The landscape workshop, Creating Memorable Landscapes, was held at Starved Rock State Park yesterday. The workshop was well attended and a great success. We spent the morning in the classroom exploring ideas about landscape shooting and critiquing images that fell within the rules of landscape photography as well as some that break the rules as well. Participants ate a box lunch and then went out for a couple of hours to photograph in the woods and canyons of the park.
Here are some shots of participants applying some of the ideas discussed in the workshop. The day was a mixture of sort of dull light with some interruptions of bright sunlight. There was a threat of rain, mostly in the morning when we were inside talking. No one seemed to mind the weather and all went out shooting up a storm. I was out there with a gray card and my light meter which gave me an opportunity to talk about how one uses the gray card to control white balance along with manual metering to assure a proper exposure in the camera. One might want to rely on the in camera meter for some shooting but for greater control a manual meter and manual adjustments is needed. I even had a chance to explain what I was doing to a group of hikers walking through French Canyon where we were shooting at the time.
When we returned to the conference room to look at the work we did it turned out that because I shot in RAW format, my computer would not read the .cr2 files on my card. What a bummer, I thought. We looked at a number of images made by participants, looking at them through the critical perspective of composition. But I didn’t get to show any of mine. Well, I can now correct the error and show off four images that I shot while out in the woods. These images, all of them HDR conversions, were shot using 5 exposures in a range from 2 stops under to 2 stops over at one EV intervals. The first image is a ferns and leaves that I though presented interesting visual patterns. The second image is made from an overturned tree root structure. One can see the embedded dirt throughout the entire frame. I shot this fairly close with a long lens (I was using a Tameron 70-200mm f2.8 lens wide open) looking to capture the irregular patterns of the roots as they spread out from the center. The next image is of a hollowed out log at the base of an intermittently flowing waterfall. I was struck by the contrasting shapes as they contributed to the almost surreal nature of this scene. Finally, a fence line leading along the path at the top of a canyon. To the left of the fence is a several hundred foot drop to the canyon floor. I was taken by the almost strange leaning of the fence as it serves to protect hikers from doom.
Our next workshop is tentatively scheduled for late January, although we do not have firm dates as of this moment. We will be exploring lighting for portraits using simple light setups as well as available light sources. Sign up for our email list and I’ll be sure to keep you updated as to the details of the workshop.
