got six Pocket Wizards on there (I don’t know what the other three are for) and maybe a couple of bicycle wheels. All in all, a very righteous hack.

This particular redwood is allegedly the “most architecturally interesting” tree in the world, with several forks and bends stretching 300 feet into the sky. It’s only been standing there for over 1,500 years(!!), but now it has been recorded in the annals of photographic history forever.

Via (one of my favorite blogs) Hack a Day, via National Geographic, via NPR

I am very excited to announce a photography workshop in Death Valley National Park, California, hosted by Christopher Blake and Aaron Bieber (that’s me!), to take place in April of 2008.

This will be a thrilling four-day workshop in Death Valley open to photographers of all skill levels. We’ll spend four days and nights making photographs from before sunrise until well into the night. Aaron and Chris will serve as your guides to aesthetic approach and technical application as you explore some of these breathtaking Death Valley locations:

• Badwater
• Artist’s Palette
• Dante’s View
• Stovepipe Well Dunes
• Eureka Dunes
• Golden Canyon
• Devil’s Golf Course
• The Alabama Hills
• and more!

There will be a strong focus on night photography including work with light painting and star trails. This workshop is designed to coincide with the new moon, giving us nights filled with stars. If you have never done photography at night before, or if you want to get better at it, this is the right workshop for you. Between the two of us we have 12 years of experience making wonderful images at night.

This workshop gives you the opportunity to photograph a famous and unique location with two professional photographers who will help you get the most out of every hour and out of every exposure.

Who should attend this workshop?

Anyone who wants to advance their photography skills and get the absolute most out of a trip to Death Valley. In a limited amount of time we’ll bring you to the best locations at the best times and work with you both in the field and in front of the computer to help you get great results.

Itinerary

Here’s the plan.

Friday April 4th

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We will meet in the afternoon (you’ll be emailed the exact time and place to meet at least two weeks prior to the workshop). Each participant will receive a workshop package including information and equipment (listed below). We will then have introductions, get to know one another, and get a feel for what each of you hope to accomplish during the workshop. We will set out in the early evening to photograph sunset and then do an introduction to night photography.

Saturday April 5th – Monday April 7th

Each day of the workshop will be broken up into three sessions, described here:

Session 1 – Dawn

We’ll meet in an agreed upon location and set out to photograph dawn, then return to the inn for breakfast.

Session 2 – Late morning

After breakfast we’ll get together to review the work we’ve done so far, go over any questions, and plan shooting locations for the remainder of the day. Participants who shoot digital and have a laptop with them are welcome to share their work with the group. Chris and Aaron will be available to do one-on-one critiques and offer guidance.

There are a few locations that can be effective during morning and afternoon sun, such as Golden Canyon, so we may opt to explore one of those locations together during the day. If you wish to explore on your own, you are welcome to.

Session 3 – Sunset

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We will travel to our chosen location to photograph sunset. After night falls, we will commence night photography sessions. It is not unusual for the ambitious in the group to photograph well into the night.

Note: Some of you may not want to join us for the next sunrise session. You can meet us at breakfast, normally around 9-9:30 AM.

Since the conditions in Death Valley change from day to day, it’s impossible to predict the perfect location for each session. Both Chris and Aaron have a good deal of experience with Death Valley and will plan our locations to best fit the changing conditions. Our first priority is making great photographs, no matter what the circumstances.

Though we will be photographing locations as a group, each will offer the opportunity to spread out across a large area. Two-way radios can come in handy, so we’re going to give you one. It’s an effective method for the group to communicate across distances of a mile or more, and we’ll also use the radios to communicate between vehicles while traveling to each location.

Registration

The cost of this once-in-a-lifetime experience is only $1,199 and is open to photographers of all skill levels. To register, please send us an email. We accept all major credit cards as well as personal checks. After you contact us, we’ll mail you our registration package. Workshops are filled on a first-come first-served basis, so don’t miss out!

Workshop fees are refundable up to 60 days before the workshop, less 10% for processing fees. Within 60 days of the workshop a refund is not possible.

Please feel free to e-mail us with any questions.

This workshop will have a maximum of ten participants. Sorry, but no guests are permitted to tag along. We find that the group is most focused and productive when we are all actively photographing, and we don’t want to dilute the experience for any of our attendees.

Important Notes

• This is not an all-inclusive trip and as such does not include transportation, food, or lodging. Your registration package will contain a thorough list of available hotels and campgrounds as well as our advice on staying in Death Valley.
• Though meal cost is not included, we’ll eat at the same time each day and you may wish to join us, or feel free to go out on your own during this time.
• Your registration package will also include detailed information on the trip as well as a very basic questionnaire that we use to tailor the workshop for you.
• We will not be taking any long hikes, but some hiking will be required. This is not a stressful amount of exercise by any means, but you should be in decent physical shape and able to navigate the irregular desert terrain.

Gear

You’ll need some things on this trip…

What you should bring

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Although this workshop is open to all skill levels, you should have at least a 35mm SLR (digital or film) camera and a tripod. You should also have a basic understanding of how your camera works. We would be glad to help you get the most out of your equipment while on the workshop, but it won’t be a fundamental course, so be sure you are familiar with the basics.

If you want to brush up or review, you may want to read these articles (posted here):

• Histograms, Huh?
• Be a Control Freak—Shooting Modes Explained
• Focal Length Reciprocal Rule

And also these assorted articles from Earthbound Light Photography:

• I Bought a Digital Camera But My Photos Are Still Blurry
• Program vs. Aperture Priority vs. Shutter Priority vs. Manual

If you are interested in advice on what to bring (or what to buy), you can email Chris. He has a lot of equipment experience and would be happy to share it with you.

The weather in Death Valley can go from very warm to very cold. You should pack accordingly, keeping in mind that in windy conditions before dawn and after the sun goes down it can feel very cold.

What we will give you

As part of the workshop experience, we will provide you with a few essential items that we have found to be indispensable on these trips. The Death Valley Workshop package includes a GMRS (family band) two-way radio with several-mile range; a bright xenon flashlight for light painting and general navigation; a rugged, waterproof National Geographic map of the park that we will refer to often; and lots of information about the art and science of photographing on location and specifically in Death Valley. All of these items are, of course, yours to keep.

Who are you?

Here’s a little about us and why you’re going to love to learn and explore with us in Death Valley.

Christopher Blake

I am a fine art travel photographer living in the Boston area. I have worked exclusively with digital cameras for the past six years, focusing on traditional fine art landscapes, HDR (high dynamic range), and night photography. I have an extensive background in information technology and I leverage that knowledge to get the most out of my photographs. I am excited to share my experience in travel photography with you in Death Valley!

View Chris’s gallery, The Curious Lens.

Aaron Bieber

I am an illustrator, photographer, web and graphic designer living and working on the scenic Connecticut coast (I am also the author of this blog). Though I have been very serious about photography for many years, I come from a traditional art background and I have written at length on the topics of photography as an art form and the techniques and practices unique to photography as a medium for artistic expression. My main interests in photography are geometric abstractions and exploring the invisible world as can only be seen through the lens of a camera.

With over ten years of Photoshop experience and as an outspoken fan of Photoshop Lightroom, I do my best work in post-production. I look forward to helping you make the most of a very unique experience during this workshop!

View Aaron’s gallery, Fisheye Multimedia Galleries

Ready to Register?

Just send an e-mail to Death Valley Workshop registration and let us know!

Having spent most of my developing years surrounded by it, I have always taken for granted many of the fundamental guidelines of art. Perhaps due to the complexity of its technical aspects, formal photography courses tend to focus (no pun intended) on the equipment and techniques of creating images and not as much on their content.

Learning the traditional “rules” of art (or what I would call the rules of design) is important for two specific reasons. First and foremost, to make your work better. Following the rules—as well as judiciously breaking them—will strengthen your compositions, but you need to know what they are before you can do either. Second, to enhance your critiquing ability. By learning the basic terminology of art you will be able to take full advantage of critique from your peers as well as articulate your own.

So let’s get started! Today I’ll be discussing texture.

So what exactly is texture?

texture adj. (pl. textures)

1. The feel or shape of a surface or substance; the smoothness, roughness, softness, etc. of something

In painting, texture is sometimes used to add dimension to a piece beyond its mere color and shape. The technique of building up thick layers of paint to form raised peaks and waves is called impasto and has been in use for centuries. Masters such as Rembrandt as well as notable modern artists such as DeKooning were big fans of impasto. Light reflects off of the contoured surfaces of raised paint, sometimes casting small shadows, allowing the painter to create additional levels of realism in fabrics or to add the impression of motion.

In photography, texture can play a significant aesthetic role. With help from its best friend contrast (which I’ll cover in detail later), texture adds important tactile cues that can give the viewer an immediate experience of what they’re looking at.

Behold, Figure 1.

~~/SingleServings/2007/March/27Mar07-01.jpg~~

I made this photograph at the park in March while I was sitting around watching people fly their kites and throw their Frisbees. It’s actually my knee, clad in corduroy, but shot with my Sigma 105mm f/2.8 macro lens. When I look at this image, I feel as though I could almost touch the surface of the material. I have a very real sense of what it would be like to touch it, and that’s the key to using texture.

I chose this photograph as an example not because it is a singular work of art, or even among my favorites, but because it exemplifies the use of texture as the subject; there is very little else in this image that is interesting. In post-processing (using Lightroom), I chose the “strong contrast” tonal curve preset, which deepens the shadows and boosts the highlights. Contrast and texture are intimately related because the cues that give us the impression of textures in an image are all formed through contrast. Keep that in mind.

Now, Figure 2.

~~/SingleServings/2007/March/27Mar07-02.jpg~~

Tree bark is a ubiquitous source of texture in photography—and for good reason. In this image, the light through the branches of the tree strongly reveals the bark’s texture because of its downward angle. Once again, using the tone curve adjustments in Lightroom allowed me to enhance the textural effect. I also used Lightroom’s built-in sharpening (which many in the field have criticized, but I like just fine thank you) to further punch up the roughness.

This is a good case of a subject that, from a distance and shot in a traditional way, would probably have yielded an image of limited interest. Especially considering the bright midday sun and stark shadows, it would be hard to achieve anything too pleasing. Keeping texture in mind, however, introduces new possibilities for using the situation to best advantage. Having a mental library of compositional techniques may allow you to make very nice photographs in locations or at times that are inappropriate for your preferred style.

Finally, Figure 3.

~~/SingleServings/2007/March/27Mar07-03.jpg~~

In the above piece, texture is only one player on a team of compositional tools including contrast, line, form, and depth; design elements that I will be discussing in more detail in future installments of this series. Once again focusing my post-processing efforts on the tone curve and sharpening tools, I have enhanced the prominence of the ground’s texture as well as the surface of the pole.

Speaking in purely photographic terms, capturing textures is tied most strongly to aperture. The above photograph was exposed at f/8, which was sufficient to keep the pole and nearby ground (where the texture was most interesting to me) in focus while still allowing the background to fall away into soft bokeh. Because texture does best at smaller apertures, textural images are best achieved under brighter conditions, which allows some of the best textural photographs to be made during the bright, raking light of the midday sun—a time of day scorned by landscape photographers the world over.

The aperture in SLR cameras always remains fully open to its widest setting so that the view through the eyepiece is as bright as possible. When you press the shutter button, your selected aperture setting is applied before the film or sensor is exposed, but you can’t see any of that because by then the shutter has been closed and the mirror flipped up. In order to get a better idea of what your textural subject will look like at different aperture settings, you should use the “aperture preview” button if you have one. This button, when held, will stop the aperture down to your selected setting. I use this button constantly.

You may have taken note of the fact that my three example photographs are in black and white. There is no reason that texture cannot be a prominent feature of a color photograph, but in my mind a photograph only deserves to be presented in color when the color itself is a prominent player. Also, black and white images have a more flexible tonal range because the underlying colors can be adjusted independently before the conversion to black and white. Lightroom handles this magnificently with its “Grayscale Mix” palette. With a broader tonal range to work with, your textures can be adjusted intricately.

Hopefully this article has given you a better understanding of the part texture can play in your images and how to enhance it by paying attention to contrast and tonality. In upcoming articles I will dive yet deeper into design concepts, so stay tuned, and feel free to bury me in questions and comments!

The aquarium is ripe with photographic subjects. Tank after tank of exotic, colorful fish; beluga whales; touching tanks filled with sea stars, coral, and so forth are all dying to be made into beautiful images. On a busy day like Saturday, the first day I went, you’ll be surrounded by people wielding their point-and-shoot cameras like claymores, blasting their body-mounted flashes directly into the tanks.

The greatest challenge to photographing at the aquarium (this applies only to the indoor tanks) is getting enough light. Even the most brightly lit tanks provide much less light than you think, most often because your eyes have become accustomed to the darkness and your brain is working to normalize everything you see.

For this trip, I brought only my Canon 50mm f/1.4, which I kept at f/1.4 almost the entire time. I often had to push my 5D to its highest sensitivity, the equivalent of ISO 3200, and even then I couldn’t always get a shutter speed fast enough to handhold for the shot, much less to freeze the motion of a quickly swimming fish. The aquarium will definitely put your skills and your equipment to the test.

In an ideal world, such as a sponsored shoot (not to imply that assignments are often, if ever, ideal), much brighter lights and possibly even softboxes might be employed to make the scene more technically feasible. If I had my way, I would place a single softbox or flash with diffuser above the tank where the standard light source is located and fire it with a PocketWizard or similar. Light that comes through the surface of the water has a wonderful, shimmering quality to it that most people recognize immediately.

Of the 180 or so photographs I made on this excursion, only about five of them were good enough to toss up here. The major problem was, as I said before, not getting enough light. Even when the classic “focal length reciprocal rule” indicated that I should be able to handhold the shot, the fish I was trying to capture was moving too quickly. My problems were compounded by the 50mm f/1.4 being a fairly mediocre lens and suffering from a good deal of chromatic aberration and vignette (which I don’t mind too much, but it bears mentioning).

I attempted to use Lightroom’s “lens correction” features to fix the chromatic aberration, but rather than having one of the two “classic” (and somewhat subtle) forms of aberration, the lens demonstrates what is often referred to simply as “purple fringing,” which means you’re basically out of luck. Add to that the fact that most of the images were pretty blurry and you can see where I’m going with this. That having been said, I think these five photos are fairly nice catches (no pun intended) out of a big group of rejects.