What You’ll Need:
1. A tripod
2. A DSLR camera capable of a 30 second exposure
3. A lens capable of zooming
4. Coachella Valley, California
Point your camera at the pretty lights of Coachella Valley. Zoom in all the way and focus, then start your 30 second exposure. At any point during the thirty seconds, zoom out all the way, and allow the exposure to finish.
Try this with more than one zoom position and different rates of zoom. Impress your friends! Be popular!
“When you’re starting out, don’t be running to Nashville, and don’t be running here and there and everywhere. Go somewhere, sit down, and make some racket. Play your music and make them notice you. When they come to you, then the doors are always open. But when you come to Nashville, the doors are never open.”
-Waylon Jennings
Is that you’ve got to actually do it to be good at it.
Straight Off The Camera
The Magic Of Lightroom
If you’re like me, you choose Adobe Lightroom for your digital photography workflow and you’ve probably created and/or downloaded several development presets and you probably spend a lot of time clicking on them or hovering over them to see what a particular shot might look like with each preset applied.
Unfortunately, this is a time-consuming process. My problem with the current Lightroom method of previewing presets is that it requires a 1:1 distribution of effort to output: for every preset you view, you must take an action to initiate that view – whether it be clicking on the preset name or hovering over it in the list and monitoring the Navigator. This takes precious time away from your life which could be spent anywhere but in front of the computer. I would like to see the ratio of effort to output optimized with regard to managing development presets, and I have figured out a way to do it.
I propose that the ninjas on the Lightroom team include a “Preset Grid” view, allowing you to view one image from your collection in a contact sheet-like grid, with all of the presets in your collection applied in the order in which they would naturally appear.
In the screenshot below, we see a portrait of my friend Ira looking particularly normal in the first photo in the grid, which is the “negative” or the original, unedited shot. Instead of seeing a grid containing Ira’s entire shoot as we would in the Library module, the “Preset Grid” view gives us oversight of what this single highlighted shot of Ira would look like if we were to apply each develop preset in our collection to that image.
At the bottom of the screen we see a thumbnail strip showing all of the presets as well. That probably isn’t really the best behavior for the thumbnail strip in this case – it should actually behave just as it always does, showing a thumbnail of each negative from the shoot to allow navigation through the folder.
With my proposed “Preset Grid” we can scroll down through a grid of images which correspond to each development preset. The number of images you see in the grid for your original image will always be the same: if you have 100 presets, you will always have a grid of 100 images to look at for the overview.
It might take a short while for your computer to generate all these thumbnails, but it’s possible that in the long run it could save you hours of clicking and scrolling through an ever-growing list of presets. That’s for the ninjas to decide.
Don’t expect any brilliant writing from me today, because I just don’t have it in me. What I do have in me is half a can of Monster, which according to the label, contains L-Carnitine, Taurine, Ginseng, and something I actually recall from high school health class, B Vitamins. L-Carnitine sounds like something you’d find in the pathology report of a body found in an alley on a CSI type show: “Here’s what’s weird – we found traces of L-Carnitine in the victim’s bloodstream.”
“But these powder burns are consistent with a gun shot from close range.”
“Yes, and we see a higher concentration of L-Carnitine in the tissues damaged by the bullet.”
(slow removal of sunglasses) “This is going to be one Monster of a case.”
Speaking of monsters, here’s some truly crappy photography from my first year with a camera. I hope you hate it.
This thing doesn't drop half as many calls as my iPhone on AT&T
My first camera was a Fujifilm Finepix 40i. With a built-in mp3 player, this camera served iPod duty in addition to taking marvelously pixelated images. I bought the camera just before a plane trip, thinking I’d listen to music all the way to wherever I was flying.
“What are you listening to, son?”
“My camera.”
That's a plume of smoke from a distant power plant interfering with the tail of the aircraft.
I always liked this shot until I realized that I’d created an awkward merger between the vertical stabilizer of the aircraft and the plume of smoke from a distant power plant. The color in the sky is what drew me to the window to snap this little snappy snap.
Better positioning of the plume.
When I pointed the camera down at the runway, it automatically adjusted the exposure to allow me to capture some detail in the runway. Unfortunately, it also caused the evening sky to blow out to white. Decisions, decisions. These days, I expose for the highlights and then dig the shadows out in development. By development I probably mean Adobe Lightroom, which did not exist when this photo was taken nearly ten years ago.
The moon was out and this was as close as I could zoom into it.
I remember this evening vaguely: I was driving home home to West Virginia from my home in North Carolina, and when I saw the color in the sky and the sliver of moon hanging lazily above the mountains, I knew I had to drive up to a high point and photograph it. Again, the camera is on an auto-exposure setting (I shot on AUTO for a long time – years – before I figured out how to actually use a camera) but because I pointed it up at the sky it did a fair job of exposing the sky and leaving the ground nice and silhouettey. Silhouettey is not a word.
Look at this beautiful frozen stream. Now play in it. Now freeze your nads off. Look at that. No nads.
All I remember about this day was that it was at a church camp where I was volunteering. Church camp is a great to get away from the trappings of modern society and get out into nature and allow God to speak to you.
That probably means different things to different people, but I’m going to go ahead and put myself on the record as saying that if you’re going to hear God actually speak to you, it’s probably going to be in a place like this with wind whispering through the pines and not in your living room with a man screaming through the damn television about how much your donation is needed to keep him on the air. Just sayin’.
This is a terrible photo.
Can you believe how pixelly these images are? I think they were shot at the lowest quality setting for the camera. This is because instead of taking a few good images of the winter West Virginia landscape, I apparently wanted a hundred-odd shitty ones.
Going back to the church camp thing: church camp is a great place for a young male if you are looking to meet truly crazy women who honestly believe that because they met you at church camp then it must according to a Divine Plan™ that your paths have crossed and that the relationship will blossom into an expensive diamond ring and a couple of carseats.
So, you know. There’s that.
I couldn't be bothered to leave the Chick-fil-a parking lot to capture the post-sunset color. Really?
Here’s a perfect example of the crap people shoot for their 365: sunset from a retail center parking long. I suppose there is some poetry here – no matter how much we strip-mine and strip-mall away the landscape, the sky is still above us and it is still awe-inspiring.
But still, don’t do this. Ever.
Here's the only sharp image I ever got with my camera. Such a waste.
Why was it necessary to document a flat tire? It was not. But as a camera owner, that’s exactly what I felt compelled to do. There was a whole world of snow and trees and beauty around me that day, and all I wanted to photograph was this flaccid tire. Go me.
That is all.
I’ve got a friend named Alison who shall remain anonymous who suggests on her blog that it’s better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission to go tromping around on someone’s property with a camera in order to take photographs of their stuff and/or land.
That works for college students, but in the real world (notice I didn’t put real world in quotes) such a mentality can get you arrested or wounded or both or worse.
This image of an F-16 was captured during a visit to Luke Air Force Base in Glendale, Arizona. My friend Aaron trained on the F-16 here and he gave me a tour of the base (which included some time in the flight simulator) before he shipped out to Korea. The aircraft below is shown taxiing to the end of the runway on a beautiful Arizona evening for a final walk around and weapons inspection before takeoff.
You can't photograph military aircraft on military bases during military exercises by asking forgiveness.
In the real world, F-16 fighters conduct live fire exercises over the Barry M. Goldwater Gunnery Range which is somewhat less than forgiving in that there are serious consequences for trespassing on or near the range, making a place you do not want to be found without having first obtained permission.
It’s adventurous and fun to go traipsing about in unfamiliar territory but it’s better to hear “no” than to hear “please put your hands behind your back.”
I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’.
So you’re driving through Southern Utah – say, toward Monument Valley – when you look up from your road atlas and there before you lies the awesome beauty of one of the greatest wonders of the natural world. You are so excited to document the awesome that you throw your road atlas on the dashboard, reach for camera, and start mashing down the shutter button, because you don’t want to miss anything! Bad idea: the time and place for shooting photos through the windshield is: almost never.
Holy crap, it's Monument Valley! Quick, get the camera, put it on AUTO, and take as many bad photos as you can!
First of all, it’s dangerous: anything that takes your attention away from driving is hazardous to your health and to that of others. Even though we humans have gotten pretty good at multitasking, we are still fragile meatsacks full of squishy organs which are simply no match for the impact resistance of the steel our automobiles are made of and the pavement upon which we drive them.
Second of all, it’s silly: why would you spend upwards of a thousand dollars on a camera and even more on a lens built from several elements of precision ground chemically treated painstakingly polished optical glass designed to resolve details down to ten-thousandths of an inch only to stick it in front of a slab of material streaked with dirt and bug innards?
It's perfectly acceptable to shoot through this windshield. I shot this near Monument Valley in 2007.
The time and place for shooting through the windshield is almost never but there are countless artistic exceptions and commercial applications for this perspective – the automotive and travel industries comes to mind. As such, there are certainly a few things you can do to improve your “shooting through the windshield technique.” If you feel a mighty need to squeeze off a few shots from the interior of your vehicle, remember this rule:
The rules of composition still apply.
Look, if you want to shoot something scenic, shoot something scenic. The fact that we see it from the perspective of the right side of the road already indicates that it might be shot through the windshield – no need to clutter it with nonessential elements like that dashboard, that smear of snow in the path of the wiper, that inspection sticker, that rearview mirror, that pair of fuzzy dice, that whatever it is that has nothing to do with the scene you are photographing.
This is a great shot if you are going for that "too lazy to get out of the truck" snapshot look.
If you’re going to do something wrong, do it right: the best technique for shooting an image through a windshield that doesn’t look like it was shot through a windshield is to put the camera as close to the glass as possible so that it will not have a chance to “see” the interior of your vehicle or the artifacts on the glass. This will also reduce the glare and the reflection of the interior of the vehicle, the occupants, or the camera which might otherwise appear in the photo.
Unless you live on the polar caps, the middle of the ocean, or the Llano Estacado, composition is largely a subtractive process. Remove elements of the image that do not belong in order to emphasize those that do.
Where's the dashboard and the bug stains and the inspection sticker? This feels too much like an actual photo!
Long exposures in moving vehicles can yield interesting results. What outmoded emo band wouldn’t scrape together a few dollars to buy the image below from iStock for their next CD of whiny music about how nobody loved them in high school?
If you can mount the camera on your dashboard as you drive down a lighted street, you’ll get streaks of light as smooth as your ride can offer. If you handhold and wiggle around, you’ll get wiggly streaks. Remember the camera tossing fad? Same deal with less tossing.
A color graded long exposure through the windshield: favorite of crybaby emo bands with daddy issues.
Most windshield glass is tinted darker toward the top in order to protect the driver from the sun’s evil glare. What does this mean to you? It means your automobile comes standard with a Horizontal ND Grad Filter which is great if you aren’t shooting straight into the sun as it illuminates every head, thorax, and abdomen to have slammed into your vehicle for the last 300 miles.
Sun star: check. ND grad filter windshield: check. Wiper-smeared bug guts: check. A Project 365 masterpiece.
As a photographer, ask yourself: “Does the world really need this photo I’m about to take through my windshield?” That answer is probably no.
As a photographer on assignment, ask yourself: “Do I want to garner a reputation as a photographer who cannot be bothered to leave the vehicle for a shot?” That answer is definitely no.
As an artist, ask yourself: “Can I get away with axe murder in broad daylight as long as my artist statement serves to justify my poor technique?” That answer is definitely yes, a little bullshit goes a long way:
“This piece is a metaphor of how the barriers we erect to protect ourselves inescapably define our perspective of reality.”
With an artist statement like that you’re sure to secure a grant or win an award from an organization or individual whose perspective undoubtedly escapes any definition of reality.
100% Windshield Free Nature. I shot this at Monument Valley in 2007. Outside my vehicle.
Hey, if you do get the chance to visit Monument Valley, for the love of all that’s good and right in this world: get out of the car to shoot. At the very least, roll the window down.
I say this to all of my friends who are starting a Project 365, the ultimate in photographic masturbation: sometimes there’s nothing there.
No reason to force it.
