Podcast Highlights
0:02 Jay’s Favorite Images
11:05 Photographic Style
14:15 What Light is Ideal for Photography?
24:17 Best Photography Advice
28:49 What would you have done differently if you had to do things all over again?
35:09 Where are you going to be five years from now?
37: 39 Photography eBooks

Jay’s Favorite Images

Brent: Jay, are you ready to show us some of yours?  Is the first one The Garden of Eden that you want to talk about?

Jay:  Yup.  We love shooting in Pacific Northwest.  Like where I said earlier in the area that we would love to just go over there and settle down there, which we will most likely do once the kids are grown up.  One of the things we love about the Pacific Northwest is the amount of micro-climates that you find.  In a place called Eagle Creek in Columbia River Gorge, where the photo was taken, there is a micro-climate where you find temperate rain forest   You go into this environment and it’s a narrow, sort of a valley coming off of Mount Hood and it rains a lot and you go in there and you’re completely transformed from a busy highway to this place which just looks like absolutely the greenest and the most breathtakingly beautiful place you’ve seen.

On top of that, we like to photograph it when the spring colors are in full bloom.  If you notice all the moss on the rocks and things, they are probably at their height of spring colors when we went there to photograph them.  What we love to do is go out there when it’s raining because it provides richness to colors that you normally may or may not get because the grass is wet and wet surfaces tend to have a richer color tone.  Then combine that with a circular polarizer and you get the colors that are absolutely photoshopped without the use of Photoshop.

Brent: Lovely.

Jay: In order to take photographs like this, just for your viewers, we actually had to stand in freezing cold water.

Varina: It was cold.

Jay:  There’s an image somewhere on our blog that we had put together with Varina  standing in the cold water.  This water is snow melt and it is really cold and add to that the floor of the water carried away the heat so fast that your feet will pretty much go numb very quickly if you don’t have any protection.

Brent: That’s great.  Love this image, Jay.  You’ve got the waterfall in the background, kind of using the rule of thirds, the top third and on the left.  That’s obviously the focal point of this image, the line is part of this image and then you got the long exposure where it looks like the water is flowing towards us.  There’re some ripples in the water and you can see the pebbles under the water and the greenery is just amazing.  Love it.

Jay: Thanks.

Brent:  Love it.  I’ve never been to this area of the U.S. and I’ve definitely got to go there after seeing these images.  Lovely.  The next one, Jay, is it Salt Works?

Jay:  That’s a completely different terrain, so I picked out something that is not very different.  Salt works is in Death Valley.  If you look at the image, if you look closely at the large size, you’ll see that there’s actually a reflection in the water and there is a mix of reflection of the cloud and the textures.  The objective of this image for me was to be able to highlight the beautiful geological formations of the Salt Flats in Death Valley.  The sky was just putting on a show of its own to be able to capture that and this is a place which is one of the driest, hottest place on earth.  During our workshop a few years ago, we got incredibly lucky.  It had rained a few days before we got there.  There was an inch of water covering the entire salt flats.  So, you would walk in there and there are these salt formations that haven’t yet been destroyed by the water because the water was still pretty fresh.  We got a terrain which was absolutely unique.

We’ve been to this place 10 times in the last 10 years and we’ve seen the salt flats completely destroyed by the water.  I have photographs of this place with a lake from the floods and we have photographs of this place with no water, absolutely white surfaces of salt.  This was probably the only time when we got conditions which actually mix the salt formations and the water together.

Brent: Amazing.  Once in a lifetime photographs.

Jay: Yeah and the great thing about this was that we had a bunch of students with us and they were just awestruck.  They just stood there and looked at the sky and just oh, wow, this is awesome.

Varina:  With their jaws on the floor.

Brent: Yeah, and this is a sunset, is it?

Jay:  It is a sunset.  This particular location is good for both sunset and sunrise.  However, because of the terrain, the sunset has a better chance of producing colors because the mountains that you see to your left are further away than the mountains to your right, which you can’t really see in the photograph.  When the sun comes up, it comes up over fairly high mountains.  So you can’t really shoot looking into the sun very well, as you can during the sunset.

Brent: I can see the mountains must be high because they’ve got snow on them, the ones on the left.

Jay: That’s correct.  In fact, the mountain on the left is one of the highest peaks in Death Valley and probably somewhere to my left about a mile or so down is the lowest point in Death Valley and the lowest point in the Northern hemisphere.  You can actually see both the tallest mountains in Death Valley and the lowest point in the Northern hemisphere.

Brent: That’s below sea level, isn’t it?

Jay: It is about 248 feet below sea level.

Brent: Wow.  Amazing.  Another place that I’ve never been to.  I’m putting it on my bucket list, Jay.

Jay: I’ve been there several times.

Brent: Wow.  Great.  That’s awesome.  The last one that you sent me, Red River.  Can you tell us a little bit about this image?

Jay: This highlights another very unique terrain in North America.  There are only a few places in the world where you can actually see geysers and hot springs and this is one of them.  In fact, the largest place in the world where you can see a collection of geysers and hot springs in Yellowstone National Park.  The image is actually taken in Yellowstone National Park.  The image actually showcases the extreme dynamic range that most landscape photographers actually deal with.  If you look at the right side of the image, there is a sunset and the steam is backlit and as you go and move your head towards the left image, the steam is not backlit.  You notice there’s a blue tint in this scene to the left of the image.  That blue tint is actually real.  If you were to stand there, you will actually see the steam turning blue.  What happens is the steam takes on the colors of the environment around it and the steam is rising off one of the largest hot springs in Yellowstone called the Grand Prismatic.  If you were to ever look at the Grand Prismatic from high up, it’s a beautiful rich absolutely blue gorgeous hot springs and the steam that hovers around it takes on this rich blue color, as well.

The image showcases the extreme dynamic range that most photographers will face and in today’s world, with digital cameras, you have tools to be able to capture that.  The foreground of the image is again a geological wonder itself.  The reds that you see are the work of the bacterial mass that thrive in the hot springs year round and that’s where the intent red colors come from.

Brent: Amazing.  Tell me, is this one exposure or did you use multiple exposures to get the dynamic range that you wanted?

Jay: This is three different exposures we blended together with what we call our iHDR workflow.  So, iHDR stands for intelligent HDR.  It’s essentially a manual blending workflow that Varina and I have developed over the last few years, I guess.  We have a series of webinars we sell through our website and what it does is it uses Photoshop layers and masks to preserve the visual perception that a person would experience while standing at a scene like this.

Brent: If people wanted to get that, they can just go to your website?

Jay: Yup.

Brent: Awesome.  That’s an amazing image, Jay.  Another place that I need to go visit. You’ve obviously showed me all the spots that I never got to when I lived in the U.S.

Jay: You’ve got visit these places and you’ll never want to come back.

Brent: Yeah, probably.  Definitely.  Well, thank you so much for that.  We’ll jump onto the next question.  Can you guys each, or maybe it’s the same for both of you, but can you describe your photographic style?

Photography Style

Varina:  Yeah, Jay and I actually have pretty different photographic styles.  A lot of times people assume that we do the same thing because we’re standing side by side shooting, but we actually very frequently come away with images that are completely different from one another.  For example, while I was photographing the spider web shot, Jay was photographing a stream not 10 feet from me, but he was interested in the rippling patterns that the water was making and the reflected light from the hillside nearby.  We come away with completely different images and our styles are very, very different, as well.  Jay tends to include as much as he can to tell a whole story.  He’ll include the sun beams coming down from the sky, the mountain in the distance, the river, the red flowers in the foreground, the trees.  He wants to show the amazing beauty of this wide vista in front of him.

While he’s taking that photo, I might be taking a photograph of a tiny water droplet on a leaf.  Or I might be doing something where I’m using a long exposure to soften the surface of the lake as in the photo I showed you before.  My images tend to be very minimalist.  I look for a specific color to work with or two colors.  I’m looking for a monochromatic color scheme, where I’m using shades of blue or shades of green or I’m looking for something very, very simple with an analogous color scheme where I’m using colors that are side by side on the color wheel or complementary colors, where the colors are across from one another on a color wheel, creating a really extreme contrast where one object stands out against a background of something more subtle.

I think Jay is looking to tell the whole story of the scene, whereas I’m trying to distill the scene down to its theme or its essence.

Brent: That’s great.  Do you want to add to that, Jay?

Jay: I think Varina said for both of us, like mine is dramatic, while hers is very subtle.

Brent: And that’s really different.  That’s what I love about going photographing with different people.  You can be at the exact same location and people can come away with totally different images.  And you’ve probably seen that at your workshops, too?

Jay: We have over and over again and we also have influenced each other to our style.  A while ago we did a hangout on with Nik Software about how our styles influence each other.  If somebody wants to take a look at it, it should be posted on our blog under the video section.

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What Light is Ideal for Photography?

Brent: Great.  We’ll jump on to the next question, guys.  What light is ideal for your photography?

Jay: One of the things we learned a long time ago is that there’s nothing like bad light per se and by being influenced by each other over the years, what we have found out was that we are able to deal with any kind of light conditions.  A lot of landscape photographers will give you advice and hey, it’s great to photograph during the golden hours or get the sunset or the sunrise or twilight because it’s easier to deal with.  In today’s world with digital photography and being able to be influenced by each other, what we found out is when we go on a location; we can actually photograph in any conditions.  We will start photographing only in the morning and then just shoot sunsets and sunrises like any other photographers would and we wake up and go and do that.  But then, an hour or so passes by and the sun starts getting higher and what most photographers do is they pack up their gear, they go to Starbucks, find a place to hang out and chatting with their buddies on social media.

We, Varina and I, are usually out there being able to create photographs.  When the sun gets higher, we will look for photographs that are constrained in space.  We are looking for light conditions that are either all in shade or light conditions with very harsh light, but is reflecting.  For example, in the afternoons we’ll venture out into canyons if you’re in the right terrain and we’ll look at these intense reflecting colors in the harsh sunlight from one wall of the canyon to cast on the other wall of the canyon to be able to create the color and the abstract images we come away with.  Now, one can argue, you have to have special geology to be able to do that.  The truth is, you can find if you look hard enough and be creative hard enough to be able to find photograph in any light conditions.

For example, we were in Hawaii shooting the lava and it’s a pretty well-known fact that to get the intense colors of the lava, you need to shoot at twilight, but in the morning, in the afternoon, we ventured out and found just the right level of water and the beach and we needed that intense sunlight to be able to get the colors in the sky, so we were shooting what we call the wave action in midday at 2:00, trying to be able to photograph it.  So when you ask what are the right light conditions for your type of photography, we will say any light condition.  Even in the middle of the night, there are things you can photograph.  For example, the Milky Way, the star trails.

Brent: Yup and I think that’s what defines a great photographer, is they can produce great images under any conditions.

Varina: Sometimes it takes a special piece of equipment.  We always carry with us a reflector and a diffuser.  They’re very small ones, actually.  I think they’re 12 or 14 inches across and they fold up, fit neatly in our camera bags.  But this is something where if I’m trying to photograph a flower, for example or a detail in a rock at midday with very harsh light, I can use a diffuser to filter the light in a small area.  I have absolute control in that small area and then a lot of times, I’ll also use a reflector to bounce a little bit of that sunlight back onto my object from another angle so that I can give it a really nice soft light look.

There are always ways that you can use the light you have.  There are always ways you can get creative and honestly, a lot of times if the conditions are difficult, if it’s pouring rain or if it’s very hot and sunny, if we’re just not feeling it at that location, we’ll actually spend a lot of time exploring.  Even when we’re not shooting, we have our cameras and our bags on our back; we’re looking for the next shot.  We feel that there’s always one there and we’re exploring so that when the light is perfect, if the sky goes nuts at sunset or whenever it is, we know where to be, we know where our composition is and maybe it means we come back two years later, but we know the area well enough to make the most of the conditions as they shift.

Brent: For sure.  I think, Varina, those are two great tips that you’ve just given us, carrying a diffuser or reflector with you when you’re shooting landscapes is a huge tip and also checking out the area that you’re going to photograph when the weather’s bad because when the weather turns good, if it’s a sunset or something, I know over here in Australia the sunsets don’t last too long, maybe two to five minutes and then it’s gone.  If you haven’t been to that spot before, you might not know what the best composition is when the sky does light up.  Those are great tips.

Varina: We frequently see photographers running with their stuff.  The sky is glorious and they are running like their life depends on it, trying to find composition and you know, when you arrive late, a lot of times you’re done.  It’s just not going to happen.  You don’t know where to setup your camera.  It’s not about just plopping your tripod down and getting the shot.  It really isn’t that simple.  It’s about finding your photograph, being ready for it and if you arrive a little bit late and you have to work quickly, that’s one thing.  If you arrive so late that it’s almost over by the time you get there, you’re probably not going to get the shot you wanted.

Brent: Yeah, totally.  Is that the height of stress for a landscape photographer, when you see a landscape photographer running over rocks with a tripod over his shoulder?

Varina: I think so.  I think that’s the moment where you just sort of cringe and go, “Oh, thank goodness that isn’t me.”  I have to say, we have missed a lot of sunsets.  We’re driving or we’re somewhere where we simply cannot get out of the car and that’s where the light is perfect or we can’t get the photograph and I know that when I first started shooting on location, it really was difficult to miss that shot.  I have gotten to the point where it honestly doesn’t bother me anymore.  The fact that I saw it is enough.  I love to have seen it, I love having been there.  It’s mine.  I saw it, so I have it in my mind.  If I can’t share it with the world, then   so be it.  There will always be another one.

Brent: I’m starting to do that now in my, I guess, my twilight years of photography, if you can call it that, because for quite a few years I was obsessed with getting every sunrise and sunset in my area.  I couldn’t miss anything.  The problem was that I didn’t enjoy them as much as I would have if I just sat there with a glass of wine and watched it happen, because I was running around and shooting HDR and trying different compositions and everything.  Maybe it’s actually quite good if you miss a sunset and you just enjoy it for a change.

Varina: I have a word for you, too.  You say you’re shooting in your twilight years; that’s wonderful.  The twilights are gorgeous.  There’s something about all that beautiful subtle light that I love.  Don’t worry, there’s plenty of time after that because you’ve still got the very last light and you still have the star trails and you still have the Milky Way.  You can shoot all night long, so you have a long time in front of you.

Brent: Definitely and I might be exaggerating there because I’m not much older than you guys.

Varina: Yeah.

Jay: Also, what you bring up is one good point.  If we photographers chase so much after golden light, that we miss the beauty that is in between those hours and a lot of times your creativity is lost because all you want to do is sit in Starbucks and chat with your buddies when you can be out there exploring.  We tend to try to capture photographs in not just sunsets and sunrises, but the blue sky shots.  To be honest with you, the emotional impact of blue sky shots, for somebody who hasn’t seen the location or hasn’t been to the location, it is just as tremendous as a fantastic sun shot like at Death Valley, for example.

Brent: I agree with you, Jay and especially if you got like a 10 stop neutral density filter in there or if there are clouds around, you can really get some amazing stuff right in the middle of the day.

Jay: Yup.

Best Photography Advice

Brent: Awesome.  Great.  All right, let’s jump to the next question.  What’s the best advice you can give my audience.  These are people that have got a digital SLR camera, they may be beginners or intermediates or they’ve been in photography before and they’re just getting back in with the digital age, what advice can you give them?

Varina: That was a tough one.  This is something Jay and I talked a little beforehand, to narrow it down to something that wouldn’t take up your whole show.  There’s so many things that you can do, but I think for me, it comes down to always learning more, always looking for the next thing I can learn.  That’s what I love about photography, it’s always a challenge.  When I’ve mastered one thing, there’s something else I can work on and then I can go back to the thing I had mastered and realize I really haven’t mastered it at all and there’s so much more I can learn about that.  Every location is something new.  Every location is a different challenge and even coming back to the very same location again and again, each time it’s different.  There’s something else I can learn from it.

The resources that are online are amazing right now.  There is more information available to photographers than there ever has been in history and it’s much easier to access.  So, get out there and look for the next thing.  Find out what you love and learn how to do it really well and then learn more, because there’s always more you can learn.  I think that that is the most important thing that I do.  I’m constantly looking for the next thing that I can learn how to do, the next bit of information that I can add to my collection and the next experience that I can have that’ll teach me something.

Jay: Another piece of advice that I can add to what Varina just said is to follow up with learning, it is not about the equipment.  It’s about the knowledge.  It’s about your skillset.  If somebody who has just acquired a digital SLR camera thinks that they can get the pro level camera and all of a sudden their photographs will be amazing, it’ll never be the case.  Even the Rebels or the amateur level digital SLR cameras right now are capable of producing photographs that are stunning.

Another way to look at it is, great photographs have been produced from the time photography was invented and throughout the ages, all the equipment that we are given, we have always taken photography and produced stunning photographs.  In order to think, for somebody who is just starting out, that your photographs are no good because you don’t have pro level equipment or because you need a certain kind of lens to produce is probably not the case.

Varina: That comes back to what I was saying.  Learn to use the equipment you have.  Learn as much as you can about it and when you start to see what it is about your camera that’s holding you back, then it’s time to look for different equipment, but not until you truly understand why you need the new equipment.

Brent: That is great advice, guys.  I love it.  Work with what you’ve got.  You don’t have to get the next best lens if you don’t need it.  Work with what you’ve got.  When I first started, when I became a professional, I had two lenses, the 17-40 mm and the 70-200mm F 2.8 and that’s it.  I started my whole photography career with just two lenses.  The second part of that question is, if you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently?

What would you have done differently if you had to do things all over again?

Jay: Well, I would start a lot earlier than I did.  Let’s just put it that way.  I think, for me, I have never done any photography that I don’t like.  My photography was primarily landscape-based photography only.  I’ve done a few weddings just to try what they were like.  It was not really something I was interested in and luckily enough for me, I don’t really have to rely on it to make money enough, so I’d rather do photography.  Like I said, the only thing I would have done differently is I would have started sooner when I was younger.

Varina: Actually, when I was 14, 15, 16, I knew I wanted to be a photographer when I grew up.  I had a plan.  So, that meant that every decision I made between the ages of 14 and now has been about finding my way to that goal.  I think a lot of people don’t know what they want to do with their lives.  That’s a theme I hear again and again, “I just don’t know what I want to do.”  They’re 45 or 50 and they still don’t really know what it is that makes them feel whole, makes them feel complete.  I was really lucky because that was something I knew as a child.  For me, I wouldn’t do anything differently per se.  I think that the choices I’ve made have been careful.  They’ve been targeted towards my goal.  That doesn’t mean I went straight towards it.  Like I said before, I worked for Marriott  the hotel chain.  That wasn’t a part of my goal, but it did get my foot in the door.  It was a decision that I made that took me slightly off-track, but towards what I wanted to do.

I think for me, what I would change, is that I spent a lot of years believing people who told me I couldn’t do it and even though I was working towards it, I didn’t quite believe it could be done.  There were times where that held me back.  There were several years where, rather than focusing on photography, I decided, “Okay, I’m going to be practical and I’m going to do something reasonable.  I’m going to do that.”  In a way that was a good thing.  Being practical is always good, but at the same time, it meant that it took me longer to get started.

Brent: Varina, I think you should have listened to Cole Thompson.  I just did an interview with him a week or so ago and I love the way his philosophy is “Don’t listen to anyone.  Listen to yourself.”

Varina: Right.  I think that’s very true.  My parents were supportive in a lot of ways.  They did not believe that photography was a good career choice for me.  They were not okay with the idea of majoring in art in college and really, in the end, I agree with them in a lot of ways.  Majoring in art in college is difficult.  It doesn’t give you the skills you need to be an artist and run a business.  I wish that I had realized that sooner.  Although I do appreciate having the art background, I’m happy that I graduated with a degree in information technology because that means that I can use those skills to run my business.  I’m good with computers.  I can program my own website.  I understand the technical side of digital files and things like that and so it really does make a big difference having that background.  We usually recommend that people, rather than majoring in art, they major in business or in marketing or something like that.  Then, they have art as a minor or as a double major because most of the skills for art are things that you don’t need to learn in a classroom.

Brent: They come from within.  Is that what you’re saying?

Varina: Yeah.  I think a lot of times they come from within.  There are a lot of skills that you do need as an artist, but I think they can be learned in informal classes.  They can be learned from a mentor, which is huge, if you can find a mentor, someone who can give you a little bit of hands-on help, a little bit of personal guidance.  Even just someone who will critique your photos or your artwork, whatever it is you’re doing, of course.  You can find that online in a way you never could before.  Post your photos online.  Get on there.  Listen to critique, ask for critique and be willing to hear what people have to say.

It can be tough to hear what people have to say about your work, but personally I’ve learned that a critique, especially a negative critique, is a wonderful thing.  My work has improved exponentially because I was willing to listen when somebody told me what they didn’t like, what wasn’t effective in my photos, what was distracting, what took them away from what I was trying to convey.  If you can listen to what people say about your work, you don’t have to agree with it.  You don’t have to change based upon what they say, but understanding what it is that someone else sees in your work can make you a more effective artist.

Where are you going to be five years from now?

Brent:  Well, thanks, guys.  We’re almost out of time.  I’ll ask the last question and maybe you can tell us a little bit about the products that you have on your website, the amazing eBooks and videos that you have.  Tell us where you guys are going to be in the future, five years from now.  I know you guys are really huge online and in the social media sphere.  Where are you going to be five years from now and tell us a little bit about your great products?

Jay: Hopefully, if I have to be where I am five years from now, I would say work less on photography and shoot more photographs.  The social media phenomenon is a recent one and we are fortunate enough to get into the tail end of it and sure, we’ve gotten a lot of attention on social media and it has helped our business grow, but our primary intention when we do photography is not to be huge on social media.  Our primary intention is to photograph.  What we would love to see in five years is to have more collection of eBooks, but in order to get the eBooks, I would love to see us do more traveling in places we haven’t been, like Down Under, New Zealand and Japan, Antarctica, South America and Africa.

Jay: Five years from now, what we would love to see is a bigger collection of eBooks and more travel.

Varina: I agree with Jay.  I think, for me, right now my children are at home, all of them.  They need a lot of attention and I have the freedom right now to build a business, so that when my children do move out, when they’ve moved on, I’ll still be relatively young.  I’ll be in my mid 40’s.  Jay will be in his mid 50’s and there’s still a lot of life left at that point.  But, at that point, we hope to have a business that is completely established, money coming in from our eBooks, which is, at this point, where we make most of our money anyway and to have a collection of eBooks, Webinars, things like that, that will sustain us so that we can do what we want to do more often.

Photography eBooks

Brent: Tell us a little bit about your eBooks.

Varina: Yeah, we have a collection of 18 eBooks on everything from creating vibrant colors in the field to composition and the gestalt theories of perception. We have books about layers and masks on Photoshop and histograms; all kinds of things. We have a variety of topics.

We have a Complete Collection that we sell where people can get the entire collection of eBooks by placing a single order.

We also have smaller collections for those that are interested in just getting a look at what we do, maybe giving a gift. That’s something a lot of people do. They’ll choose our Apprentice Series, which is three eBooks or our Workflow Series, which is four eBooks. They’ll give those as a gift or purchase those for themselves. We have a huge collection of those. And of course, we also have another in the works right no;we always have another one that’s up and coming. Hopefully that will be out within a few months.

Then we also have a Webinar Series that we sell, where we teach our iHDR process. That’s something that’s impossible to teach in a series of blog posts or you know, in a few minutes sitting down with someone. This is over 9 hours of instruction and it includes sample images and notes and a few videos to help. So that’s the whole series and it’s sold in four parts so that you can purchase the parts you need or purchase them one at a time as you’re ready for them.

Jay: We also do occasional workshops, but those are once a year and if anybody is interested in private workshop, they can email us and we’ll give quite a price. But like I said, they tend to be fairly expensive.

Brent: I’m really interested Jay, why don’t you and Varina and the kids come out to the Great Barrier Reef with me and run a workshop with me?

Jay: If you can schedule 100 photographers to run a workshop, we will certainly be interested in coming out.  We also do a lot of speaking engagements like in-classroom workshops, where we will have a mix of instructions, inspiration and processing techniques, as well as some hands-on camera techniques and photo walks.  We’ve successfully done those.  Typical audience sizes range from around 100 to 200 participants in these workshops.

Brent: Awesome.

Jay: If you guys have any interest in Down Under, we would be willing to entertain that.

Brent: For sure.  I just recently met Colby Brown, who came out and did a Photowalk. I drove a few hours to go meet him.  Do you know him?

Varina: He’s a great guy, wonderful photographer, wonderful guy.  We like him a lot.

Jay: We run workshops for The Giving Lens once a year and we also run workshops with Colby himself.  He’s kind of teaching advanced teacher arrangements in different cities and different locales around town.

Brent: Awesome.  Maybe we should all get together and run a couple of workshops.

Jay: That would be awesome.

Brent: Sounds good.  That’s great, guys.  Thank you.  This has been a huge interview for me having both of you on and we’ve gone through quite a lot of information, great information for anyone listening.  We’ve gone through Varina’s images, the droplets, the Hawaiian lava flowing into the water.  We’ve gone through the Iceland shot, the one with the ice on the beach.  It’s beautiful.  We’ve gone through some of Jay’s images, some beautiful.  The Salt Flats image was so amazing with the water pooled in the salt flats. Columbia Gorge, which is another place I want to go to.  We’ve run through your style, how your style is different.  Jay’s captures everything and Varina focuses on one element in the scene.  We’ve run through the light that you guys like to photograph in and also discussed that you can actually create great images in any light and also about running around and checking out things when the light’s not good.

We’ve gone through a huge amount today.  You guys have given us different tips, diffusers and checking out areas when the light isn’t good.  Also, Varina, your major tip to my audience is always keep learning and checking out locations, photographing at the same location over and over again, because it changes all the time.  Jay’s, yours I also like, it’s not about the camera.  I like that one.  I like your commitment to travel to Australia, that’s a good one  I really appreciate you guys coming on the show.

Varina: Thanks so much for having us.  We really appreciate it.

Jay: Yup and just make sure you guys, all listeners, keep photographing.

Brent: Awesome.  Thanks, guys.

Special Discount from Jay & Varina until end of May:

Get 10% OFF any order for $20 or more – Use Coupon code:

bm6022

Please comment below, and Brent or Jay or Varina will reply.

Have you ever wondered what I use on my photoshoots?
I’m a full-time professional photographer and I mainly photograph portraits. Occasionally, I shoot a wedding, but most of the time it’s portraits.

My Trusty Old Camera Bag (been everywhere)

1. I can fit everything I need in it really easily.
2. When I’ve got it on my shoulder, I can actually open it up and I can take things out without having to put my bag down. Sometimes you don’t have a chance to do so. Maybe the ground is wet or you’re running around and you want to take everything with you.

Everything has its place (quick check)

Photo Gear Inside My Bag

1. Canon 5D II with 70-200mm f4 lens (main lens I use for portraits).
2. 24-105 mm F4 Canon Lens – backup lens just in case my main camera lens fails & if I need a wider angle lens.
3. 85mm fix focal length lens, it’s an F1.8 lens. I’ve tried a couple of 85mm lens, but this is the one I chose because it’s relatively quick focusing. It’s got a very large aperture of 1.8, which gives me a very shallow depth of field.  This is great for close-up portraits or photographing models or kids. When you’re really close, it just gives you a beautiful shallow DOF.
4. Flash Unit with my cheat sheet of names on the back (I’ve got another video about how I remember everyone’s names).
5. Filters – Neutral density filter and a polarizing filter.
6. Model release forms in case I’m photographing models, always good to have one on hand.
7. Spare memory cards if I run low on memory space. I always got a few extra cards and I keep them in this small pelican case, so if my camera bag falls in the water and everything else gets ruined, I don’t lose my images.
8. Spare batteries for my flash unit and my camera. My camera battery has a cover at the bottom, which means it is fully charged, when the cover is off, it means it’s empty.
9. Leatherman Multi-tool for fixing anything that needs to be fixed on the shoot, so that I don’t need to cancel the photoshoot.
10. A couple of pens – never know when you might need one?
11. Color Checker for when I’m photographing a commercial photo-shoot. I have this along to make sure that the colors are perfect.
12. Shower Cap is great when you’re caught in the rain storm. You can put this on your camera to protect it from the water & the elements. Have one in your bag at all times because you’ll never know when you’re going to need it.
13. Stands for my camera flashes if I’m using off-camera lights.
14. Cable Release which I use to attach to the camera and the flash, which allows you to hold the flash away from your camera. This comes very handy if you haven’t got any triggers. You can achieve amazing results with this off-camera accessory.

Choosing the Right Camera Bag for You

1. Protects your Equipment - all your camera equipment is really expensive, and you don’t want to ruin your gear.
2. Fits the Photo Gear you Need – What do you shoot the most? What gear do you need to take with you?
3. Accessibility is easy - Can you easily grab the gear you need, while on a shoot?
4. Everything has it’s place – where you can easily look at the things inside and know whether anything is missing or not.

Podcast Highlights
0:28 Who is Jay Patel?
2:30 RAW Image vs. JPEG Image
3:50 Who is Varina Patel?
8:48 Favorite Images
31:24 Photography eBooks

Today I have two great wilderness photographers from Ohio – they are Jay and Varina Patel. They are so interesting that I have split this blog & audio into 2 episodes…

Who is Jay Patel?

Brent: Can you guys give me a little bit of background on where you’re from originally and the photography that you guys both create?

Jay: I was born and raised in India. I moved to US way back when – I won’t tell you when because that would give away my age. But I came over to go to school. I have a background in Engineering and Technology Management and Marketing. I started a photography career in 2001, when DSLR first started to come on the scene. I have pretty much no film experience and I’ve been doing photography for about 12 years now.

Brent: Jay, you and I are kind of similar there because I kicked on when the first DSLR came on too. Was it the Canon EOS D30? I couldn’t remember what it was.

Jay: Yeah, it was a Canon EOS D30. It was a 3MP camera with a really lousy dynamic range, but it was a  great photo quality at that time.

Brent: Yes, and that’s the camera that changed everything for me too, because that was when my son was born and for the first time, I could actually get immediate feedback on what things were doing. Like for instance, aperture -you know, we change aperture and we get a different depth-of-field, and I was like “Oh, that’s what it does!”

Jay: And at that time, there were a very few RAW and JPEG tools, so I had to go through this learning process of knowing what was a RAW format and what it did. It took me a while to figure out, but once I realized the importance of it, my whole world changed.

RAW Image Vs. JPEG Image

Brent: Can you elaborate a little bit on that for my audience? Some people might not know what a RAW image is, as opposed to JPEG.

Jay: RAW image is the actual data off the sensor. Once the camera captures that RAW image, what ends up happening is, the camera itself uses some algorithms to convert that image into readable form; either into JPEG or TIFF. When you capture JPEG images, that algorithm is determined by the camera. So what we like to do as photographers, is to capture the sensor data and we decide what parameters to use to process the image. So the image comes out much better than anything that the camera can do on its own. These algorithms also include things like exposure compensation, white balance, sharpening, contrast, and curves among other things.

Brent: Excellent. I totally agree, especially when you’re photographing landscapes – shooting in RAW. Below are a few of the eBooks that Varina and Jay produce.

Special Discount from Jay & Varina until end of May:

Get 10% OFF any order for $20 or more – Use Coupon code:

bm6022

Who is Varina Patel?

Brent: Varina, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Varina: I was born in Canada. As a very young child, I moved to Washington State and then to Idaho. I spent a good chunk of my childhood in Idaho and then my family moved to Ohio. I’ve lived in a lot of places. I never know quite to say where I’m from, but my heart is in the Pacific Northwest. That feels like home to me and someday I’ll get back there. I started shooting when I was a kid. My dad used to let me use his camera, which was a Pentax K1000; a film camera. When I was in college, I spent every last penny in my bank account to buy myself the same camera, because I was familiar with it and because it happened to be on sale. I worked in the dark room in college and also in middle school actually, which was my first experience in the dark room. I switched to digital in 2005 with a Canon Rebel and went Pro that same year.

Photography is a really big part of my life. It’s something I’ve been doing since I was a kid and I’m not sure what I’d do without it.

Brent: When you say “went pro”, what does that mean?

Varina: Well, you know, I think it means different things to different people. For me, it was a shift from taking photos because it was “fun and I loved it” to taking photos because it was “fun and I loved it and I could make money from it”. In 2005, I started doing two things: I started submitting images to stock agencies and getting paid that way, and I also started shooting for Marriott –the hotel chain –doing interiors for them, which was really outside of what I wanted to do for a career. But to me, it was a way to get my foot in the door. In fact, both shooting for stock agencies and also shooting interiors for Marriott, they just felt like a good way to get my foot in the door. Get my name out there and start to put together a portfolio and shift into a role as an actual, professional photographer as opposed to just a hobbyist.

Brent: That’s great. Do you ever find that sometimes it’s difficult to maintain that enthusiasm for photography when you are out shooting and trying to create and income from your passion? Does it diminish your passion at all?

Varina: That’s a really good question. I think, for me, once I have my camera in my hand, everything else just goes away. It’s a little bit of my soul right there. I’m out there, I’m shooting, and I forget about the rest of life. Everything else just fades.

On the other hand, when I’m sitting down and I have 30 blog posts to write and schedule and get those ready, when I’m dealing with the financial side of things, when I’m preparing for a big presentation or to teach a big class, that’s when the enthusiasm is a little bit less and what I want to do is put that away and pull out some images and work with them in Photoshop, and you know, just get outside and shoot.

So yeah, it does diminish the enthusiasm to some extent, but not for the actual photographic process itself.

Brent: So, when you’re photographing landscapes and out in nature, do you still get lost in what you’re doing; like you’re doing what you love, basically?

Varina: Yeah, absolutely. That’s when I feel most comfortable. That’s when I feel most myself. That’s just really who I am. I want to be out there. I want to have my camera in my hand and if I’m sunburned and sweating or freezing cold, I tend to forget that. I’ll say to Jay “Oh my gosh, it’s so cold out here. I don’t know how long we can stay out.” You know, we’re at 9,000 ft. or something and there’s a foot of snow and then all of a sudden, I forget that I’m cold. And it isn’t until I put my camera away that I realize that my fingers actually have no feeling anymore.

Jay: Sometimes, I even forget what day of the week it is. Or what our stock market is doing. Or what we have to respond to when we get home. We just totally get lost in it.

Brent: Especially when you’re out of the cellphone coverage area and you can’t get online. Sometimes, that’s a blessing.

Varina: Yeah, you get a little bit off the grid and pretend that the rest of the world doesn’t exists just for a little while.

Varina’s Favorite Images

Brent: Let’s have a look at your favorite images. I know you guys submitted three images to me each, can you tell me a little about these images; the thought process that went to creating these images and why they are your favorite shots?

Varina: Yeah, absolutely. We’ll start with the spider web shot. That shot is from Hawaii, from the Big Island. We were driving along the highway and looked over the edge of a bridge into this big gully down below, which was just beautiful. It was a rainforest out to the ocean; it was just gorgeous. I noticed that there was a road down there. And I said, alright we need to find that road, figure out where it is. So we pulled off, drove around a little bit until we found the road, we drove down into this beautiful rainforest location. We parked the car, got out and walked around. We walked out to the beach; the waves are just crashing against the shore. There was a beautiful sugar plantation there. It was very old and it’s just the ruins of it really. I want to say that’s Kalapana. It’s a name of a very small, Hawaiian town down there.

As we were walking, Jay actually noticed several spider webs and pointed them out to me. I grabbed my camera and set it up with the macro lens on it. I got in as close as I could and kept going closer and there’s this little spider in there keeping an eye on me. But she was great; she didn’t seem to be upset having me photographing her handy work. For that shot, what stands out to me in my mind is being the theme of getting that shot, to continually moving closer and closer. Each time I’d frame the shot, I’d say no, that’s not it. I need to be closer. And I’d move in a little closer and I say, nope that’s not it.

I wanted to show the repeating lines and the web, and I wanted to zero in on a specific pattern so you can see that there are “Y” shapes in the web and the very simple strands as well. I was very careful about that to make sure that I had an odd number, because that’s what felt right to me at that moment. And then I was very careful to get an angle where I could get as much of that flat surface in focus as possible because that can be difficult with a macro lens and an extremely narrow depth-of-field. Then the background was important to me. I wanted it to be completely blurred out. Of course, with a narrow depth-of-field like that that’s not too difficult, but I also wanted to make sure that there was nothing distracting in the background; no points of light, no heavy shadows, no odd lines or pieces of grass sticking through and so getting the just the right spot in the web took some time. Those water droplets that you see in the photograph are absolutely minuscule  They’re about the size of the tip an unsharpened pencil. When I say unsharpened, I mean sharpened but slightly dulled. So it’s very, very tiny droplets and they’re created from the mist coming off from the ocean and a little bit of dew in the air.

Brent: This is an amazing photograph. It’s so abstract. It’s art, basically. It’s not merely photography. For me it’s art. I just love the lines and I’ve been looking at it now since you’ve been talking and it’s something that I would love print out huge and put on the wall. It’s amazing.

Varina: I think it would be interesting at a very large size too.

Brent: Let’s jump to the next one, Varina. It looks like lava coming out. Also an Hawaiian image, I’m guessing?

Varina: That’s correct. It’s also from the Big Island. This is lava from Kilauea, the volcano on the Big Island, which was erupting obviously while we were there. We actually got very, very lucky with this shot. We knew the volcano was erupting. We hoped we’d be able to get some nice lava shots. What we didn’t expect was that the lava would be flowing into the ocean. That actually started about three days before we arrived on the island and we went out twice. We hiked out twice with a guide; this is private land that this is happening on. We couldn’t go out on our own as that would be trespassing. So we hired a guide and she took us out. It was an amazing hike, both nights. But it was during the second night when I took that shot and you can see just the swirling of the mist as it comes off the ocean.

What was happening at that point was the lava was coming off at the edge of the cliff and when it hit the water; the steam would come up in this huge, sudden, swirling cloud. It was an amazing, chaotic experience; just beautiful to watch.

My goal with that photograph was to show the chaos in a very quiet way. I think what stands out to me with photography a lot of times, is that, I can take a scene and take away the sound of it, take away the noise of it. My goal in a lot of cases with my photography is to take a very complicated scene and simplify it for you. Jay has a photograph of the same location and he has the sun setting, it’s beautiful. He has sort of a glow of the water from the sunset and from the lava itself. He has several streams of lava coming into the water. Like I said, his photo is just gorgeous. But for me, I wanted to take away all that extra and just show the very simple reality of what was happening. So that was my goal with that and to capture that stream of lava as it dripped down from the cliff, and the spire that it was creating as it cooled, which I thought was just awesome. So I took several shots. I wanted to make sure you could see the spire. There were a few shots that I took where you couldn’t see it; it was covered by lava. This one is the one I chose for that reason because it showed exactly what I wanted to show. And the swirling steam behind was particularly effective in that shot as well.

Brent: Great image. With this shot, did you use a long lens for this? And did you say it was night that you shot this?

Varina: Yeah, the shot was taken just after sunset so it wasn’t pitch dark, but it was getting dark. This was actually a single exposure, it was unnecessary for me to do any blending. I simply allowed the darker areas to go dark. I felt that worked for them because the highlights are very bright. I didn’t need to worry about the texture in those areas and so I could use a single exposure. So yeah, that worked out really well for this shot. And it is a long lens, a 70-200mm lens. I used that to just really zoom in. Now we were close enough to the lava. We took the Poke-A-Stick Tour. We were actually poking the lava with sticks and watching the sticks ignite, which was really cool. But this was over at the edge of the cliff so I didn’t want to be that close.

Brent: Okay, so can you give me a tip here, because I’ve actually been to a lava flows on the Big Island. I can’t get anywhere close. The security and the people wouldn’t let you anywhere near. How do you actually get a guide to take you to these places?

Varina: You’re right, the security is pretty serious, they take it seriously, and they don’t want people getting hurt. And because, at least at that time, I’m pretty sure it’s still erupting now onto private lands. Private land owners, they don’t want you in there. Granted their land has been completely destroyed, but it’s still theirs and we need to respect that. There are actually several groups that do lava tours. The one we went with was Poke-A-Stick Tours and there’s a website run by a woman named Sheryl, she’s wonderful. She goes out there every single day with groups and that’s a great job. She said she goes through a pair of hiking boots a month. I mean, you know, my boots were damaged from the hike, but not badly that I need to replace them. So, you can do that and you can look into other tours as well. There are several groups that do that.

Brent: That’s great. So, you wouldn’t suggest going on with Havaianas flip flops or as we call it in this country, thongs (which means something else in America).

Varina: No, you definitely don’t want to go out there with flip flops or a thong, or just in a “thong”; that would be a bit of a shock. But no, seriously. The heat coming off this lava is very extreme. When I was shooting, holding my camera, as I was taking photos, the skin on my arms was getting pretty uncomfortable. I needed to finish my shot and back off. Anytime you’re getting close to the lava, it is really hot. Definitely close-toed shoes and I would recommend shoes with a thick sole like hiking boots, because this terrain is not a joke. It’s the most bizarre and most twisted terrain I’ve seen.

Jay: And the surface is actually made up of glass, so what happens is if you fall down on a regular ground, you may get scraped. But if you fall down on this lava, little shreds of glass will get embedded into your hand pretty quickly or you’ll slice your hand on very quickly.

Varina: Actually, a guy on our tour did fall and he was bloody. It’s not a nice fall. So, be prepared for it if you’re going to go out there. Protect your feet at least.

Brent: Great image, Varina. I love it. I love the lava coming down and it looks like it’s solidifying and kind of crawling up again like a stalagmite, is it? It’s just amazing. I know how difficult that is to shoot, it’s something where the light is actually coming from the object that you are photographing. It’s not an easy shot to do.

Varina: Yeah, and it’s a fascinating thing to watch the land change so quickly. Like I said, we were there two nights in a row and between those two nights, the shape of the land as the lava came through was altered just catastrophically. It was amazing to see the change.

Brent: So, the land owners are actually gaining land, are they?

Jay: Right.

Varina: In a way, but unfortunately it’s a dead land. It can’t grow anything on it. It’s taking out houses. It’s taking out homes. It’s taking out grassy areas. It’s just completely dead and hard. You can’t dig in to it and plant. You can’t build on it easily. It’s bad.

Jay: And other danger is that it’s unpredictable; the lava flows unpredictable. So they have had several lava flows in the course of the last 25 years. So, they thought that the first lava flow was just it, so then they started rebuilding it. Fifteen years later, another lava flow showed up. And then they stopped and they started rebuilding it again and six years later, another one shows up. So, it is very unpredictable. It will go away for several years, but then it will come back.

Varina: Yeah, you just never know. Luckily, it’s a very slow flow, which means the families can evacuate and people aren’t getting hurt, but it is still a catastrophic loss. It’s really tough to see how much land they’ve lost.

Brent: Do you guys do workshops in these places like Hawaii?

Varina: Not right now, we’re actually (at this point) not teaching on-location workshops regularly. We did teach a workshop in Nicaragua this year and we’ll teach about one a year from this point on.

Jay: We will entertain private workshops if somebody is really interested in it, but private workshops can be pretty expensive.

Brent: Okay. So, let’s jump to the next one. It looks like a long exposure to me. Can you tell me a little bit about this one?

Varina: A long exposure and the water in the foreground is sort of a bluish and purple toned. On the mountain there is an alpenglow. That shot is from St. Mary Lake in Montana. That’s a shot that we took actually while we were teaching a workshop. I think that was the last day of the workshop. It was raining, I was right up against the water and so the waves were splashing up onto my lens and I was very close to the surface of the water in order to get that angle. I wanted to be nice and low. I was constantly wiping my lens for that shot; cleaning it again and again and again. The glow on the mountain came up and right away I knew I wanted to capture that. As a landscape photographer, that happens and you go, okay stop everything.

So, I helped a couple of students get their camera set-up first. Luckily, when something like that happens, you really want it to happen on the last day of the workshop after your students have had the chance to get used to their camera and practice the techniques that you’re teaching. If that happens on the first day, it just breaks your heart, because it means that most of your students won’t have the knowledge or the ability to capture it yet. In fact, we prefer to have kind of crummy skies on the first day so that people don’t feel like they’re missing something important. So we got lucky with this workshop. We got had kind of crummy weather on the first couple of days, but the last day, we had rainbows dropping down out of the sky. We had a beautiful sunrise, we had that alpenglow before the sunrise so it was perfect. The students were ready. They were prepared for it. They had their filters out and they got the shot that they were wanting, which is wonderful and I could even take a shot, which is unusual. I don’t shoot a lot during a workshop, but I could step back and say,“okay I’m here if you need me, but I think you’ve got it”. They could practice it and I got my shot too.

Like you said, it is a long exposure. It was taken with a wide-angle lens and I wanted to take away the waves on the surface of the water. That’s something I do a lot. I think you’re probably getting a scene here, I like a very simple image and the surface of the water was very choppy. But the glow on the water, sort of that very subtle glow, comes from the sky and from the sun as it’s still below the horizon but rising very slowly. Capturing that was my goal so I used a very long exposure to smooth the surface of the water. I think it’s a 30 sec exposure and the challenge for that was keeping my lens dry for 30 seconds. So, I think I had to remove one water droplet, which wasn’t too bad.

Brent: So, what do you use to actually keep your lens dry? Do you have one of those microfiber cloths or do you use a t-shirt?

Varina: I have one of those microfiber cloths and about 12 more. I have a lot of them and I’m constantly using them. I like a clean lens and I like a dry lens.

Brent: Varina, talk about your Iceland shot.

Varina: Well, that one is, again I’m using a very long exposure to take that shot. It’s a photograph of an iceberg against a blue background. The iceberg itself is very blue as well. This is a shot at Jökulsárlón. That beach is really wonderful. The black sand beach, it is gorgeous. As far as you can see, there are iceberg scattered across the beach and some of them are deep blue, some of them are crystal clear; they’re just gorgeous. They’re about the size of, maybe a cow. Some of them are the size of a small car and some of them are the size of an egg. So there’s a huge variety, but they’re beautiful icebergs.

I took the shot with a long exposure to smooth surface of the waves as they came in and I wanted to capture the iceberg itself against a very subtle background. That day was very blue. That sounds strange. It was late in the evening, we had storm clouds as you can see there and the waves were blue. The black sand as the water came in, it was foaming, which is why you get the coloring in the foreground and then the reflection of the sky. And then in post-processing as well, normally I try and go with very natural colors. In this case, I actually allowed the image to go a little bit more blue than it already was. People ask me all the time, “Do you think it’s fair to do that? Is that cheating?” and I say “no, of course not. This is art. I get to do what I want”. So yeah, it’s more blue than the reality of the scene but to me it felt that it needed to be that way.

Brent: Awesome. It’s just an amazing image, Varina.  You know, what I really like about this shot is the glow within the iceberg. You got the long exposure, you got the blue coming in and out, you got the waves in the background. You got the sky which is a little lighter than everything else. But there’s this luminosity inside the iceberg. It’s kind of hard for me to judge big it is, but you said it’s as big as a car or cow, did you say?

Varina: Maybe about the size of a cow. That one‘s huge. I know it’s interesting; I’ve had people tell me it looks enormous. I think because of the surreal location, I think it’s very hard to get a good read on the size there, but it works for me. I’m okay with that. I think it’s a really dreamy location - It feels like something straight out of your imagination

Brent: That’s amazing. I’ve seen some great images from Iceland recently; would you suggest that as a bucket list for place for a photographer to go to?

Varina: Absolutely. We loved Iceland so much that we’re going back again this summer. Iceland’s wonderful. The variety of locations is fantastic. These are locations that you’re not just going to find anywhere else. You know black sand beaches with icebergs, huge waterfalls that are coming out of the mountains and falling out with a mist; they’re wonderful. On top of that, you have lava rocks covered with 12 inches of moss, it’s just amazing. It’s a beautiful, beautiful country.

Brent: Do you have to go in summer, the Iceland summer?

Varina: Oh no, not necessarily. This trip that we took – the photo you’re looking at now – was taken in fall. We’ll be going back in summer. You know the light is very different there. You get light all day or it will be dark all day; be aware of that . Part of the reason why we’re going there in summer is to make the most out that longer day.

Brent: Okay. Beautiful shot. Beautiful image, Varina.

Photography eBooks

Brent: Tell us a little bit about your eBooks.

Varina: Yeah, we have a collection of 18 eBooks on everything from creating vibrant colors in the field to composition and the gestalt theories of perception. We have books about layers and masks on Photoshop and histograms; all kinds of things. We have a variety of topics.

We have a Complete Collection that we sell where people can get the entire collection of eBooks by placing a single order.

We also have smaller collections for those that are interested in just getting a look at what we do, maybe giving a gift. That’s something a lot of people do. They’ll choose our Apprentice Series, which is three eBooks or our Workflow Series, which is four eBooks. They’ll give those as a gift or purchase those for themselves. We have a huge collection of those. And of course, we also have another in the works right no;we always have another one that’s up and coming. Hopefully that will be out within a few months.

Then we also have a Webinar Series that we sell, where we teach our iHDR process. That’s something that’s impossible to teach in a series of blog posts or you know, in a few minutes sitting down with someone. This is over 9 hours of instruction and it includes sample images and notes and a few videos to help. So that’s the whole series and it’s sold in four parts so that you can purchase the parts you need or purchase them one at a time as you’re ready for them.

Jay: We also do occasional workshops, but those are once a year and if anybody is interested in private workshop, they can email us and we’ll give a price. But like I said, they tend to be fairly expensive.

Special Discount from Jay & Varina until end of May:

Get 10% OFF any order for $20 or more – Use Coupon code:

bm6022

In the next part we look at Jay’s favourite images and talk about more interesting photography stuff…

Please comment below, and Brent or Jay or Varina will reply.

Hey guys, what does a good beer, a ski resort, & flags in the background have in common? Stick around and find out.

Great Beer at the bottom of Thredbo Ski Resort!

Shutter Speed

First Image: 1/125 Sec 

Second Image: 1/60 sec reduced shutter speed

Third Image: 1/30 sec  

Fourth Image: 1/15 sec

Fifth Image: 1/8 sec

Sixth Image: 1/4 sec

Best Shutter Speed for Moving Flags

Photography Tip

Podcast Highlights

0:27 Who is Giuseppe Basile?
1:40 Giuseppe’s Favorite Images
13:03 Camera Trade
17:37 Tools of Trade – Camera Equipment
23:20 Process of Creating

Hi guys, for this interview we have Giuseppe Basile. He is a photographer from Sydney and I have been following him for a while on Google Plus and he creates some amazing images. He has also established a cool website, which might interest you guys, where you can buy and sell second hand photography equipment.

Who is Giuseppe?

Brent: Giuseppe, can you tell us a little of a background on who you are and the kind of photography that you create?

Giuseppe: Firstly, thanks for having me as your guest Brent. I am a semi-professional photographer based in Sydney. I have been shooting since 2008 and I concentrate mainly on seascape and landscape photography. Living in Sydney I have plenty of access to some stunning beaches. From day one I just loved shooting seascapes. I sell most of my prints through a local cafe, that ’s where my main income from photography comes from.  I also have a new website that I have just launched:  http://www.cameratrade.com/ which is a Buy, Sell Trade website to buy and sell photography gear.

Giuseppe’s Favorite Images

Brent: We will get to camera trade.com after we have a look at your amazing images. The first one here, it looks like an evening shot of the Sydney Opera House, downtown Sydney. It looks like a long exposure. It looks like the ship or the boats are causing blurring in the image. Tell us a little bit about this image. Your thought process when you’re photographing it. What it makes you feel like and how you did it?

Guiseppe:  Yes Brent, I took this photo from the Sydney Harbour Bridge when i met up with one of my favourite photographers Elia Locardi. I am about half-way down the bridge here. A couple of things about the photograph: I found that there was a bit of negative space on the left hand side, so I wanted to introduce the blurred boat in there just to pull the viewer into the shot. The rest of the scene then speaks for itself. A full view of the magic Sydney Cityscape, with the Opera House on the left and the city on the right. It ’s a multiple blend image, so I have taken probably 4 or 5 photos in different exposures. It ’s not HDR. All I ’ve done is blended them digitally back together with the correct exposure using photoshop. That’s how I created this image.

Brent: When you’re shooting that, did you shoot with a fixed aperture and just changed the shutter speed then?

Giuseppe: Yes, that ’s right. I always shoot on aperture priority mode for this type of scene. I don’t shoot manual. You know, people say you got to shoot in manual. Why? The camera knows what it ’s doing? So, I’m always on aperture priority or shutter priority mode. I probably shot this around f11 – f16 just to give me the sharpest image I can get. That last frame was probably about 20 sec or 30 sec to get that boat streak I was after. The Opera House might be only 1/5 sec because it was so dark; I didn’t want the light blowing out there. So I captured different parts of the image with different shutter speeds, same aperture and then put them all back together.

Brent: Is that quite difficult to put together in Photoshop? Do you use masks in that type of thing? Or do you just use different layers and delete the parts that you don’t want from each layer?

Giuseppe:  Originally, when I first started processing images and I probably would recommend everyone to do if they are just starting out is to just brush out areas with layer mask applied. Now, I am experimenting more on luminosity masking which is a more refined selection technique. You don’t get much haloing and better feathering. The luminosity masking is definitely something I recommend people read up on. Sean Bagshaw is one guy that has a good series of videos; you might want to check it out if you’re looking into that. I actually purchased the video series a few years back and it helped me out immensely. Once you get your head around it, it ’s a powerful tool to have.

Brent: When you look at this image, what feeling do you get? What story does it tell you?

Giuseppe: To me, it just shows a beautiful city that I live in. You have the city lights, the movement in the harbour. The sky wasn’t doing much that night so I decided to push it more into the blue hour. More into the night setting. So again, when I am at a shoot, I sort of play it by ear; if the sky is looking magical, I would probably have taken this shot 30mins earlier, you know with that nice golden light and with the sun below the horizon. But for this one, I stuck around for a bit more and waited for it to get fully dark and let the Sydney lights be the main presence of the photo.

Brent: Beautiful image there, Giuseppe. So, we will run to the next one, the shot looks like a beach scene with a rock and it looks like a long exposure image. Tell us a little bit about that one.

Giuseppe: This is shot in Bungan Beach in Sydney’s northern beaches. This image here, it was one of my first images that really made me stand out from the crowd. I think that ’s important. With so many people doing photography, you need to stand out. Otherwise, your just going to be like everyone else.  This photo here, I have used different techniques. I used a slow shutter speed, not too slow, you are probably looking at half a second to a second here, i wanted to retain the motion of the water. As you can tell, the water looks like it ’s moving in the background, with more of a focus on the rocks in the foreground. The light was magic that night, it was like a giant soft box just lighting up the beach.

Brent: That ’s great. It ’s a slow enough shutter speed to show movement, but it ’s fast enough that you can still actually see the two waves; the one that ’s closest to the shore and then the one at the back line where it ’s probably breaking in some of the rocks.

Giuseppe: For most of my seascapes I find around that 0.5 sec to 1 sec gives you a really good sense of motion without blurring out the water too much, but not too sharp as well if that makes sense. For this photo i set my camera to shutter priority, I set that to 0.05 sec or 1 sec and then I choose the right filters to get me the right exposure and aperture i am after. That ’s the trick.

Brent: When it comes to your filters, what filters did you use for this image?

Giuseppe: For this image, I used the Lee Filter System. I probably used a 2 or 3 Grad Neutral Density filter for the sky.

Brent: To darken the sky, because the sky is a lot lighter than the foreground.

Giuseppe: That ’s right. So, usually expose for the foreground, And then, when I am exposing for that, the sky is too bright so I w’ll then try and bring that back with the 2 or 3 stop grad. If am still overexposed in the sky, I w’ll throw in a 2-stop hard grad for the whole entire frame.  It just depends on what time of the day it is and how much i need to bring it back. I don’t use a lot of filters; i find the 2-stops soft and the 3-stop soft GND is enough for what I want to do. I always shoot in the golden hours too. So, if you are shooting in the middle of the day, at 12 o’clock in the bright sun, obviously you’re going to need at least a 10-stop filter or maybe even more to get the same effects. But again, you’re losing that colour. You’re losing that bright, golden colour. There ’s something about that golden hour light and shooting at that time, that gives you the best results.

Brent: Definitely. If you can get out to the beach in the golden hour, the hour around sunrise or sunset, that is the perfect time for these images. Now, let’s jump to the last image, it looks like a crack in the rock where the water is flowing in and out. It looks like a sunset or sunrise in the background with the storm or something like it. Tell me about this image.

Giuseppe: That was a sunrise at Turimetta Beach in Sydney, one of my favourite beaches to shoot. Basically it ’s just a gorge, that ran into the main ocean and there ’s a lot of water movement. The composition, I really wanted to start from the bottom, look straight to that rock and just looking up into the sky. The two side rocks holding in to the image, Again 0.8 to 1 sec shutter speed, 2 or 3 stop grad for the sky. I processed this one in Photoshop bit, generally I try to use one exposure to process my images. I always shoot with my camera and my filters come back with one RAW image and maybe double or triple process that one RAW image, I use one image to achieve my final shot.

Brent: So, you obviously shoot this in raw. In Photoshop, how much work do you actually do to them when it comes to the saturation and that type of stuff? Or do you use Lightroom at all?

Giuseppe: Yes, I shoot everything in RAW; I get home and use Adobe Bridge as my cataloging and having all my files in order. From there, I jump in Adobe Camera RAW, to do my RAW processing. So, I bring a single shot into the Adobe Camera RAW, where i do some global adjustments, I don’t get too fancy. I just make sure that my exposure is right, white balance. I always shoot white balance on auto, so I always make that adjustment here, do i want a cooler or warmer image? Do a tiny bit of sharpening, make sure that the histogram has no clipping with a little bit of room on either end so that I can finish off in Adobe Photoshop with some techniques that I picked up to get a bit more clarity and saturation and just get the image looking nice and neat.

Camera Trade – Sell Your 2nd Hand Camera Gear

Brent: Tell us about your new venture, - Camera Trade.

Giuseppe: Yeah, six months ago Ashlan Nathens and I started cameratrade.com, it is a website where you can buy and sell you’re used or unwanted photography gear. There weren’t many sites out there apart from the big ones like eBay or Gumtree where photographers could go and sell their gear. So I decided to start this up and it has taken off really well. I also have a blog there as well. We interview photographers, about how they approach their photography. I write a few articles on my techniques as well. So, it ’s 100% to join and post.

Brent: How does it work? Because I’ve got a lot of old equipment that I never use anymore, like I’ve got a couple of the Canon extenders and those types of things. What ’s the process if I want to sell these? What do I need to do to get it on there? And how does this all work?

Giuseppe: You can jump into the site, from there, you can log-in with any of your favourite social networks. Once you’re logged in and registered, you have your own dashboard where you can post an Ad, ads lasts 90 days. It ’s very user-friendly. We are getting a lot of traffic at the moment, which is good. If someone is interested in your Ad, they will contact you directly. Your email is not visible to the public but the buyer has the option to email you about extra details or if they want to see additional photos or meet-up in person and have a look at the item being sold.

Brent: It ’s free to post an Ad for your gear and then you just put a price on what you think is reasonable and someone will obviously contact you, make you an offer, and then from there, how does it go with the person paying and shipping them the gear? How does that all work?

Giuseppe: When you fill out the Ad, there are options there on how you want to sell your gear. So you might want to go with just local pick up only, or you may be happy to post within Australia. Basically, we are the link between buyers and sellers. That ’s what we do. We don’t get involved in the transaction between the buyer and the seller. We are just photography specific, so photographers buying from other photographers and selling to other photographers.

Brent: Okay, so someone just pays via PayPal or they can pay cash or however they want and then that ’s dealt off the website. So, this website is mainly to get the gear out there, in front of photographers, of people who actually want to buy photography equipment. And it ’s a great place for you to sell your secondhand, old equipment that your not using.

Giuseppe: That ’s right Brent. A lot of people upgrade and want to sell their old gear. I started with a Canon 1000D and I am now using a Canon 5D Mark II. I don’t need that 1000D sitting at home collecting dust, so I put it up on the site and sell it there so i have few extra dollars to put towards a new Lee Filter or whatever else your interested in buying. Put it towards a new camera. That ’s what the site is all about.

Brent: That ’s great because I’ve been looking for something like this for years because I’ve got about three bodies sitting in my cupboard that I don’t use anymore.

Giuseppe: Hopefully it ’s a good resource and people can get some good use out of it.

Brent: I’ve got the original Canon 1D that I spent lot money on about 10 years ago and I still got it there. I just use it as a plate holder now, it ’s quite heavy. It holds up in the door.

Tools of Trade – Camera Equipment

Brent: Tell us a little bit about the tools of your trade.  Like what do you actually use? I know you mention that you’re using the Canon 5D Mark II, but what kind of lenses and what other things when it comes to photography that you love?

Giuseppe:  As i mentioned before, my genre is the landscape and seascape photography, so I use a Canon 5D Mark II as my body. I use the Canon 17-40mm f4/L lens for my wide-angle shots. I also have the Canon 24-70mm f2.8/L for a bit more reach, that ’s my max focal lens, 70mm. So, the two lenses plus the body, that ’s my major gear. I also have the Lee Filter Kit where I use soft 3-stop GND, soft 2-stop grad and a 2-stop ND filter. I also run a 10-stop B+W ND filter as well for my super long exposures where I like to get a lot of cloud movements in my shots. I have wireless triggers and other little bits and pieces in the bag. I always go to a shoot with a microfiber cloth, especially to my seascape shots with a lot of sea spray. I highly recommend a microfiber cloth in your bag. Always bring a plastic bag as well just in case you get rained on, you can cover the camera quickly. Tripod, you need something strong and sturdy, especially for the long exposures so that your camera is not going to have too much movement. That ’s basically it. I have never really been a guy has been focused on gear. I have never really been that sort of a person. The less you have, the more you can concentrate on your photography rather than you put yourself into situations where you need to ask yourself a lot of questions about what gear will i need when shooting. Let the photography do the talking.

Brent: I will second the little cheat things, the essential things like a plastic bag. You know what’s really good is a shower cap that you get at a hotel or something. A little shower cap, because it actually fits over your lens and camera and it’s got that little elastic band at the bottom that holds it on, especially if the wind is blowing and the storm is coming or something like that.

Giuseppe:  Especially on the water, you can really get caught out easily. One minute it looks fine, and then five minutes later, it ’s bucketing down. So, that ’s something that you should be aware of when shooting seascapes.

Brent: I’ve almost got the same exact equipment as you for my landscape, long exposure photography; the Canon 17-40mm f/4, my Canon 5D Mark II and the Lee Foundation Kit. It ’s great, I love it. That changed it all for me. I believe you are instrumental and someone else I recently interviewed, Mykall Hall, you showed him what the ND filter can do for your landscape photography. Tell me a little more about that.

Giuseppe: I met Mykall online through Google Plus, after interacting a while online we decided to have a shoot together. He was just starting to get into photography. I think back then, he had only been in it for I think, about a year. He knew what he was doing back then but I think he just needed that little bit of a nudge to see how to get his photos to stand out from the crowd, which he does now. He posts some amazing images. So yeah, I lent him my 10-stop filter for about half an hour, then next day he rang me up and said he bought one. And I think for him, the rest is history. Glad to be a part of it. He ’s really pulling off some amazing images at the moment and he has just started a website of his own as well. He ’s really moving on, which is good. His goal is to photograph all 37 Sydney beaches. I am not sure where he is at the moment but from memory he is about half-way there.

Brent: He’s a great guy. I met him down the Sydney when I went down to that Photowalk. Where you at the photowalk?

Giuseppe: Yeah, I was. I bump into you actually. There where so many people there.

Brent: I know. I don’t know who’s who. You get to know people online by their avatar, but you don’t actually look like in real life.

Process of Creating

Brent: Okay, so we’ve run through the tools of the trade. So, maybe we will run through the process of creating. When you get on the beach and you want to create these amazing seascape images, these long exposures, what gets to your head and what actually gives you the inspiration to get down there and shoot? Do you listen to music? Or do you surf websites before you go down. Tell me a little bit about your process of creating these amazing images.

Giuseppe: Basically, I do a little bit of research before I head to the location. I will always research tides and what time the sun ’s setting or rising. I also do Google Image search to see what other people had done from the same spot, just so you can try and improve on what they have done and get that initial idea in your head of what the location is all about. I get to a location at least an hour and a half before I want to start shooting. Check out a few different compositions before I even pull the camera out of the bag. I use my Nexus phone with grid view to test how the composition will work. Once i have sorted the scene i want to capture I probably pick two or three in any one given shoot and wait for that perfect light. Basically from a shoot, I might come home with maximum of five scenes that I am going to think about processing, and I well probably end up with 1 or 2 final images from the each shoot. You know the ones where the light was just right, the right composition, right timing. I think that ’s important. A lot of people get out there and take a hundred photos and they get home and they don’t know where to start. If you only take a few in the field it really narrows your choices down when you’re ready to start processing your images.

Brent: Yeah, I totally agree with you. I’ve done quite a few workshops where I’ve taken my students down and photographed some landscapes and I notice some people set-up and they start shooting, like as we get down on the beach. I walk around for the first 10 minutes on the rocks and it looks like I’m looking for a loose change somewhere in between the rocks and bending my knees. I’m using my head like this to look through and see what it would look like on a wide angle shot and spend some time before I run back and get my tripod and camera and set it up. That ’s a great tip; pre-visualize the images that you possibly can produce before you start shooting and then go and  just shoot a couple and then you’ll know if you got it or not when you get home. You don’t spend 20 hours editing a hundred shots and then only one of them is actually good.

Giuseppe: That ’s how I first started. I think we all did the same thing. We go out there, we get like a hundred shots and it makes the though process very difficult. If you can just concentrate on just 2 or 3 different compositions that you’re happy with, and then getting home and editing those. Some of my images, It might take me three or four days, backwards and forwards, I will leave it. Forget it, come back maybe the next day, and I will say, what was I thinking? And then I will start again. So, I think that ’s important too. Don’t just get home and start throwing your images through a processing program, boost up the saturation, boost up the vibrance, sharpen them and throw it on the web. You really want to spend time. You went out in the field, did all the hard work, did the research, you’ve got all your good camera gear, and then the last thing to ruin it is the post-processing part, it ’s a bit of a shame really.

Brent: That ’s a very good tip. Not to rush the processing or the finishing of your art that you’ve spend so much energy creating. Just to finish off, thank you so much for talking with me. We’ve run through quite a few things. You’ve told us who you are; you’re a great landscape photographer from Sydney. You’ve shown us three of your amazing, long exposure shots; one of them that I really like is the Sydney Opera House night shot, where you’ve blended quite a few exposures. You’ve told us a little bit about your new venture, the cameratrade.com, which is an amazing place to get rid of pre-loved equipment and buy someone else’s pre-loved equipment. You told us a little bit about the tools you use, the process of creating images and how you edit things and pre-visualize your landscape photography. If people want to get hold of you and follow what your doing and maybe just chat with you, what’s the best way to do that?

Giuseppe: I am pretty active on most social networks, probably on Google Plus is the best place to catch me these days. cameraTrade on Google Plus and you can follow my facebook page: Glow Photography and also on cameratrade.com

Brent: Anyway, thanks again Giuseppe.

Travel Sunset Photography Tip

While travelling, I wanted to give you one more little trick from this photoshoot using this point and shoot camera. The sun has gone down, it’s getting quite dark now and I’ve been playing with this little point-and-shoot compact camera to see what I can do. It’s quite amazing.

Highlights from this video:
0:21 What you can do with a point-and-shoot camera
0:30 Dragging the shutter
1:05 Image showing movement and sharp focus

Dragging the Shutter Technique

I photographed my daughter jumping in front of these clouds as we’re catching the last rays of sun. I want to show you a little method called “dragging the shutter.”

Very Slow Shutter Speed

It’s when you go with a really slow shutter speed. I’ve put this camera on to time value (Tv) or shutter priority mode and I’ve adjusted the shutter speed down (slow).

I’ve gone from 1/100 sec and went all the way down to 1/13 sec or 1/15 sec, which is really slow, and I’m also using the flash. I got my daughter to move and jump around and do a little ballet pose. What it does is, it creates this unusual image where you got movement in the images and part of the image still.

Add Fill Flash

The really slow shutter speed captures all the movement as shown by the blurring of the image and the flash fires where it actually sharpens part of the image that the flash captures. That is because the flash fires at a very high speed (short burst of light) – which means it freezes part of the subjects that it touches.

So that’s what you call dragging the shutter. What do you think of these images? They’re quite cool. They’re really slow shutter speed images with a flash.

This Brent, have a great day!

What do you think of these images? Please leave a comment below.

For more Travel Photography Tips Click Here.

Podcast Highlights

0.12 Who is Cole Thompson?
2:39 Favorite Images
17:39 Inspiration and Mindset
19:58 Pre-visualization Process
29:15 One Thing You Wish You Knew
32:48 Best Advice from Cole
33:52 Education and Learning

Hi guys, I’ve got Cole Thompson here. He’s an amazing black & white fine art photographer.

Who is Cole Thompson?

Brent:  Cole, can you give us a little bit of background your photography and your life?

Cole: I grew up travelling; my father was in the Air Force and we travelled a lot. When he retired, we landed in Rochester, New York and it was there, as a 14-year old boy, that I discovered photography.  I decided that photography was my destiny; I believed in that as a child and I still believe it today.

I was out hiking one day with a friend when we stumbled across an old house and my friend told me that it had been owned by George Eastman.  Living in Rochester, everyone knows about Kodak and George Eastman, and so I read his biography. Before I had completed that book I had decided that I was destined to be a photographer. It sounds kind of silly saying, but before I’d even taken a photo or seen a print come up in the dark room, I just knew that’s what I was supposed to be. From there I taught myself photography and it became my life. At age 17 I decided I would not pursue photography in college because I feared that if I earned my living as a photographer, I would lose my passion for it. So instead I pursued business and built a career and family. Because of those responsibilities I didn’t have much time for my photography until 30 years later when picked it back up after 30 years.

Brent:  Tell us why you moved to Colorado and how has that affected your photography?

Cole: We moved to Colorado from Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a crazy place, a crowded place, an expensive place and it wasn’t the best place to raise a family (I’ve got 5 children) and so we moved here in 1993. I know that a lot of people might imagine that with all of the beautiful scenery in Colorado that it might have affected me, but it has not. While my roots are in landscape, and I still do some, I really don’t consider myself a landscape photographer.

Cole’s Favorite Images

Brent: Thanks, Cole. Now, let’s have a look at your favorite images. You’ve sent me three of your favorite images that you’ve taken in the past. Let’s run through them quickly. Can you tell us about the photos and the thought that went into creating these images?

Cole: The first one is “The Angel Gabriel” which I created in 2006 and it’s of a homeless man on the Newport Beach Pier in California.  It was a long exposure and so it appears that he’s standing there alone with only a couple of ghosts in the background.

There are two things significant to me about this image.  First of all was the experience. I was shooting the pier using long exposures, it was crowded and I was using a 30 sec exposure so that almost all people disappeared. While the images were interesting, it was missing something, a subject. So I was looking around trying to find someone who I could use when I saw this man, Gabriel, digging some French fries out of a trash can and eating them.  I went over and I said “excuse me? Would you help me with a photograph?” He looked at me distrustfully like we might look at a homeless person, I told him “No really, I just need you to help me with a photograph and if you do, I’d be happy to buy you lunch.” So he agreed and we took a couple of photos which were just “okay.” Then he wanted to take one holding his bible, and this is the resulting image.

Afterwards I took him to the restaurant at the end of the pier, it was very nice restaurant and the people were looking at me because I’m bringing in this barefooted, dirty homeless person. We sat down and I said “please, order anything you’d like” and he responded that he hadn’t had a steak in years and that he’d like it with mushroom and onions. When the server brought his steak, Gabriel picked it up with his hands and ate it. All the while the restaurant staff is giving me the “why did you bring him in here” look.

During our conversation I learned that he was Romanian and so am I and so we had something to talk about. I learned that his family had escaped Romania when the dictator Ceausescu fell from power and that his father lived nearby.

After the meal and as I was thanking him, I said “Gabriel, give me your father’s address and if I sell any of these images, I’d be happy to send you some of the money.” And he said “No, why don’t you give it someone who really needs it? I’ve got all that I need.” And Gabriel walked away with his only two possessions: a bedroll and a bible.

The second reason this image is so important to me is that it was the first time that I really exercised my vision and “created an image” rather than “taking a photograph.” I believe that a photographer tends to document reality while an artist creates.  This was the first time I felt that I had done that.

Long Exposure Equipment

Brent: That is awesome. I just love this image. Gabriel is right in the center of the pier and there are a couple of long exposure ghosts in the background. Tell me Cole, what kind of filter did you use to photograph this? What are the technical aspects of this image?

Cole: For my long exposure work, I typically use two filters stacked one on top of the other. One is a Singh-Ray Vari-ND; it’s an adjustable ND filter that can go from 2 to 8 stops of neutral density. It works like a polarizer and this is important to because you can open up the filter to let enough light in to compose and focus, and then you can stop it down for your exposure. On top of that filter I’ll stack a 5 stop fixed ND filter which gives me 13 stops of neutral density, which is usually enough to give me a 30-second exposure in bright sunlight.  I’ll sometimes stack a 10 stop filter in place of the 5 and that allows me to get several minutes of exposure in bright sunlight.

Brent: Do you have a filter holder in front of your lens?

Cole: These are circular filters, I use an 82mm and then fit each of my lenses with a step-up ring so that one set of filters works on all of my lenses.  I use large 82mm filter because when you stack them they protrude and vignette the image, so the wider filter helps minimizes that.

Artist or Photographer?

Brent: Just back to the part where you talked about the artist; the difference between the artist and the photographer. When did it start coming into your mindset creating art as opposed to taking photographs?

Cole: Early in my photographic life I was not conscious of such a concept and I’d always considered myself a photographer. In fact, I felt that as a photographer I had a duty to not modify the image. I see now that is silly because everything we do as photographers modifies the image; starting with the lens that we choose, our perspective, how we expose it and how we process it. Everything changes the image. So in a sense, there really is no way to document reality and to capture the truth. A photograph can capture many realities and many truths.

Around 2004 and shortly after I came back to photography, I met a woman who became my mentor.  She was an artist first, who began using photography as opposed to me who was a photographer first, and who later become an artist. She continually tried to get through my thick skull that I shouldn’t limit myself to simply taking photographs, but rather I should create images. Over time that concept slowly started to sink in until I woke up one day realizing that I wanted to create. It was a gradual process and it took me about two years until I felt comfortable thinking of myself as an artist.

If someone asked the old Cole the photographer if he “manipulated” his images, he would respond “No!” and be insulted at the very thought of it.  But if you ask me now, my response is “Yes!  I manipulate what I see with my eyes, into what I see through my vision.”  That is what makes an artist, an artist; they create.

Brent: That’s great. Let’s run through the second image, the one where it looks like someone is in water.

Cole: This is called “Swimming Towards the Light.” Many people think this was photographed underwater, but it’s really my daughter swimming laps in a hotel swimming pool.  I’m on the 5^th floor looking straight down and this image is catches her just as she is about to touch the pool where the light is.  And that’s why it is called Swimming Towards the Light. This was taken with a 1/10 sec slow shutter speed to introduce a little bit of blur and movement in the image.

It’s a very simple but conceptual image. I never like to tell people what my images mean to me or what they’re supposed to mean to them, but I do find it interesting to hear what others see in them. I recently gave this image to a friend who is undergoing some pretty serious cancer treatment and it has come to mean something very special to her as she fights her battle. She relates to this image very personally.

Brent: Just going back to the artist within you. You’re actually creating art that obviously mean something to you but it may mean entirely something different to someone else. They will see this image, have a look at it and it’ll create some kind of emotion in them that is entirely different from what you actually created it with.

Cole: Absolutely. And oftentimes my images don’t have any special meaning to me but others find meaning in them. That’s why I don’t like to tell people what they mean, or even hint through the title what the image is supposed to mean. When you look at my image titles, you’ll notice that most are simple numbered titles. I just don’t think that it’s my role to tell people what to think when they look at my art.

People often ask what my images mean. Sometimes they really don’t mean anything, they are just beautiful images.

Brent: And does this image of our daughter in the water mean something to you?

Cole: No, it’s just an image that I saw it in my mind and created. It doesn’t have a deeper meaning for me, but that’s not to say that it can’t have a deeper meaning for other people.

Brent: Great. The last image you sent me, it looks like a concentration camp.

Cole: Yes, this image is “Auschwitz No. 14″ and it’s my favorite image from the series “The Ghosts of Auschwitz-Birkenau.”  A few years ago I was visiting my son in Ukraine who was serving in the Peace Corps.  Because we were so close we decided to visit Poland and the family engaged in discussion to decide what to do while there.  I knew that everyone would probably want to see Auschwitz-Birkenau, but I was secretly hoping that we wouldn’t go because I don’t like sad places.  But the family out voted me and so off we went.

We began with the tour inside buildings where they show you the meticulous records that the Germans kept on each prisoner. I found myself looking at a photograph of a man, who was looking straight into the camera…into my eyes, and all I can think about is how he was then murdered shortly after this photograph was taken.  It was surreal and depressing. As we continued through the tour, we saw the infamous piles of clothing, glasses and shoes. I am not prone to claustrophobia but I just could not breathe and I signalled to my family that I was going outside for air.

Once outside, I could breathe easier and I began to walk slowly while looking at my feet.  With every step I could not help but wonder who else had walked in these same footsteps and were now dead?  I began to wonder, perhaps metaphorically, if their spirit still lingered there today.  And then suddenly it hit me: I needed to photograph the spirits of the people who lived and died there. Unfortunately I had less than an hour before the tour bus was going to leave.

So I ran from location to location photographing ghosts.  People want to know about the ghosts, are they real?  Did you create them in Photoshop?  Did they appear in the images afterwards?

I created these ghosts using my long exposure techniques and they are really the other visitors at the camp. They didn’t know I was photographing them or turning them into ghosts. In fact, that was my major challenge, getting people to walk into my scene so that I could photograph them. People are just too polite and when they saw me with my tripod and my camera, they would stay out of the scene. They could not appreciate that I actually wanted them in the shot!

So I used various techniques to trick them, these are techniques that I had developed in Japan under similar circumstances. I would use a remote shutter, turn my back away from the camera and act like I was talking on the phone. People would gradually wander back into the scene and then I’d use the remote shutter release to get the long exposure.

I was able to create 16 different images, each with a different type of ghost. My two favorites are Auschwitz #14 and Auschwitz #13 which depicts ghosts leaving the gas chamber.

Even though I did not want to visit Auschwitz and I had not intended to photograph there, this turned out to be great experience because I felt creatively inspired.

Brent: So, is this a series that you’ve exhibited?

Cole: Yes, I just finished exhibiting it at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and in a few weeks I’m going to Croatia to attend the opening of this exhibition in Split.

Inspiration & Mindset

Brent: That was a really moving story, Cole. Now, let’s move to the next question about inspiration and mindset. How do you stay inspired and where do you get those from? Do you have any rituals you do before you go out and photograph?

Cole: Well, I don’t really have any magic answers about how to get inspiration. For me inspiration comes externally and so I just have to be prepared to recognize it.

I find that I no longer am able to photograph around my own hometown. I’m just too caught up in my day-to-day activities, family, business, work and everything else. So for me, I need to get away. I might take a couple of days and drive somewhere. The key for me is that I need to have my mind freed up of my daily worries and cares.

I also find that when I read the Edward Weston Day Books (his diaries) they inspire me and put me in a creative mood. The other thing that inspires me is listening to the Beatles. I’m always amazed that they, upon reaching success, didn’t try to ensure continued success by maintaining the same style. They were willing to take a risk and try something new. Listening to their music inspires me to apply that same philosophy to my work. I don’t want to get stuck doing just one type of work nor be classified into one category such as a landscape photographer.

For me, it’s all about seeing. I know that great images are all around me, if only I can see them!

Brent: Yeah, that’s really important. For me too, getting away is one way that I kinda recharge the batteries a little bit and you know get away with the daily activity and then it seems like the creative energy stars coming back out of you when you remove yourself from the everyday activity. Now Cole, can you tell us a little bit about the process of creating images. Do you pre-visualize what you want to photograph? Or do you just go with the flow? Go to a place, see what happens, see where the inspiration comes from and then shoot it?

Pre-visualization Process

Cole: I do pre-visualize, but only once I’m at the scene and I see what I’m going to photograph.  At that moment, I generally know how I want the final image to look and my challenge is to take the image my eyes see, and force that into the vision that my mind sees. Now sometimes when I’m processing I might also stumble upon an idea or a look and my work can take a different direction there.

Brent: So, when you’re there you know what the end result going to be like?

Cole: Almost always I know what I want my images to look like.

Brent: Tell us a little bit about the process you go through. From start to finish; from capturing the image, processing it, printing it, and then displaying it.

Cole: I have my own “Rule of Thirds”. (I don’t like Rules of Photography so I make up my own) My Rule of Thirds says a great image is comprised of one-third vision, one-third the shot, and one-third processing.

The vision is what drives the other two-thirds. It drives the shot because when I know what I want the final image to look like, that directs how I capture the image. Likewise with the processing, which is where I do the majority of the creative work on the image, the vision drives it.

My workflow is extremely simple and I typically use only six tools:

RAW Converter
Black and white converter
Levels
Dodging and Burning
Clone Tool
Contrast Adjustment

I think it’s also instructive as to what I don’t use:

B&W converters
Plug-ins
Layers
Special Ink Sets
Custom Paper Profiles
Monitor Calibrators

Most of my work is done with dodging and burning and for that I do use a Wacom tablet, which gives me great control and allows me to dodge and burn the smallest details.

Brent: Okay. So, you start with the raw image, process it, and then do you actually save that as JPEG before you print? Tell us about the printing; the actual display part of the whole of the process.

Cole: I convert my raw image into to a TIFF and never use JPEG’s except for my web images. I use an uncompressed TIFF because the image will not degrade each time you save it, which is what happens with a JPEG.

I first use the RAW converter to do my basic brightness and contrast adjustments and save it to a TIFF.  Then I’ll use levels to set my white and black points. Then I dodge and burn in great detail to highlight things I want emphasized and to burn down things I don’t want the eye to focus on. I also use the clone tool to remove imperfections in the image.

Lastly comes my printing secret: adding contrast.  I’ve learned that once an image looks on screen, it will look flat when you print it.  Everything looks good on the monitor because it uses transmitted light and that makes the blacks look deep and gives you wonderful contrast.  However when you print the image it will look disappointing because we see the print with reflected light, which pales in comparison to transmitted light.

So, what I do is this: Once the image looks good on the monitor, I need to pump up the contrast beyond what looks good on the monitor.  This extra contrast can help the print look almost as good as the image you see on your screen.

Presentation of Fine Art Photographs

Brent: Do you use any special fine art papers? How important is it to display them properly?

Cole: I typically use only two papers; my matte paper is Hahnemuhle Photo Rag 308 and for my glossy prints I use Epson Exhibition Fiber which has an F type surface, reminiscent of the papers I used in the darkroom.

Those are the only two papers I regularly use. I see many people on a lifelong quest searching for the perfect paper and I just don’t think there is such a thing. Find a paper you like and move on.

What I find as important as the paper is how an image is matted and framed. I think it’s important to have a lot of white space around the image to present it properly.  Also having the image under glass improves the blacks and contrast in an image and so that’s why I like to ship my prints in a clear bag, it not only protects the prints, but it also makes them look good when the customer takes them out of the box!

Brent: When you matte your prints, is that a normal white matte around the black and white image?

Cole: A simple single white matte with the image centered.  I don’t care for a bottom-weighted matte.

Brent: Is there a certain size that you print your images at? Or you just print them according to what the customer wants?

Cole: I’ve become so busy that I just don’t have the time to print and matte different sizes, so I’ve standardized on three sizes:

An 8X12 print which is matted to 16X20
A 10X15 print which is matted to 20X24
A 20X30 print, no matting

By standardizing my sizes, I can streamline my production process and make my life so much simpler, which becomes important at a certain point in your photographic business. At first you find yourself photographing 90% of the time and doing business 10% of the time. After a while you wake up to realize that the tables have turned and you’re now spending 90% of your time on business and only photographing 10% of the time!

By standardizing my sizes, I am able to keep things simple, minimize my costs and maximize my time behind the camera.

What’s One Thing You Wish You Knew When You Were Starting Out?

Brent: That’s great. Cole, tell me what’s one thing you wish you knew when you were starting out?  And what is that one thing that you’ve done that has made all the difference in your photography?

Cole: I am self-taught: I’ve never taken any photography classes or workshops. One of the great benefits of being self-taught was that I never learned the rules of photography. It was only a few years ago when someone criticized one of my images for not following the rule of thirds that I learned what that was.

I felt a bit silly not knowing that, but once I heard this “rule” I thought that it was pretty silly that anyone should be constrained by such rules. I was so glad that I had never learned the rules of photography and I’d advise someone starting off to not learn them. But if you’ve already learned them, consider them vague guidelines that should almost always be ignored.

If you want to create exciting work, do what makes sense and never because it’s a rule!

The other thing I would tell somebody starting off is to define success for yourself before you begin your journey.  For many years I followed the assumed definition of success which is: sell prints at high prices, get representation by a big name gallery and publish a book. For years I chased that definition but didn’t find it fulfilling. Sure, accolades are great in that moment, but at the end of the day you go home and you realize that it’s only you, your art and what you think of it. So, I started asking myself “what was my definition of success?” Coming up with my own definition was one of the most important things I have done and now I chase my definition of success.

Brent: So, for you, success is doing something you love?

Cole: Exactly right. For me success is being able to create work that I love and to answer to no man, no critic, no buyer and no gallery owner.

In addition people pay me enough – to purchase my equipment and to travel the world.

Best Advice from Cole

Brent: That’s awesome. I love your definition of success. What is the best advice that you can give to my audience? People who have DSLR camera, they’re getting into photography; they may even have been in photography for a little while and just getting really enthused about what they can create. What’s the best advice you can give them?

Cole: Don’t listen to other people. We brand people experts but the truth is that there is no one more expert about your vision than you. So, don’t listen to others.

I’ll hear people giving advice to others: “Here’s what you should do with your image…” I don’t listen to others advice and I never ask for advice about my images.  I know what I want and I pursue it.

So do your own thing and have fun with it!

Education and Learning

Brent: That’s a very good advice. That’s awesome. The last question will be all about education and learning. Where should someone starting out go to get some information and how they can learn the fastest way?

Cole: Well, everybody learns differently so no one way of learning would fit all people, but I enjoy learning by trying things, experimenting and making mistakes.

You have to know your learning style, but I would tell people to just go out and try things. Can classes help? Sure, they can help but I think that today’s cameras are so good that you don’t need to focus on the technical before you can pursue the creative.

Many of us gravitate towards the technical because it’s concrete and easier to learn than the creative. Learning to find your own vision is a lot more conceptual, vague and harder to know how to go about it. Learning how to use a camera is easy, you read the manual.  But I’ve never seen a good manual on how to find your vision and yet without vision, the most technically perfect images are cold and lifeless.

Brent: That’s great, Cole. What do you think about knowing your tools so that you can actually create that vision? Shouldn’t you know the technical part of the vision you got in your head so that you could actually go out and create?

Cole: If I were doing it over again, I would rather work on the creative and develop the technical as I needed those skills to complete my vision.  I really do think that we put too much emphasis on the technical.  I hear people say “you really can’t create until you know your tools.” Well, there’s certainly some truth to that but the other side of the coin is the person who spends all of their time learning processes that and they never get around to learning to be creative.

If I were to do it again, I would focus 80% of my efforts on developing my vision and 20% on the technical 

Brent: Okay. We’ll end this interview by asking, how can people get hold of you if they want more information?

Cole: Well, they can go to my website which is http://www.colethompsonphotography.com/ and they can email me at cole@colethompsonphotography.com. I answer every email.

Brent: That was an awesome interview. We’ve gone through quite a few things.

We’ve touched on your background, your favorite three images, you’ve given us a whole bunch of really good advice, your definition of success, your process, your vision, how you think of yourself as an artist instead of a photographer, breaking the rules, I really like that one.

I just really want to thank you Cole for taking the time and talking to me and getting this great information out in front of my audience or people that are thinking about getting into photography, especially when it comes to the art of photography, which is really close to my heart.

Final Thought – Important!

Cole: I appreciate you having me on your blog. You know, I had another thought I’d like to add: a lot of people who are just starting off with photography may be like me: I turned to photography because I didn’t believe that I had any creative ability and I felt that I could compensate for this by becoming very good at the technical. And I became very good at the technical, but that wasn’t enough to create great images.

Through my struggle and search for my vision, I have come to believe that everyone has this ability to be creative.  Sometimes it’s buried under a lot of “stuff” but it is there.

Brent: Thanks, Cole. That’s a very inspirational thought. Thank you very much.

Please leave comments below for Cole or Brent to answer.

Here’s an interview I had with Mykal Hall. He’s a photographer I met in Sydney a couple of weeks ago when I went down for the Google Plus photowalk. I’ve been following him online for quite a while. He’s a great photographer.

Podcast Highlights

0:32 Who is Mykal Hall?
2:24 Online Education
5:42 Equipment that Mykal Uses
23:25 Mykal’s Favourite Images
34:24 Post-Processing Techniques
41:20 Best Advice for Beginners

Who is Mykal Hall?

Brent: Mykal, can you give us a little bit about your background? Who you are and the things you’ve done in the past when it comes to photography?

Mykal: Well, with photography, I have been doing it for almost three years now. So I’m still pretty new to it. I fell into it by accident. I was listening to a Psychology Podcast and I come across the TWIP (This Week In Photo) Podcast and I thought that sounds pretty geeky and I do like a bit of tech. What happened next is, I bought a camera and that’s where it all started from.

All my training comes from online. I don’t have any formal training. I never picked up a camera up until three years ago. So it’s all relatively new to me.

Brent: That’s amazing. You’ve only been photographing for three years and you’re creating these unbelievable photos. That’s just incredible for someone like me who’s been doing this professionally for ten years now or maybe longer. It shows how much you can learn if you’re willing to go out there and learn it.

Mykal: I spent a lot of time listening to podcasts and going online for tutorials.

Online Education

Brent: So, you’ve learned everything online. You got your inspiration online. What websites would you suggest where you can get some really good information and further the education when it comes to learning photography?

Mykal: Okay, you’ve got the main one, there’s Kelby Training. That’s just a treasure chest of knowledge.  They have great instructors. You’ve also got linda.com, and YouTube. There’s so much free information out there. Of course, there’s your training as well. We’re so lucky these days. The community is just willing to share the knowledge.

Brent: I’ll second that, because most of my education came from online too. Even back then when the Internet is not as fast as it is now. What I did was that, I actually emailed great photographers that I was following, whose work really inspires me. I ask them questions like what lens are they using? What aperture? What shutter speed? So that I could get as much information as I could. That’s how I learned. That’s one of the reasons why I like to give back to anyone out there who wants to learn too, because everyone that I’ve learned from has been so forthcoming and sharing their knowledge and experience.

Equipment that Mykal Uses

Mykal: I shoot with a Nikon D7000, but it’s not a full-frame camera; it’s a crop factor camera. I use it mainly with a 12-24mm Tokina lens. I like shooting wide. For my lenses, I have 28-300mm, which is my general lens.

Brent: I notice that you do a lot of the long-exposure, slow shutter speed images with a lot of cloud movement. Tell us a little bit about your hitech filters kit. I remember watching you working your filters, photographing next to me with your tripod. And also, can you tell us a little bit about your electronic device that you were working and trying to figure out when we were photographing at Bondi in Sydney?

Mykal: Okay. The filters that I use, they’re hitech filters. They’re only resin filters and not glass. I’ve got three grad filters. I’ve got a 1-stop, 2-stop, and 3-stop graduated neutral density filters.

Brent: For people who don’t know what that is, can you explain what those filters are?

Mykal: It’s a gradual darkness in the photo. It brings the exposure down so you get a range of light that’s more controllable. It’s an easier aspect to control.

Brent: That’s kind of like your windscreen, where you got the tinted part at the top to stop the really harsh sunlight from coming through. And then it gets more opaque as it goes down when you’re looking at the road, when it’s a little bit darker.

Mykal: I also have four Neutral Density Filters.

Brent: For those who are just starting out, Neutral Density Filter is just basically a darken piece of glass. It’s just like a piece of sunglasses, darkening the light; darkening the light from coming in to the camera. So, Mykal, what do you use these for?

Mykal: Usually with the Neutral Density Filters, I want to try to get a slower shutter speed so that I can capture the water movement. To capture water movement, I try to get around 0.6 sec. That’s my go-to timing. But it depends on how fast the water is moving. I may vary it from there, but that’s the shutter speed I use on the first attempt. And most of the time, it’s fine.

Brent:  So when you’re photographing these landscapes and seascapes, your whole focus is blurring the water just enough to show some movement but also you can still see the wave in the background and the cloud seem pretty still to me. With me, I take the opposite approach. I want the water looking all blurred looking like milk and I want the clouds moving. So I go for much longer shutter speed than you. I go for 2 minutes or 30 seconds.

Brent: So, what other things do you use to create these images? What other things do you need?

Mykal: You’ll need a remote shutter and a tripod, unless you’re very steady with your hand.

Brent: When it comes to a remote shutter release, you can either use a cable rod that’s just plugged straight at the side of your camera and you can actually press the shutter on the cable and it’s going to expose your camera in bold mode and it’s going to keep the shutter open for as long as you press it. That’s probably the cheapest way to go. But you have something else. Tell us a little bit about that.

Mykal: My previous remote shutter sort of died, so I thought about moving away from a cable remote. I needed a wireless remote. So, that’s when I picked up a relatively cheaper, wireless remote. It’s Phottix Aion. It has a wireless remote and another unit that fits into the hotshoe.

Brent: So they’re two black boxes about a size of old, small mobile phone. One is a bit bigger than the other. The other one has a screen on it, which is the remote piece. The other piece, it slots in to your hotshoe and doesn’t have a cable that actually goes into the side of the camera, doesn’t it?

Mykal: Yes. It does have a cable and I can control the shutter speed. I can control the number of shots to be taken. I can also do bracketing for long exposures.

Long Exposures

Brent: So you’ve got a camera, a wide-angle lens, filters, sturdy tripod, and a remote shutter release. What’s the whole mindset behind all these equipment? What’s the outcome that you’re looking for?

Mykal: For longer exposures, I like to portray the movement of time in over 30 seconds or two minutes, which is my general long exposure time.  All the movements that happen within that period is going to be blurry. I just love long exposures.

I like going out there. Being out there with nature, it’s like a meditative feel. Everything else just disappears  You’re in that zone and nothing else matters. It’s so relaxing and brings you back down to earth and all your worries disappear.

It’s like you’re sitting out there and you meditate. At the end of it, you hopefully have this wonderful photo to show around and share with the world.

Brent: How long did it take you from when you first decided you want to become a better photographer and you got your equipment to where you could actually pre-conceived an idea and really enjoy the creative process?

Mykal: When I first started learning photography, I learnt full manual mode. I think that helped a lot. I learned very quickly. I think it was up until I went out with Giuseppe Basile, he’s a great photographer from Google Plus. My first meet-up was with him and he lent me his 10-stop filter, which is very dark. I tried it, looked at it, and I was like “wow!” He said “You can take shots but this is being creative. This is being an artist. You’re not seeing this, but you’re making this.” And I just fell in love with that. That was probably a year after I picked up a camera.

Mykal’s Favourite Images

Brent: Can you walk me through some of your favourite images? I think the first one was Avalon Beach? Can you tell us about the feeling and the story behind the actual photo when you were taking it?

Mykal: This is at Avalon Beach, one of the Northern Suburbs beaches in Sydney, Australia.  I’ve been photographing around the centre of the beach. The sun had set and I had moved around to the rock pool, the light was getting dimmed, and I can see this image in my mind of the chains and the pool is just swirling and this water is flowing out of the overflow outlets. I just see this image in my mind. It actually has the sodium lights from the pool that’s why it’s got a bit of a yellowy tinge to it. It’s just a longer exposure and then edited in aperture and then into my favourite photo editor program; the Perfect Photo Suite 7. It can be a plugin to Lightroom or Photoshop, or just a standalone program.

Brent: This is definitely your style as I can see it with the others. You have that really moody, dark cloud. You have the water movement. I see that you shot it at 2 seconds f16 with a 16mm camera lens.

Mykal: I just like having weird objects at the beach instead of just rocks.

Brent: Okay, so let’s jump to the next one, the Mona Vale Beach.

Mykal: The main feature of this is there’s a storm water outlet there, which is another oddity on the beach that I sort of honed into. Normally storm water outlets are round structure, but this one has more of a surf board shape.  The clouds were looking moody and you have that nice break in the background as well. This happens to capture the waves crashing over those rocks at the right moment.

Brent: What I really like about this image is that, you have the wave really coming through. You got a surfer kind of sitting out there. He’s obviously waiting for the right wave and it wasn’t enough for him. I like how you used the rule of thirds; your horizon in on the top third of the image and you’ve got the storm water drain in the bottom third of the image coming in from the left. Your eyes flow in from the left.  You’ve got the moss on the drain and you got the water that’s really milky and I can see the movement. So you got the beach, concrete, water, and you got the sky.

Mykal: I like lining images up. So you got the storm water drain and the rocks sorts of points towards the surfer. I didn’t do that intentionally, but when I edited it, I noticed that there’s a leading line.

Brent: Composition is really important when you’re photographing landscapes. And the next one, this is Coal Cliff.

Mykal: Yes, this one. This was a Google Plus meet-up. Michael Sutton, another photographer, organized a meet-up down at Coalcliff, which is down south of Sydney. We went out, we shot the sunrise and I just happen to look over my left shoulder and happened to see these magnificent clouds. I just had to take that photo.

Brent: I noticed that these are all landscapes. What attracts you to the landscape photo instead of portraits or other area?

Mykal: I suppose being new to photography I started off with landscapes. I also find it like a meditative process as well; being close to nature. It just sort of energizes you when you’re out there. At this stage, I just love landscapes.

Brent: I agree with you. Getting out there to nature, it’s very relaxing and it’s good to the spirit too. Let’s jump to the next one; the Sydney Harbor. It looks like a sunset. It’s just beautiful. You got the opera house and you got the harbor bridge. You also got some rocks on the foreground. Tell us more about this.

Mykal: This is taken at Kirribilli, it’s a northern suburb foreshore of Sydney Harbour  It’s got some great jetty formations with these beautiful rocks.  Once they’re wet, they just look magnificent. I just find it odd that you have this modern structure of Sydney in the background and then you have rubble in the foreground. I just like the image.

Brent: Yes, the contrast between the rubble and the modern glass. And we got the last one, the landscape.

Mykal: This is one of my favourite beaches to shoot. It’s called Turimetta Beach. In winter, this place is probably one of the best beaches to photograph. The rocks go all green. You’ve got lovely flat structured rocks at different levels. You’ve got channels. When the surf comes in, the sand moves so much you could go there one day and take photos and you go back the following day, it looks completely different.  It’s really a great beach.

Brent: This looks like a very long exposure to me because you’ve got lots of milky water. I can see the layers of the rocks in front. You’ve got some of the layers that are quite dark because they’re sticking out of the water. As you go lower, they get mistier and kind of disappear into the mist of the waves coming back and forth. Do you remember how long the shutter speed was?

Mykal: Actually, this photo has a lot of meaning for me because this the day I met up with Giuseppe Basile. This was my first Google Plus photoshoot. We went out and he lent me his 10-stop filter. I used it, composed my shot and once I saw this, that’s when I fell in love with the creative process.

Brent: I just had a look at the Google Plus photo details, this is 80 seconds. That’s a pretty long exposure. Tell me a little bit about the post-processing techniques that you do on these images. Obviously, you got something in your mind, you go out and photograph it, but what happens in the camera is only part of the final creative process. Tell me about the editing that happens afterwards.

Mykal:  I have only just moved into Lightroom and this photo was taken into Aperture then boost colours a bit, just a nudge, just a little bit more than you see in nature to create the mood, feeling and to attract the eye to certain areas. In Lightroom I just drag the highlights down and the shadows up, clarity, sharpening then move them into Perfect Photo Suite for colour stylisation, dodging and burning.

Brent: Do you shot in RAW mode?

Mykal: Yep.

Brent: So you shoot it in RAW mode in your camera, you then download everything into your computer, process them in Lightroom then into Perfect Photo Suite for your final touch ups.

Best Advice for Beginners

Brent: What’s best advice you can give to people reading this; people that are starting out with photography. They have a digital camera and they’re trying to learn the basics of how photography works. Or people that know the basics and they rediscovering photography and they want to get out there and take better photos. What’s the best advice you can give them from your experience?

Mykal: The best advice is to shoot what you love. Don’t try to emulate someone else. Just feel it in your heart what you love shooting; if it’s nature, people, architecture. Follow that first.  I suppose the next would be meeting up with some photographers. Go to local meet-ups. I think that’s probably one of the best ways to move your photography forward, by hanging out with like-minded people.

Brent: To hang out with these people, I want to give some action points, some things that they can do after listening to this podcast or after reading this blog, if you’re listening or reading this three or four years ago when you first started photography, what is the first thing that you would have done when you were back then? What is the first thing that you would do to get them to the maximum bang for the action?

Mykal: Well, check and see if there’s a photography club in your area.  I joined up first with a photography club in my local area, just to get contact with other people. There are many people online, it’s quite easy. Talking to other people, that’s what they should get out and try to do.

Brent: I think that’s a really good piece of advice; finding a photo buddy. Someone who can go and shoot with who knows a little bit more than you do. That’s awesome, Mykal.

Thank you so much for letting me interview you and passing on all these great advice. How can people get hold of you or contact or follow you if they want more information?

Mykal: They can follow me on Google Plus Mykal Hall or they can follow my new website called sydneyseascapes.com. I’ve got a few images up there and a blog.

Please comment below if you have any questions for Mykal or Brent

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Hey guys, today I want to show you a couple of travel photography tips. I’m photographing a triathlon behind me and I want to show you some unusual ways of getting some great images at an event like this; a sporting event.

Highlights from this video:
0:10 Photographing a Triathlon
0:20 Slow Shutter Speed, Wide-angle Lens
1:00 Dark Background
1:24 Get Down Low
1:38 Tracking Auto-Focus

Tip #1: Slow Shutter Speed & Wide-angle Lens

The first thing I’m going to do is, I’m going to use a slow shutter speed and a wide angle lens. Most people have a zoom lens, but I’m going to use a wide-angle lens for this at a 1/30 sec shutter speed.

I’m going to get close to the cyclists as they come past and I want to show you how I can get blurring movements. If you’ll have a look at this, you’ll notice that I’m trying to get the cyclists in sharp focus and I want to get the background blurred so that I can show movement and how fast they are going.

Tip#2: Choose a Dark Background

When you’re photographing triathletes or movement like what’s happening behind me, choose a dark background if you can, so that you can get people to jump out of the background.

Notice that I have chosen a bush setting for the background (darker) and I can show movement and that I can get my subject jump out of the background. So that’s the second tip. Use a dark background when photographing movement especially if the cyclist is wearing bright clothing.

Tip#3: Get Down Low

Another thing you’ll notice is that I get down low. I changed my angle of view when I’m photographing cyclists because I want to get low and I want to get a lot of movements with the wide-angle lens and slow shutter speed.

Tip#4: Tracking Auto-Focus or AI SERVO

Another tip when you’re photographing movement is make sure that your auto-focus is on tracking auto-focus (AI SERVO). In that way, you can track the cyclists as they’re getting closer to you.

Recap:

1. I’m using a slow shutter speed to get movement & blurring the background of the image, but I want the cyclist to be in focus.
2. I’m choosing a darker background
3. I’m getting low-down to change my angle of view.
4. I’m using tracking auto-focus to keep the subject in focus even though they are moving towards me.

What do you think of these images? Please leave a comment below.

This is Brent, have a great day!

For more Travel Photography Tips Click Here.

Hi guys, I recently interviewed Andrew S. Gibson. I asked him a couple of questions about his great photography. Some of his photography is really inspirational and he’s also written some unbelievable eBooks all about photography.

Podcast Highlights

0:24 Who is Andrew?
1:00 eBooks – When and How did you start writing them?
4:36 Work  for EOS Magazine
5:53 New Zealand?
9:14 Camera Equipment Andrew Uses
14:22 Andrew’s Photography Inspiration
17:08 Overwhelmed with too much Stuff?
19:16 Education and learning?
21:55 Great Photographers to follow
21:43 Social media?
28:07 Other photographers
30:03 Andrew’s Favorite Photos
42:48 Current Projects – New eBook on Portraiture
50:00 Best Advice from Andrew
57: 34 Tell us more about the “Understanding EOS” eBook of yours

Who is Andrew S Gibson?

Brent: Can you tell us who you are and what are the things you’ve done in the past?

Andrew: Yes, this is an interesting question in itself because a lot of people, when they see my website, they assume I am a professional photographer, but I am not. I make a living writing about photography and I have been doing that for a few years; I have been self-employed for 2 and a half years now and before that I was working as a writer and also as an editor for a photography magazine called “EOS Magazine”, which is in the UK.

Awesome Photography eBooks

Brent: Tell me more about your eBooks and could you tell us a little more about the writings that you’ve done?

Andrew: The eBooks have taken up the majority of my time. It’s something that I enjoy doing. It all started off with Craft & Vision which is a website and publishing company that probably a lot of your readers and listeners have heard about. About 3 years ago, David duChemin, the photographer who runs Craft & Vision, published a few eBooks on his website and I think they sold quite well. I bought a few of the eBooks and I was reading them through. At that time, I was working for EOS magazine and I look at his eBooks and I thought, well actually this is a really cool format. It’s not like writing a print book, which tends to be very long, about 200-300 pages, so they have to be quite in depth. It involves a lot of photos and it’s quite a big project.

The eBooks, on the other hand, are ready to be shown and they’re also very interesting because he was writing from the point of view of a professional photographer. You know, once he writes, he always have good advice given. His photos are very good and also very inspirational.  Then I thought, you know, I could do this. This is something that I could do as well. And so, I sat down and I thought about it and I thought well, what am I going to write about? Obviously, I need something to write about. At that time, I had a lot of Black and White photography, so I thought, what about I write a book about Black and White photography? So, I sat down. I worked out the plan. I had to wait and see if he’s interested because at that time, he’d only publish books which he buys himself, so I didn’t know if he’s interested in books of other people or not.  And then I thought, hang on, if I send him an email, he doesn’t really know who I am. So, all he’s going to do is say, “well write it and send it to me anyway.” I just went ahead and wrote it. I spent about a month putting it together and then emailed him and sent it to him and he liked the idea and I’ve been writing for them ever since.

Brent: Awesome! I’ve actually read and bought a few of the Craft & Vision books and they are all unbelievable. They’re great. I love the simplicity to it, the huge images on the pages.  Some of them take up a double page spread, like the actual image goes to over two pages. You can consume it pretty quickly like in a couple of hours.

Andrew: Yes, that’s kind of the beauty of the eBooks really. You can read them through in one hour if you want. Most of them have a lot of details in there so you can go back and re-read sections and learn more. They’re not just something that you read once and then forget about. They have a lot of value. There’s a lot of good stuff in there. You can go back and get more out of it each time.  I think that’s very important.

Brent:  Awesome, good! Just a little bit in your background. I notice that a lot of the books that you wrote are on the Canon camera, the EOS system, can you just go and talk a little bit about that?

Andrew: Yes, that came about mainly because of the work I do for EOS Magazine. I worked for them for nearly two years and as you can probably tell (even if you’ve heard about the magazine or not) by the name, they just write about EOS camera system. One of the things that differentiate EOS Magazine from the other major photography magazine, or most of the others is that they write about things in depths. Whereas I think a lot of photography magazines, especially the popular once, tend to simplify things. But that’s not what we did with EOS Magazine. We just explain how to use your camera to take better photos.  We keep things simple but we don’t dumb down. We’re not afraid to go into some of the more complex technical stuff that some people want to know.

Get this ebook bundle for £2 off – Use coupon code: brent2 until the end of April only.

Lives in New Zealand

Brent: We’d probably get back into the eBooks in a little bit, but just a question; You’re living in New Zealand, are you?

Andrew: That’s right. Yes.

Brent: Where are you from originally?

Andrew: UK

Brent: What made you move to New Zealand?

Andrew: Well, mainly because I have a girlfriend whose family lives in New Zealand.

Brent: Okay. That’s a good reason, I guess.

Andrew: Yeah, that’s a good reason. Another fact that makes it easy is that, I actually grew up in Australia. My parents moved there when I was young. We lived there for 10 years and moved back to the UK. So I have an Australian passport as well as an English passport. That means when I move to either Australia or New Zealand, I don’t need to go through the immigration process. A lot of people who immigrate to New Zealand or Australia, they have to think about it for a long time. They have to do their research and go through the application process. It’s a long, winded thing. Whereas me, being fortunate , I can just come whenever I want. It’s just like moving. It seems like a good idea at this time.

Brent: And has it work out for you? Do you like it there?

Andrew: Yes, it has in many ways. One of the biggest shocks in New Zealand I think is that the cost of living is very high. It always used to be the kind of place where people would go to from the UK because the cost of living was significantly cheaper than the UK.  But now with the shift in exchange rate, it’s now more expensive to live here than it is in the UK.  That was a bit of an eye-opener. It’s something that I wasn’t really expecting. But you know, apart from that, everything has worked out really well. It certainly is a nice place to live. People in New Zealand are very friendly and there’s a lot of beautiful scenery, incredible places to explore, and the weather is pretty good in most times of the year. Yeah, there are a lot of benefits to live here.

Brent: I’m seeing a lot of your landscape photography in your books that take place in New Zealand and surrounding areas. I’m actually looking at one of your books right now, the “Creative Image”, it’s the one you get when we sign-up to your website, the free one that you gave away. It’s just amazing, all the landscape images and some of the images taken around Auckland and you got a couple in other countries, I guess.

Andrew: Yes, that’s right. I’ve been living in New Zealand for the last two years now. I have a lot of photos taken here, which made their way into the eBooks, especially on the West Coast Auckland, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the area at all, but there are lots of nice places there where you can go and take seascapes, and even in the East Coast as well. It’s really good for that.

Camera Equipment Andrew Uses

Brent: Yeah, for sure. I’ve been to Auckland once, but I only spent I think two days there. That was when we were on our way to Australia, when we were immigrating here, too. But yeah, it’s really a beautiful city. Alright, back to photography. Tell me about the main tools of your trade. What kind of bodies do you use? What lenses?

Andrew: My main camera is the one that I use all of the time is an EOS 5D Mark II and at the moment, I have four lenses for it, I tend to keep things fairly simple. I have a 17-40 mm zoom lens, and the rest are primes. I have a 50 mm, 85 mm, and a 40 mm pancake lens.

Brent: That’s interesting. Those are great. I’ve actually got three of those four lenses that you talked about; the 17-40 mm, 50mm, and 85mm. I don’t have the 40mm pancake lens; tell me a little bit more about that.

Andrew:  The main reason why I bought it is because, I wrote an article for EOS Magazine. I pitched the ideas in and I said, “Would you like an article about the new pancake lens”?  And they said “yeah, sure”. So I went ahead and bought it. It’s quite a nice lens. The advantage of it is that, it’s small. The body of the lens is only about a centimeter long and on my EOS 5D Mark II, it looks like a normal focal lens, but I think of it as a moderate wide-angle. It stands out to be a very useful focal lens. You could get a close-up lens on it and get close to things. You can use it for portraits, there’s not much distortion. It’s just a really cool and useful lens. It’s surprising that the 5D Mark II is quite a big, heavy camera, but when you put that particular lens on, it becomes almost like a compact camera. That’s how it feels after having like the 17-40mm zoom mounted on there. It has a very nice feel because the body is so heavy but the lens is relatively light. It rests nicely in my hands. It becomes a really nice set-up for taking photos. I like that lens a lot.

Brent: What’s the widest aperture that the 40mm pancake lens goes to?

Andrew: f2.8

Brent: Oh okay. I know that in some other lenses, they got quite a long minimum focusing distance, especially the 85 mm. When you try to photograph a model or someone, you could get too close on focus. What about the 40 mm pancake lens, has it got a really close focusing distance?

Andrew: It has, yes. I couldn’t tell you what is of hand exactly but I think it’s about 28 cm. You can get in really quite close. I like using my close-up lens a lot, but you can put that one and get even closer if you want to. I took a couple of really nice photos of flowers doing that. That’s was really cool.

Brent: Is there any other stuff that you use a lot that’s not a lens or a camera?

Andrew: Well, there’s my tripod of course. I use a 9-stop Neutral Density Filter a lot for that long exposure photography. And my close-up lens which is the 500D close-up lens that most people call filter. I use that lens quite a lot because I like close-up work.

Brent: Is that the extension tube?

Andrew: No, the close-up lens. You can see that when you go to a camera store and you will see the close-up filters, you’re using that +1, +2, +3 diopter and they can be very inexpensive and you can buy them individually or sets. Most of them are round, so you screw them in front of your camera like a filter but they’re actually lens. They’re like a magnifying glass. There are cheap ones that you see in the shops called “double elements close-up lenses”, they call them lenses not filters, and the quality is very high so they’re more expensive, but the quality is superb especially in a prime lens and I really use one of those.

Brent: So, it fits into the lens mount in your camera and it doesn’t into the front of your lens?

Andrew: No, it goes into the front of the lens like a filter. It just lets you focus more closely.

Brent: I got to try one of that some time.

Andrew: Yeah, they’re really good. On the 85mm lens, that’s where I use it the most, it lets you get nice and close and get some really cool pictures.

Andrew’s Photography Inspiration

Brent: Thanks, Andrew. That’s a really good tip for me to try out. Tell me a little bit about inspiration and how you stay inspired to go out and photograph these amazing images and also write the books that go with them? I know there’s a lot of energy and thoughts that goes into writing a book and I guess you got to focus on the project for maybe like a month. How do you stay inspired and keep going with the project?

Andrew: That’s a very good question because I actually don’t have a problem with inspiration. I enjoy what I do and I think that’s the key to it. I mean, I really like it. I get to do something quite amazing, which are writing eBooks and articles and things like that. It’s a lot of fun and a lot of people really love to do what I’m doing. I think, because I came to it late in life, I appreciate it more and I’m kind of aware that if I’ve done this 10 or 15 years ago, if that’s when I’ve started on this clear path, instead of just about 5 years ago, then by now I have probably achieved a lot more than what I have done now. I’d be a lot further ahead in my career. So I do have a sense of making up for the lost time. I appreciate and enjoy what I’m doing. I have an opposite problem to get uninspired. I have too much inspiration. I have so many ideas of the things that I would like to do over the coming months, so I have to filter those down and pick out the good ones and think about how to carry them out like take the photos and that sort of thing.

Brent: How do you do that? How do you actually figure out which are the highest priority projects to start on first as opposed to try and get everything done at once?

Andrew: It’s just a matter of planning out a year I suppose. Like on my website, I would like to release 3 or 4 eBooks over the course of the next 12 months and also write a couple for Craft & Vision. It’s just a matter of thinking what am I ready to write, because the process of writing an eBook is going out and try to learn new techniques and new things. So I have to go through that learning process before I could put the book together. I consider what do I have photos for? What do I need to go out and take a lot of new photos for? That’s what really takes a lot of time. I just think of several projects ahead and it seems to work itself out.

Overwhelmed with too much Stuff?

Brent: I have the same problems sometimes. I’ve got so much stuff in my head that I want to get out and share with my audience. Someone once told me to do one thing and finish it before starting the next one, instead of having three things going at once. I guess that’s my biggest issue.

Andrew: There’s a guy who’s very interesting. He’s very smart and he’s newsletters we’re subscribing to. His name is Brian Tracy, he has some self-help newsletters. He gives a lot of good advice about all sorts of things that can help you in your career and building a business whatever things you’re into. One of the things he talks about is a concept called “single tasking”, where you concentrate at one thing at a time until it’s done and move on to the next and again concentrate on that. It’s kind of a form of time management because when you skip form one thing to another, it takes time to get up to speed with the new things and getting to it and you skip the other thing and you have to bring yourself up to speed again. It wastes a lot of time. If you can concentrate on one thing as well as getting into it and doing it better without distraction, you’re also saving yourself a lot of time. So, in the long run, you get more things done.

Brent: I think that applies to photography, too. When you’re learning photography, focus on getting one thing right before you with the next and becoming overwhelmed with too much stuff. For instance, if you are focusing on what aperture does, I go out and shoot it and really understand it. What aperture and depth of field do and also how aperture affects exposure. Going out, learning it, knowing it and then going on the next thing like knowing what the shutter speed do. That leads me into the next question, which is all about education and learning. What’s your take on education and how important is it? Where and how do you get most of your knowledge?

Photography Learning

Andrew: Well, I think education is very important in a general sense as well, not just related to photography because some people leave school, get a job, and not do much to improve. They tend to stay where they are in life. Whereas I think you get more out of life if it’s a continuous learning process. Even if it’s just stuff you’re doing in your spare time for enjoyment, not necessarily related to your career. But for sure, if you want to advance in your career, whatever that is, it’s a continued process of re-education and learning new things because whatever you do, there’s bound to be new things coming along. When it comes to stuff like photography, whether it’s a hobby or a career, it’s changing so fast. It has changed so fast over the last 10 years. There’s an explosion of new learning material out there, which is really good for anyone who is learning photography because when I started off, I go to the library or the bookstore to buy or borrow a book and read it, but now there’s just so much information online and a lot of it is really high quality as well. It’s just amazing how much you can learn and how much there is out there. I think websites are very good places, especially if you can find the work of a few photographers whom you really like and write good stuff on their blog. You can follow their blogs and learn about what they do. Of course, eBooks are great way to learn and print books as well. There are so many publishers producing really nice print books at the moment. That seems to have picked up over the last 10 years or so. I think when you go back 10 or 20 years, photography books are quite stated a little bit out of date and people weren’t really doing many exciting new things. We have photography books now that teach you to do something rather than portfolio books. The standard has been raised quite a lot and there’s some really good stuff out there.

Great Photographers to follow

Brent: Can you give us one or two websites where you get your knowledge from or people that you are following?

Andrew:  One thing I think that’s worth doing when you’re following the work of other photographers is just concentrate on one or two or three that you really like because the problem with so many websites being out there is that it’s very easy to jump around between them and I prefer to just like really get into the work of one person and absorb what’s he’s saying and see what they’re doing and kind of go through their old articles and see what they’re writing about. Now, there’s one guy that I really like, his name is Bruce Percy. He’s a Scottish photographer. On his website, he has a subtitle that goes “the Art of Adventure Photography”. He takes some beautiful photos. He works in colors. He’s got a lot of landscape photography and portraits. He travels to amazing places. He’s been to Norway recently. In fact, he’s been to Tasmania in Australia. He travels to South America to Patagonia, to Bolivia. He’s got a superb eye for photography. And of course, he has a lot of photos from Scotland because that’s where he is from. He writes some very interesting articles on his website about composition and light and the folks behind his work. He’s got a very nice podcast as well, you can subscribe to it. It’s a video podcast and he shows his photos and explains some of his stories behind them. He has some really awesome stuff in there.

Brent: Would you recommend social media at all?

Andrew: Not so much. I mean, I find the easiest way to follow someone is just to subscribe to their RSS feed if they have a blog. I use Pose on my iPad, which is very good for that. There are all sorts of ways that you can do that. Social media, it’s a way of keeping track. If you liked someone’s Facebook page for instance, and they link when they write an article, you might see something that you’ll otherwise miss. But I think the easiest way is to just use a feed reader of some sort and then you can just go through and see what people are publishing and read the stuff that interests you.

Brent: Definitely. Another way is to subscribe to their newsletter; like I send out a tip every week to my subscribers. That’s something that I have been doing.  Just getting back to the social media part, Andrew, that’s how I actually discovered you. You were interviewing other great photographers and linking your blogs to Google Plus. That’s how I went into your blog and had a look at your eBooks and everything. You’ll never know how people are finding you.

Andrew:  The RSS feed thing is just my preferred way of things, but of course, it’s easy for people to find your work through all sorts of avenues. From a self-promotional point of view, if you want to get eyeballs on your website, the more you can get the links out there, and then the more people will see them.

Brent: I’d like to add to that a little bit. I definitely agree to the continuous learning. Everything I learned when it comes to photography has been self-taught and I’ve done it in my 30’s during the career change; changing from engineering to photography as a full time living. One of the things you get when you first learn photography is that a lot of people get overloaded. There’s just so much out there and you don’t know where to go and what to look at. There’s a pool of information and you can’t absorb it all at once. What I would suggest is exactly what you said. Follow one or two photographers whose work is really something you like and who is giving out really good information. Just follow those people. Stop following everyone else and you won’t get overloaded. You can chunk it down. You can actually get little bits of information, absorb it, try it out, get it into your head, know what you’re doing, until you get into the next little piece of information.

Andrew: Yes, that’s a very good advice. There’s really so much stuff out there. I have eBooks for instance, that I have never read because I bought too much stuff to look at. So you have to make a conscious effort. At the moment, I am not buying anymore eBooks or books until I’ve read the ones that I have. Once I’ve read those, then I can go on and buy something new to interest me.

Brent: I think, we’ve all done that enough. I’ve even had a look at my statistics on people who are watching my videos, my photography training videos. I noticed that the really long videos that are longer than 20 minutes, people watch half of it and then something happens, like they get distracted and never watch the end of it. So what I’ve done now is I’ve actually tried to chunk down the videos. Instead of having a 20-minute video, I’ll have four 4-minute videos so that people can absorb it and go on to the next video. I’m getting a lot more people watching the videos from start to the end.

Andrew: Right. It’s interesting, isn’t it?

Brent: I guess that goes the same for the shorter eBooks too, which you can actually absorb when it’s less than 250 pages. You can actually get through it one, two, or three sitting, or read it on your iPad in bed at night. I think that’s why the eBooks are so popular; the shorter eBooks with lots of images. The next question I’ve got is, are there any other photographers whose work you really admire?

Andrew: Yes. There are a lot of great photographers, but one that I follow is a Cole Thompson and I actually interviewed him on my website, the long exposure photography interviews. He’s a black and white photographer who lives in the United States and he’s got some really nice work. He’s got some very interesting ideas he’s written about in his blog as well. Another guy whose work I really like is Flemming Bo Jensen. He got in contact with me a year or two ago. He read one of my eBooks, the one I wrote about my travels in South America and he was going to South America, so he had a few questions about of the places I’ve been to. He’s got some interesting stuff on his website. He’s one of those people who seem to live life his own way. He does a lot of travelling around, moves from place to place, and takes photos. He’s a very good photographer. He has some really interesting stories on his website. He’s a very intelligent photographer. He’s not writing how-to stuff, but he’s writing about the different projects he’s undertaken and he’s very good at what he does.

Brent: Awesome. I’ll put links to all of the photographer’s websites at the bottom of this post. I’ve actually followed Cole Thompson, too. He’s got some beautiful long exposure, black and white images.  I’ve actually tee’d up an interview with him too, which is great.  I actually found him from your interview. Let’s have a look at your favorite images that you’ve sent me. Just walk me through them. I noticed that they’re all black and white and they were taken in South America, is it? Can you describe your feelings and your thought process when you photographed it?

Andrew: That’s right. Yes. These photos, they’re fairly old. It’s interesting when you say favourite photos because I think it takes a while for the photos I’ve taken to become favourites.  It’s because at the moment, I’m busy taking a lot of photos for my current projects and I’ve taken so many. I don’t really get a chance to sit down and absorb and really see which ones are my favorites. It tends to be ones like these which are from further back in time and they’re probably also favourites because I have such a great time travelling around South America as well, saw these really cool things.

Andrews Photos – His Favourites

This first one that we are looking at is called “Casabindo” and this is a photo taken back in 2004. It was film camera, actually. This was before I moved over to digital camera. I was traveling around the Northwest of Argentina, which is a very beautiful kind of set-up, mountainous place up in the Andes. It really is like going back in time. I’ve read an article about a celebration, a festival or fiesta they have in a small village called Casabindo, which is about 3,600 meters up in the Andes, in the remote part of Northwest Argentina. It’s not even very easy to get to. I went up there. I was in the region and I managed to find out how to get to the village. I went there on the day that they had this bullfight thing that they do.  It’s not like Spanish bullfight. They don’t kill the bull. It’s far more dangerous for the bullfighter than it is for the bull. These are just guys from the village. Not matadors or anything like that. You can see that it takes place in a square. We’re looking at one corner of the square. There’s like a low wall around the square and there are a couple of things in it.

One of the things I like about this particular photo is that, the guy got his cloth and he’s got the bull. It’s  kind of sizing him up and scraping his paws on the ground. Now, what the guy has to do is that, there’s a headband between the horns of the bull and he has to grab that headband. It’s a test of bravery. Once he’s got the headband, that’s when it’s over.  Some of these bulls are pretty tamed. I remember the first one that went out there. The first guy was waving around his cloth and the bull came out and to sniff the ground. It wasn’t really interested in doing anything. The guy just simply shrunk his shoulder and grabbed the headband.  The bull wasn’t interested at all. But there was one bull in particular. It’s not the one in this photo, but it was a big black bull and it gave the bullfighter some problems. It’s very aggressive and chasing all over the place. And it actually got hold of him, tossed him up to the air with his horns, he fell on the ground and then he actually jumped up and down on him. It was trying to kill him, there’s no doubt about it. You can imagine a big bull; I don’t know how much it weighed but obviously not light. It was jumping up and down and gave him a really good pounding and lost interest. It ran towards the wall, the opposite wall to what you see in this photo and actually jumped over the wall taking a bunch of people with him and ran off somewhere in the other side. I was sitting in the wall in the other side. Luckily, it jumped over the other side and not my side. There are so many people between the walls, it’s difficult to move. If the bull jumps toward you, there’s only one place you’re going and that’s backwards. You cannot move to the side. The guy that was hit in stampede just got up and walked away. He obviously didn’t get hurt too badly. They had an ambulance on standby in case anyone did get badly hurt. But anyway, one of the things that appeals to me in this photo is all the people sitting on the wall, I think there’s probably a small hill behind the wall, and there’s a small building and there were lots of people sitting on the top. There are even a couple of people sitting in a small window, which is in the side of the building. It’s something that really appeals me about this photo.

Brent: That’s awesome. I notice that there’s a skinny, little tree just behind the bullfighter. If he’s smart, he can run back and climb that tree to get away from the bull.

Andrew: Yes. I didn’t know the branches are a little bit high, aren’t they? I remember the guy who is being chased by the aggressive bull tried to hide behind the tree but he really couldn’t hide because the bull came around a lot quicker.

Now, the next one is called “Iruya” and that’s just the name of the village, where I took the photo from.  It’s another remote village in that area of Argentina. I remember I took a bus there from the nearest town and it took about 3-4 hours to get there. The bus winds its way over the tracks of mountains when you get there. It’s all quite primitive. I think one of the attractions there is that, they were having a festival as well. I was there for the month of August and that’s when they were having a lot of festivals and fiestas in the area. The villages have their own traditions. You can see from this photo that the view is quite incredible. It’s a very mountainous area and there’s a woven path that cuts through the rock and there’s a woman leading the donkey were the kid sits on the back. It’s incredible scenery, very beautiful place.

Brent: Can you tell us why you’ve converted this to black and white, or did you shoot it on black and white film?

Andrew: Yeah, I shoot it on black and white film.

Brent: Can you remember what set-up you had? What camera and lens did you use?

Andrew: Vaguely, because I think I had two Pentax camera bodies; one with a 24mm prime lens, which is the one I took this photo with and the other was with a 50mm prime lens. That’s what I had with me.

Brent: I love this image. I like the composition you’ve chosen with the rocky walls in the foreground. I’m kind of going often to the subject of your photo; the person on the donkey getting lead down the pathway and your eyes follow the pathway back to the village. It’s just amazing. I love it.

Andrew: The next one, I’ve just called it Doorway. That was the title in my website and that was taken in a village called Purmamarca, which again is in Northwest Argentina. I think I’ve always liked this photo because it has some really nice texture in it.  The tone and contrast is quite nice as well. The door is light and everything else is quite dark. I’ve always had a lot of fun with processing that photo and exploiting all the textures.

Brent: When you processed this, was it in a dark room?

Andrew: No, actually this one was taken a few years later and was taken with a digital camera. So this is done in photoshop.

Brent: I love the textures on there. It looks like that the bits of the wall has come off the plastering on the left side of that doorway. And also part of the frame has come off around the doorway and there’s rocky steps going in there. Awesome shot.

Andrew: It’s nice with all that old and decaying texture. This region of Argentina has the oldest buildings in the country, but it was the first area to be settled. The Spanish colonies came in on the land from Bolivia and they built the first towns and villages in this area, so everything is quite old. There are lots of old Spanish colonial style buildings.

Brent: That’s the great thing about visiting other countries; everything is different from what you’re used to. You see things with a fresh pair of eyes and you can try different angles of view when you’re photographing. These things can make all the difference.

Andrew: Yeah, I’m sure anyone who lives in this village would be thinking; what on earth has this guy taken a photo of this door for? You know, you’re someone from a foreign country coming to take a photo their front door.  But yeah, you see things like these in other countries.

Brent: And the next one with a person’s foot?

Andrew: Yes, this one. This is quite a nice image. This was taken in Bolivia. We were in a village called Tarabucco and the reason this village is kind of well-known in the tourist trail is because it’s near Sucre, the capital of Bolivia. They have a market there. I think every week, once a week in the market, you’re not aimed at tourists, it is for the local people because the village is quite remote. I remember there was a bus that you could catch from the city, it took about three hours to get there. So it’s quite a remote, Bolivian village. Boilivia is the poorest country in South America. So it’s like getting back in time when you’re going into these places. When we were there, we could see people walking over the mountains, leading donkeys to go to the village, and they are from other smaller villages nearby and they don’t even have access on electricity. One of the things that they don’t have in these places is TV. When I took this photo, there was a room in Tarabucco where they had a TV up and there’s like people standing around and just looking at the TV. I was absolutely fascinated by it. One thing they do in this place is they like to make sandals out of old toy rubbers. That’s a very common form of footwear here, especially for the poorer people in these areas. I just saw this guy standing here, saw his weathered foot and his footwear there, and took a photo. I knew it would really come out nice in black and white.

Brent: That’s great. You know, I grew up in South Africa and I’ve seen a lot of the tire footwear that they use over there too and it’s very similar to this image.

Andrew:  It’s amazing isn’t it? It’s in a different part of the world and yet people still found the same solution to creating footwear.

Current Projects – New eBook on Portraiture

Brent: Can you tell us about the current projects that you’re working on?

Andrew: The main one I’m working on at the moment is an eBook for Crafts & Vision, it’s about portraiture. The theme of the book is using natural lights to take portraits.  It’s not like using portable flash or anything like it. It’s all about making the most out of natural light.

Brent: So, are you photographing all the images going into this book?

Andrew:  I’d love to. What I also do in some of my other books is use some case studies. I look for photographers that take some interesting work and I shoot them an email and see if they’re interested in taking part because even if I have plenty of photos, it’s still kind of just one photographer’s vision. It’s just one way of doing things. So it’s interesting to fill the gaps, you  know the stuff that I don’t do, to find someone whose work is very different from mine, who has a different technique of vision and then that adds to the book as well because you’re not just seeing things just from the point of view of one person. You can learn from several other people as well.

Brent: For you, when you’re actually creating a new book like this, how long does it actually take you go from start to finish? From the concept of what you’re going to do to when it’s actually ready to go and people can purchase it?

Andrew:  Well, it’s an interesting question because this one has actually taken me quite a while because the idea was born around September last year, when I started thinking about it and I’m still working on it now. The main reason for that is, I had to take a lot of photos for it. So I’ve been working with a local model. I’ve explained the project to her and she’s really keen on taking part. We’ve been taking a lot of photos together for different parts of the book. I’ve been working with other models as well to take some photos in order to get a bit of variety in there. The photo taking process is what takes a long time, which is why you have to think things ahead with these things. You know how it is especially when you’re taking photos outside, sometimes you get rained off and then sometimes you’re not available and model’s available for a couple of weeks, or something like that. Everything takes time, but it’s coming together now and hopefully we’ll get into that stage where it’s nearly complete. The bigger the selection of images I have, the better the quality would be.

Brent: So, it’s taken you six months to get where you are now. How far are you and when do you think it will be ready for the public to view it?

Andrew: Well this is another thing because when it comes writing stuff, the owner of EOS Magazine, he once told me a little joke about magazine writers, the question is “How close are you to finishing the article?” and the answer people like to give is “Nearly finish. I just have to write it”. Writing it doesn’t really take very long. It’s the research, the thinking about it, thought process, taking the photos, to illustrate the eBook; that’s what takes the long time. When it comes to writing it down, it just takes a few days for you to get the first draft done and then it needs to be edited and refined. At that stage, when the first draft is complete, but I need to take more photos, add some things, organize the case studies, and then once I’m happy with it, it goes off to the publisher. Hopefully, they’re happy with it. If not, they might request some changes and send it off to their copy editor, graphic designer, and yeah, they have their own schedule. I have no idea when it will be ready for the public. I’ll probably send it off to them in a month or so. Whether it would take more time, I have no idea. It all depends on their schedule and other eBooks they have in the pipe line.

Brent: That’s for Crafts & Vision?

Andrew: Yes.

Brent: Do they come up with the idea? Or do you come up with the idea?

Andrew: I come up with the idea.

Brent: Then you create the book and send it to them for final review?

Andrew: Yes, because they have a copy editor and a graphic designer.

Brent: So, they do the graphic designing and all that in the book. You just write the book in a word processing format?

Andrew: Well, I use InDesign because we use that in the magazine and I use that to create my own eBooks. I tend to prefer to write in InDesign because that’s the program that their graphic designer uses and it’s also easier to organize your work like that because you tend to write enough content for a page or two at a time and then I could put the photos on so that the graphic designer knows what photos goes with what text.

Brent: That really interests me because I’ve written two eBooks and I know it’s really tough to put it together once you actually got the actual written words and then you got your images and you need to make sure that they fit together really nicely in a great visual way. Sometimes, you take some of your writing out or add some more just so you can fill spaces in there.

Andrew: Yes, that’s all part of the process. Luckily with eBooks, if you’ve got more text that fits into a space, you can write it on to the next page and add a photo or something like that. So, that’s normally how to deal with it. You don’t have to cut too much text. But when I was working for the magazine, we used to do the similar thing. We write the article, send it off to the designer, and then it would come back because the spaces are tight. There might be gaps where you have to add some texts to take it to the end of the column or what is more common is that you have too much text to fill the available space according to the designer. So you have to cut a few paragraphs.

Brent: Oh good, because it sounds pretty complex to me.

Andrew: No, it’s quite straightforward. In eBooks, you have a lot more freedom when it comes to the design.

Best Advice from Andrew

Brent: What’s your best advice to people listening to this, people who have got into digital photography? What is the best advice you can give to get them to the next level of photography?

Andrew: Well, I think it’s very important that when it comes to photography, especially if it’s a hobby rather than your career, is just to enjoy it. That’s the most important thing. Enjoy it and keep learning. Don’t take it so seriously. It all depends on what level you are of course.  But for instance, if you want to learn more about portrait, then you can look in the work of some of the good portrait photographers. Maybe buy an eBook or two on it, or buy a book and learn about different things. Be involved; go out, out some techniques into practice. Have some fun and don’t get too worked up about it if the photos don’t come out the way you want to. One of the things that I like about photography is the act of taking photos. It relaxes me, it engages the creative side of my personality. I have times when I go out taking photos and I look at the results and see that there’s nothing in there that I can use, if it doesn’t come out that well or the idea wasn’t that good. I don’t get worked up about it because I actually enjoy the process of taking photos. I just accept that not all things go according to plan; you don’t always produce your best work. I think a lot of people, when you look at forms or comment on articles on websites, they say they’re kind of worked up or they take the wrong things too seriously or get too critical or get hung up on a certain technical point that has to do with aperture or depth of field or something like that. I mean, it’s just nice to relax and just go out and enjoy. If you’re enjoying it, you’ll learn.

Brent: I think that’s an awesome advice. You know, if you’re not enjoying it, then why are you doing it?

Andrew: Well yes, that’s what happens for most people, isn’t it? The majority of people that do photography think of it as a past time. They enjoy it.

Brent: I think there comes a stage that as you’re learning and improving your photography, you start to enjoy it even more because you are creating what you initially want to create. Your vision is coming to reality as your skill level improves.

Andrew: Yes, it’s very rewarding. I remember when I was starting out. That year when I was starting to take photos that was good enough to get a print and put up on a wall or something. I mean, it’s very rewarding. It’s much nicer than buying a print in IKEA.

Brent: What’s your take on people who are critical on images? For instance, you take a photo which you think is great and you put it online, in one of the photo-sharing websites, and someone says something about your photo. What’s your take on that?

Andrew: Since I’ve been doing this for a while, I’ve got a good idea on whether or not my photos are good or what the weaknesses are. If someone is critical, I mean there probably is a price e of anything, not just photos.  it’s easy to take that thing personally and kind of ignore the message. What I try and do is, think if the person has a point? And it depends in which way they are critical because there are some people who can be critical in a constructive way, which is very useful and that tends to be the kind of advice that is hardest to find. On the other hand, someone could just be very critical. Especially if you’re fairly new in photography, or you don’t have, I suppose a strong sense of the worth of your photo, the strength of your photo, if you’re not sure if you’re creating a strong image or not, it’s easy to let yourself be not downed by someone who is critical. I think it’s important to just not take it personally, but have a look if whether there is a grain of truth in the message. If there is, that helps you out because they give you an idea or it will get you to try and take a better photo.

Brent: I would add to that and say, when I first started taking photos, I took one which I thought was brilliant. I put it online and I’ve got a troll tell me that it was really bad and it brought me down. But then I started thinking about it and I thought, do I actually care what they think? Am taking photos for other people to tell me that they’re great? Or am I taking photos for me? I guess if you don’t care too much on what other people say, then you going to go out and create amazing images anyway because you’re doing it for yourself. If you’re just going to share it to the world because you want other people benefit from your creative vision, then that’s great. I was just actually speaking to a model yesterday and she post a lot of stuff on Facebook and you always get people who say negative things and I had her go through that little talk about not to take things seriously. Yes, you can learn from what people say if they want to help you, but a lot of people who say things on social media just to make themselves look bigger than you.

Andrew: It also depends on what level you’re at too. Sometimes, when you’re new to photography, and you’re just starting out, unless you’ve got lots and lots of natural talent in you, your photos aren’t going to be too exciting more likely. So, when someone who is very experienced looks at your images, even without meaning to, they may say something that puts your off or brings you down. You have to think that maybe for someone who is new to photography, it isn’t likely that you’ll immediately produce images like somebody who has been doing it for ten or twenty years already. So it’s always a difficult think when you’re looking at someone’s photo, and someone ask you for some advice, the advice that you might give an experienced photographer is completely different from what you might say to an inexperienced photographer. Let’s say the same photo, I suppose when someone is fairly new, you’re looking for potential. But when someone is more experienced, you’re looking at helping them get to the next level.

Latest eBook from Andrew

Brent: For the last question, it’s about the Understanding EOS eBook, it’s an amazing book. It’s got all sorts of good stuff in here. It has great images and it goes through the basics of your camera and the basics of photography, but what I really like about this is you actually got through the settings of the camera and a lot of people have asked me this because I also do this basics of photography in my training video series, but what I don’t do is that, I don’t go through the settings of the individual camera and you do. That’s what I really love about this. You actually got a lot of screenshots on where to turn the dials, to aperture value and time value, and what the numbers actually mean on the screen and all that good stuff. Maybe you can tell us a little bit more about this eBook of yours? And also where people can get it from?

Andrew: Yes, that eBook came about because I’ve written a few eBooks about Canon EOS cameras on my website and I realized, it would be nice if I created something that is for complete beginners to photography. So it’s for someone who has just bought a Canon DSLR for the first time and they don’t really know what the aperture and shutter speed is and all that sort of thing means. The book was really written for that type of person and hopefully, that would introduce him to my work as well and they can go on and buy some of the other eBooks if they find this one useful. One of the advantage of writing about a specific brand of camera, as opposed to a more general book which coves things in general is that, you can show people how to adjust these settings on their camera. That’s one of the things that we can do at EOS Magazine. We can be very specific about how Canon EOS cameras work. What I tried to do in this book, is I keep things simple and just show people how they can use these settings in a way that they can find the various things that they need on their camera. I suppose one of the ideas behind it or one of the things that I wanted to do was to simplify the process of taking photos. If you buy that same entry-level camera, as you know on the mode dial, you have the portrait mode, landscape mode, and same intelligent auto, all of these wonderful things. But I think a lot of these are really unnecessary. All you need really is program, shutter priority, aperture priority, and manual, which the most advance cameras have. What I really wanted to say to people is to skip these, don’t use portrait mode. Come over and use program mode if you’re new and you can progress into aperture priority and shutter priority mode as you learn more. It’s really explaining about what aperture does and how you can use it creatively. What shutter speed does and how you can use it creatively. The basics ISO, the white balance and picture styles because really, these are the things you need to know to take a good photo. You really don’t need to know much more than that. Your camera has a lot of different things on there that you can use. You can go and read up on that if you’re interested in learning how to use the quick control screen face. You can go and for an article on that. It’s not an essential part of taking photos. It’s actually pretty useful when it’s not essential. So this eBook just talk about the essential things that you need to get going.

Brent: Awesome. What I’ll do is I’ll put a link on this eBook at the bottom of this post so that people can purchase it from here if they’re interested.

Andrew: Right. Just follow the link and it will lead you to my website, you will see the eBooks there, you can buy it. And also, you can buy the eBooks in bundle as well instead of buying one eBook at a time; you can save yourself a bit of money.

Brent: How can people get hold of you if they want more information?

Andrew: Well the best way is to just go straight to my website which is www.andrewsgibson.com and then it has the links there to my Facebook page, Google Plus, and Flickr. So, everything is on there.

Get this ebook bundle for £2 off – Use coupon code: brent2 until the end of April only.

Brent: Thank you so much Andrew – great talking to you. Cheers, Brent

Please comment below if you have any questions for Andrew or Brent

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