Even though this weekend is predicted to be the best weekend of the year here in Seattle, the Pacific Northwest is ever changing and it shouldn’t be long until things change.
Rainy days are some of my absolute favorite days to photograph. Sure it would be a lot easier to shoot through fog to create that soft mysterious air to your images, but fog is unpredictable and typically rather temporary lasting only for an hour or so in the early morning. However rain in the Pacific Northwest is both predictable and persistent.
People are often surprised that I don’t run outside with my camera on a beautiful blue sky day. The clouds on an overcast day act like a huge softbox to soften the light, reduce contrast, and open up the shadows to details that would be completely lost on a bright sunny day. Falling rain diffuses and evens out the light even more. Some of my favorite images have been captured on gray rainy days.
You’ll need to check your lens frequently for spots but with a little care you can use the rain to your advantage. Use a tripod, polarizer, small aperture and long shutter speed to keep from recording individual falling drops of rain and maximize atmospheric softening. Additionally, the polarizer removes the shine from foliage for the richest colors possible. It’s rare that I don’t have a polarizer on the front of my lens. With standing water in your frame the falling rain will ripple the surface. The long shutter speed will blur movement the same way a waterfall can be rendered as a soft ethereal white drape over rocks.
It is important to pay attention to foreground and background elements when trying to compose an effective surreal landscape image. Shot on location in Glacier Bay National Park.
Sometimes a landscape can be so interesting and new, one can forget how to capture it most effectively. Art discusses how a wide angle lens gave him the perfect composition in the surreal Pancake Rocks of New Zealand.
I have traveled to many locations that are not friendly to my traditional photography workflow. Here’s one way I deal with harsh conditions while still getting the shots I want, shot on location in Mali.
September 12, 2011 – Port Angeles, WA – With Jay Goodrich.
This 1-Day class follows Art Wolfe’s Olympic National Park Workshop. This is a great way to take what has just been taught in the field and learn to improve your process of development and managing large volumes of images with Lightroom 3.
As the popularity of digital image making grows, so does a photographer’s image catalog. How do we manage a hundred, thousand, or even 10,000 images? With the latest edition of Lightroom 3, Adobe is making the life of the photographer much, much easier. Photographer and writer Jay Goodrich has been using the Lightroom package since the first version, and is now offering a class to help those who are in need of a management solution for their collection of photographs. This one-day addition to our Olympic Peninsula workshop will begin with an overview of the Library and Develop Modules. Jay will then spend the rest of the time working with each participant to help catalog and maximize the images they created during the previous three days.
