Landscape Photography- Acadia National Park

Each autumn now, for the past three years, I've been traveling up to Maine to spend a week photographing Acadia National Park. This was my fourth trip, and I learned a lot about my equipment, how I approach photography, and myself.

Acadia is a small park, with only about 40 miles of paved roads, and all contained on the relatively small Mount Desert Island. Each morning I woke up at 5am (4am my time), and left my motel at 6:00 to be in place for dawn half an hour later. After the sun rose at 6:50, I'd spend the rest of the day searching for new things to shoot. Here's what I learned:

* landscape photography is better when you don't shoot everything at f16. F2.8 is far more creative and interesting, and f1.8 is even better.

* once the sun peaks out, the best light is done for most of the rest of the day.

* always carry a compass and know where the sun will set and where it will rise. Use it throughout the day to determine where the sun will be when the light is perfect, and what it will light up.

* I need to get a larger rectangular filter holder to cover the 16mm setting on my wide angle lens. Now I have a full frame digital camera (Canon 5DMk2), my widest angle is 16mm instead of 21mm with my 1.3X crop cameras.

* when shooting at the coast, get tide charts to know when the waves will be peaking.

* after a day of rain, streams turn into hundreds of small waterfalls.

* the pre-dawn light is a beautiful blue, twenty minutes before sunrise.

* when I'm thinking of what to shoot next, I don't really want to eat anything, and have small snacks throughout the day instead of any meals. I often don't think of food for several hours. I love to sleep in, but when faced with the prospect of shooting the dawn, I can wake up at any time of the night. Sunrise is almost always better than sunset.

* shooting in a location where tens of thousands of pictures are taken each day, it's a challenge to do something different. Having shot four times there now, it was much harder to see worthy subjects. But I think my images are better for the extra thought that went into them.

I love flying into Bangor Airport; there are only two or three gates and it's much quieter than any other public airport I've flown into. Upon arriving, it was fun to go into the small store there and see one of my pictures on the cover of Bangor Metro magazine. I had a three page spread of my Acadia work inside the magazine. I was going to pick up a few extra copies when I left, but alas, October was gone, replaced by November.

Changing Business in a Bad Economy

It's been a strange year professionally for me. A year ago I watched as others struggled with the effects of a souring economy; I read stories about several photographers packing it in after years of being in business. It wasn't until about April when things started to slow down for me. My biggest client saw their revenues way down and slashed their marketing budgets dramatically. Consequently, I lost a client I'd had since 2001, as the first client dropped their services completely. Six months later, everyone has been more careful about where they spend their money, and business has been down for me about 50% as a result.

But while work has been down, some smaller jobs have kept me busy, as well as several personal projects and other clients, both old and new. While some photographers I know are getting out of the business, I'm excited about some new directions I'm heading in. In the past year, I've been doing more stock photography, and traveled to five different national parks (Shenandoah, Rocky Mountain, Arches, Canyonlands and Acadia) to work on photos. Next October I plan on leading my first photo tour to Maine to shoot in Acadia, with ideas for more trips and teaching photography in the works. I've done more fashion shoots, working with professional models, which makes a nice change from many of the people I normally shoot for marketing campaigns ("I hate having my picture taken..."). And while I've always relied on getting my own work and promoting myself, I'm seriously looking at the idea of getting a rep to help promote my business, negotiate contracts (my most hated part of my job), and land new and bigger jobs.

Stay tuned; the future is looking bright.

What to Bring....

My friend Scott recently posted on his Facebook page that he would be going on a trip somewhere with the family, and wondered what gear he should bring. Scott is what I would call a 'keen amateur' and has just bought a digital camera for the first time. I didn't plan on spending an hour replying to his post, but I get asked similar questions often. Here's what I wrote:

Ok, I'll give it a shot... first off, the one GLARING thing I see that's missing, is a camera body cap. Sounds very innocuous, but with that missing, all the dust from the air and your carpet are wafting onto your sensor. (I'm assuming here that the black camera is your digital camera, though maybe you're using the digital to take the picture). In any case, keep that camera covered all the time, and change lenses quickly. You'll be very frustrated when you come back and find dust spots all over your pristine skies. Then you'll spend days or even weeks getting rid of them on the computer. I know– it's happened in the past to me. Get a bulb to blow off the sensor regularly. Some Sensor Swabs (about $50/ pack) are useful too, but most dust can be blown off with a bulb. Price for a bulb ~ $15.

Do you have something, like a laptop, to backup your pics to each day? You may also want to backup the pics to DVD-RWs, that way you have them in two places if one fails. When I go to Maine each Fall, I put the pictures each day onto a portable HD, then onto a DVD-RW. I've never needed the DVDs but if the drive goes out on me, I'm OK. Price for a few DVD-RWs ~$25.

I'd leave one backup camera in your hotel room/ suitcase and not even get it out unless your main camera fails. No point bringing another camera on a hike when the chances are slim that you'll have camera failure. Pack lightly, though don't leave out the essentials.

If you're shooting in the daylight hours (8am-6pm) you may not want your tripod, but I'd STRONGLY encourage you to get up an hour before sunrise and stake out a place to shoot the sun coming up. Shoot a couple sunrises and sunsets and you won't want to shoot during the day, the light is so harsh and boring. Most great landscape pix are shot within an hour of sunrise or sunset. The quality of light is so much better. When I go to Maine, I spend most of the day (after shooting the sunrise) figuring out where the best sunset shot will be. Bring a compass and figure out where the sun rises and sets, then use that during the day to determine where the best locations are for future pix. Bring the tripod- it's bulky and unwieldy, but you'll have sharp pictures, and be glad you brought it. Price for getting up early- Free– and a little missed sleep, which you won't even notice once you see how beautiful the landscape is at that time.

Make sure you have more than one memory card; get the biggest ones you can afford, at least 4GB should be ok for a day's shooting, depending on your shooting style. I do a lot of panoramas, some of which require 15-25 images for one shot, so I've been known to shoot 8-10GB in a day.

A 2X lens converter sounds good, but most (even my $300 Canon 1.4X) will degrade image quality a little, so I usually don't recommend them. Depending on the wildlife you're shooting, you may be able to patiently just walk closer to your subject. When I shot some bears out East last week, I was able to get within twenty feet (ok- these were small bears!). Deer and elk are usually easy to shoot if you move slowly and use your 80-200 zoom. Open the aperture all the way to throw the background out of focus.

A very useful accessory that a lot of landscape photographers use now is a bubble level that mounts to your hotshoe and helps you get straight horizons. Price ~$20. (http://www.adorama.com/TPBLS.html?searchinfo=bubble+level)

The graduated ND is pretty useful. You can get around it by shooting two images, one for the sky and one for the foreground, then combining in PS, but it's better to get one shot in-camera. My Singh-Ray ND filter cost $100. Lee makes good ones too. A filter holder would be handy too though you can get by without one.

When you get to where you're going, visit the visitor center and gift shops and see what locations are photogenic- what scenes are in all the postcards and posters? Look at the photography coffee table books from the area; read the captions to find out where they were taken, then visit those places.

Hope that helps Scott! Look forward to seeing what you come up with!

After about two months of re-scanning and hunting down old prints, etc, the latest version of my fine art website has been launched. It's the eleventh re-working since my first site in 1996. Enjoy.

Conflict of Interest?

I just received an email from a friend/ client of mine:

"I have a photographer's question for you. A friend of mine is the marketing director for a school in Colorado. He is having some issues with a photographer and a designer that work for him. The designer would like the raw, un-touched files for the work they are creating, but the photographer will only provide jpegs or tiffs. The designer says you can manipulate raw files more and would like them that way but the photographer doesn't want to provide those because it will reflect poorly on their work if the photographer doesn't do some retouch. What do you think? This would be my response, unless it's been specified up front that the designer requires the raw files and the photographer expects it, the photographer can refuse to give the raw files. What would you say?"

This was my response:

"It's a tricky situation. I never send out raw images; I don't think I've ever been asked to. The main reason why someone wouldn't want to do it is, like you say, their photos can be made to look bad (unintentionally of course) and that reflects back on the photographer. While I'm shooting, I have certain ideas of how the pictures will look when finished; occasionally that's pretty much as they look when shot, other times it can be quite different. After a shoot, I do a lot of work on each picture to get them to look just the way I had planned when I took the shot. Because it takes time (and expensive software), I usually charge $15 per image for a finished shot. Click here to see some samples of before/ after  pictures, as well as my take on the subject.

I'm assuming this photographer is new to your friend's school; usually this sort of thing would've been talked about beforehand if they wanted the raw images, or if they had certain ideas for how they wanted the finished pictures to look. I would contact the photographer and say, fine, don't give us the raw images, but here's what we want done with them (darken this one, boost the colors on this one, etc). It's not really the designer's job to manipulate the pictures; that's what the photographer is hired for. See if they can work out an amicable arrangement. It sounds more like the designer doesn't trust the photographer to do a good job, which may be the case, but then that's a good reason for them to talk things over before shooting. If the marketing director hired both of them independently, it means he likes both their work– the designer needs to work with what the photographer gives her, and the photographer needs to let the designer use his pictures in the way she best sees fit."

Mike

Catching Up

I spent five days in England for a family birthday last week, arriving back in Chicago Wednesday afternoon. Thursday morning I was up bright and early for a full day's hospital shoot, with eight setups and breakdowns of the lighting. Today I have seventy-one emails to plow through! Hopefully by the end of the day I'll be somewhat caught up....

The Cost of Photography

What's a photograph worth? And what's a photographer's experience worth? I've got almost twenty years experience shooting everything from presidents to the homeless. How do I figure out what to charge? Read on...

I used to be scared to charge much when I first started out as a photographer; after all, I'd been working at the dining hall in college for about $5 an hour, so to charge any more than $7-8 seemed high to me (this is 1989 you have to realize). I used to be shocked, like most people, when I heard of plumbers charging $100 just to show up at your door! Now I charge more than that- so what's changed and how do I justify my rates? Read on to see what it costs to be a photographer....

Soon after I started out, I realized I needed to have top quality equipment to stay in business, and I needed to regularly train on new gear and new software. And to add to that, I had to purchase all the things I needed to run a small office- pencils, a desk, file folders, a paper cutter, not to mention a computer, printer, flatbed scanner, film scanner, etc, etc. Unlike company employees, I had to purchase everything myself, down to the paper clips and envelopes I use.

Since I went digital in 2002, I've owned three high end digital cameras (the Canon 1D series). I couldn't believe I spent $5000 on a camera the first time I bought one. Now I've spent $15,000 on three! The savings over having to buy film (I used to order about $500 of film every few months) has been substantial, but a good digital camera has a life of only about three years, so there's a trade-off. I've figured that, depending on the shoot, I usually have $10-20,000 of photography equipment with me on any given job. And unlike my plumber in the paragraph above, I'm often upgrading gear and purchasing new software to keep current. Here's a rundown of some of the equipment I use in the production of my photos:

Honda Civic ($16,000)- can't do without a car and this is my business car. 40MPG!
Canon 400mm lens ($7000+)- with sports being a big part of my work, I need the best gear– bar none, this is the best sports lens you can get.
Canon 1DMk3 camera ($5000)- the camera I currently use on every job
Apple Mac G5 Quad computer ($4000)- the best computer you could buy (three years ago), upgraded several times with hard drives (just added an internal 1.5TB hard drive this morning) and 6.5GB of RAM. Will probably upgrade to a new computer within the next year to keep up with all the large files I need to process after every shoot.
Canon lenses- probably about $20,000 in lenses over the years, from a 15mm full frame fisheye to a 300mm f/2.8 (not including the 400mm above). Most lenses I now use cost over $1200 each.
Lighting- six high powered flash units (each about $500) , plus stands, soft boxes, umbrellas, radio slaves, cases, etc

After a shoot, I generally spend one hour in post production for every hour I spend shooting, so my shooting fee covers my time in the office too. After a shoot, everything is backed up onto DVD's and hard drives and cataloged for easy retrieval later– my catalog is up to 140,000 images, and about 400 CD's and DVD's. All of this costs money and time, which is another part of my shooting fee.

Hopefully that explains a bit, and gives you an idea of what you're paying for when you hire a professional photographer. I wouldn't do any other job– I won't get rich being a photographer, but it's the best job in the world!