by 6 people |
A day in the life
The night before, I gather energy food, water, my gear, and semi-warm clothing, then go to bed fairly early for I'll be up in the mountains before the sunrise the next morning. I've mapped out my hike, and make sure that my GPS has fresh batteries.
Nature is beautiful, powerful, and awe-inspiring. She cleanses the mind, body, and spirit of all worry and stress of life in the city, and as a photographer, it's my goal to share an image of how lovely she can be.
Each trip has a specific goal in mind. It might be to capture a certain landscape, a waterfall in slow-motion, or perhaps a certain pond. I'm always on the lookout for wildlife, but to date, this is a secondary goal, mainly because I don't have the right equipment for good wildlife portraits yet.
Once up the canyon, I set off up a trail on a pace that'll keep my heart rate at a moderate level and keep my eye open for interesting objects, angles, and ultimately a unique and intriguing photograph. On a particular hike, I might shoot 200 pictures or more. In the old days of film, this was a very expensive hobby, but with digital cameras, there's no reason to not shoot hundreds of images.
Eventually, I'll reach my destination, but that's only one aspect of the journey and adventure. Hopefully, by the time I've reached it, I've already taken a hundred or more well composed and memorable shots.
Once I get home, I'll load all of the pictures onto my computer and sift through the ones that I like. These get saved into a different folder and loaded into Photoshop. From here, I'll look at the overall composition and see if there are any distractions. If there are, I'll do what I can to minimize then. This might including cropping the image or removing the distraction (the clone tool can be very handy with this). Next, I'll check the overall lightness and darkness of the image and adjust the image's heuristics levels, and finally, I'll adjust the overall sharpness of an image using the "unsharp mask" filter.
Some consider adjusting an image using a software application as a deception, but my opinion is that I'm adjusting it to appear closer to what my eyes viewed in the first place.
By the end of the journey, hopefully, I've been able to create a couple of images worthy of showing to others.
Great Salt Lake Sunset
The Great Salt Lake is a great place to photograph at sunset. Sundial Peak and Lake Blanche
This is probably my favorite hiking destination. Lake Blanche and Sundial Peak is in Big Cottonwood Canyon, which is near Salt Lake City, Utah. Transition
A larger version of this composite image can be found in my gallery at The Lens Flare. I named this Transition since the background boxes slowly merge from the flower's background to the cloud. Parakeet / Budgie
Parakeets make great subjects for nature photographers mainly because they'll hang around long enough to take their picture, especially, if you have a stick full of bird seed. Cockatiel
This cockatiel really liked posing for my camera. Nature Photography Links
- Art & Photography Community
- The Lens Flare is a growing community of hundreds of photographers that have thousands of pictures in their galleries. Most of the artwork and photographs are related to landscapes, wildlife, and nature.
- Landscape Photos
- Photographers from all over the world have uploaded their best landscape photos for you to browse at your leisure. There are currently over 5,000 images that have been submitted by hundreds of people.
- Wildlife Photos
- Nearing 5000 wildlife photos and arkwork, this is one of the larger galleries of animals on the web. Hundreds of people have submitted their artwork and photography to The Lens Flare for free.
- Flower Photos
- Flowers are a popular subject among nature photographers, and this gallery is full of them - in fact, close there are close to 4,000 flower images.
- Water photos
- Ranging from droplets to oceans, water is an important aspect of nature photography. Other examples include streams, rivers, waterfalls, ponds, and lakes.
- Tree photos
- Trees are to the nature photographer as people are to the portrait photographer. Each tree is a little different, and under the right conditions they can portray emotion and add to the overall feeling of an image.
- Sunset Photos
- Sunrises and sunsets are popular for their dramatic colors and moods, and this gallery contains nearly 1,500 of them.
Photography Sites
Squidoo Lenses
- Nature Photography
- A lens further describing my thrill of nature and landscape photography.
- Digital Landscapes
- Describes 3D graphics software used to create digital landscapes and how to get started.
by nature-photographer
I'm a semi-professional photographer currently living in Salt Lake City, UT. My passions include nature and wildlife photography, web design & dev...
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