Nature Photographer

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 will 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.