BROOKS RANGE PACKRAFTING SHOW

To me, spending time in Alaska's Brooks Range is one of the very best things I could dream of doing with my time. We did a 14 day packrafting trip there this past August.

What's a packraft? It's a small, light one person raft that weighs 5.5 lbs, can be rolled up and stowed in your pack when you're walking, and blown up and paddled when you want to float.

A trip of this nature necessitates watching every ounce that goes into your pack. I took a light kit: My Nikon D300, 12-24 lens, 70-300 lens, two batteries, 10 GB worth of cards, and a polarizing filter. No tripod. It all fit into my Lowepro Photo Runner fanny pack that I wore backwards so that the pack was in front, giving me easy access to my gear. When we were floating, this pack went into a lightweight, but very high quality dry bag. Check out the presentation below to see what we did.

Review: LENSBABY COMPOSER- selective focus lens

I have been a fan of the Lensbaby and the look it generates since I bought my first one four years ago. With the latest permutation of this lens, the Lensbaby Composer, Lensbaby has really hit a home run. It’s so much easier to use than any of the previous generations of the Lensbaby.

The Lensbaby Composer is a manual focus lens that comes in a mount for your brand of SLR. It is a selective focus lens that transmits an image that has an area of sharp focus, the “sweet spot”, with sharp focus dropping off towards the edges of the frame. The position of the “sweet spot” can be changed by rotating the Composer within its ball and socket mount. The size of the “sweet spot” is determined by which aperture ring you drop into the lens. Aperture ring changes are a cinch.

The Composer is a great improvement over previous generations of the Lensbaby. It works with the exposure metering system in your camera, which is something I love about the Composer over my Lensbaby 2.0. The position of the sweet spot is a breeze to change and there is a locking ring if you decide you need consistent positioning of the focused area.

I love the unique selective focus look of images taken with the Composer. It allows for infinite artistic license and I find that there are so many interesting possibilities that I end up experimenting with a subject much more.

Available accessories include a telephoto, a wide, and a super wide accessory lens, macro lenses, and the optic swap system, which gives you the choice of 4 different optics that can easily be installed and changed. The double glass optic gives a tack sharp sweet spot. The single optic gives a pleasantly soft sweet spot. The plastic optic yields an ethereal look, and the pinhole/zone plate optic allows for some really exciting artistic possibilities.

Times when I reach for my Lensbaby Composer:
1) when selective focus is a must for the subject, often in portraits
2) when one part of my composition is too busy and I want to simplify it with selective focus. (i.e. busy foreground in a landscape shot).
3) when I want to show the viewer an interpretation that they’ve never seen before.
4) when I’m feeling uninspired and looking for a creative interpretation of my subject to get excited about.

In summary, the Lensbaby is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED in my book. It brings new exciting views of the world and new, artistic possibilities that are within reach of anyone willing to experiment. It’s guaranteed to spice up your camera bag.

10% DISCOUNT

For a 10% discount on anything ordered from the Lensbaby website, lensbaby.com, enter the coupon code mwitschard09 into the coupon field as you check out.

I'm Crazy About Digital Infrared

I am inspired by more traditional, literal interpretations of landscapes and nature; but I’m also very strongly drawn towards abstract, other-worldly renderings of these subjects. Many photographs that stick with me over time suggest a different reality. This explains my current year and a half long love affair with digital infrared (IR). At that time, I had an old Nikon D70 body which I sent off to be converted for digital infrared shooting. A whole new world opened up for me and I haven’t been able to stop exploring it since.
Here’s a little background on the whole IR process: as wavelengths of visible light get longer, they go from violet to red. Infrared begins where red light ends. We can’t see infrared with our eyes, but sometimes we can sense it as heat. Converting a digital body for infrared shooting involves removing the high pass filter, which protects the sensor and actually cuts out infrared, and replacing this with a different piece of glass that cuts out visible light and lets the infrared pass through.
There are two alternatives to the converted digital camera for shooting infrared. Both have serious disadvantages. The first option is to shoot infrared film, which is an expensive proposition, both in film and in the processing. It is also a royal pain because IR film is SO sensitive to light. The second option is shooting with an infrared filter on the end of your lens. This works OK, but results in very long shutter speeds (usually multiple seconds), forcing one to always shoot from a tripod. I love the option of being able to shoot handheld. With infrared filters that’s just not an option.
In my world, converting a camera to infrared is the way to go, hands down. I got mine converted at www.lifepixel.com . The converted camera operates as it would normally. Auto-focus works, metering works, and you can look through the viewfinder and see the image as you’re capturing it. Compared to the other options for creating infrared images, shooting with a converted digital camera is a wonderfully spontaneous and liberating process.
I am thrilled about infrared for many reasons. Anything that reflects a lot of infrared appears light in tone. Vegetation and people, both very effective infrared reflectors, are rendered in ethereal, light tones. Infrared absorbers like blue sky and water are rendered in dark tones. Most infrared images end up with some color information in them. This color usually does not match the real world, but sometimes it can be very beautiful. I end up converting most of my infrared captures to black and white images, because I love the look. This often results in a fairly high contrast image that has beautifully light toned vegetation.
Another reason that I am so excited about digital IR is because it keeps me more productive and more engaged around mid-day. Infrared shooting is often at its best during the middle of the day when objects are hot and our eyes perceive the scene to be harshly lit. Now that I am shooting digital IR, mid-day is becoming incredibly productive for me and since there is so much infrared being reflected at that time of day, much of this work is shot hand held, which I thoroughly enjoy. These days, I often shoot with my regular color body until around two hours after sunrise and then I switch to my IR body and just keep on shooting. When the light starts getting soft and sweet in the late afternoon, I switch back to my regular body.

Here are 3 shooting tips for digital IR to get you started.

1) Shoot in RAW if possible. This always affords you more options later.
2) When checking your histogram, know that with IR you may have to overexpose by up to a stop to get a good exposure that has lots of information but is still not close to being clipped on the right side.
3) Shoot middle apertures when possible. IR is more prone to flare than visible light is. Shooting at middle apertures, around f 8 for most lenses, helps manage this because smaller apertures are more prone to flare.

And finally, I have yet to meet a photographer who has explored digital IR shooting who hasn’t totally fallen in love it. If you want to add some exciting, creative options to your shooting that allow you to be super productive during the middle of a sunny day, digital IR could be for you. Give it a shot!

More examples are available in the Landscapes portfolio on my website at www.moephotography.com

LEAVE THE LAPTOP AT HOME!

Simple Strategies for Power, Storage, and Backing Up on Long, Remote Photo Trips


So you’re planning that long and far away photo trip of a lifetime. Maybe it’s a two week rafting trip down the Grand Canyon. Maybe you’re trekking in the Himalayas, or perhaps you’re following in Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keefe’s footsteps and planning a ten day horse packing trip in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Time’s have changed from when all you needed to do was load your view camera and film sheets onto a pack animal and go.
You’re probably sporting one of the later generation DSLRs, which sounds just great until you start thinking about how to recharge batteries, where to store your images, and how to get juice to your laptop. What to do? How do you sort through the options of solar rechargers, extra laptop batteries, hard drives, backup hard drives, generators?……..the list goes on. My mantra for any long and/or remote outdoor or travel trip is this: Take everything that you truly need, but keep the kit as light and as simple as possible. If I don’t really need it, it stays at home.
Powering my camera: If outlet power is unavailable, I keep it simple by avoiding rechargers, solar or otherwise. I just take extra camera batteries. Today’s SLRs are energy misers. Camera batteries last longer and take more pictures than ever before. On my very longest trips, like a 5 week wilderness expedition on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic where there were no outlets, I took 4 additional batteries for my camera, in addition to the one it came with. Each extra battery costs $40 and weighs 2.6 oz. That’s a $160 investment in power that weighs 10.4 oz. In 5 weeks, I made about 3,000 captures. I tried to not use too much juice looking at the camera monitor and when the trip was over, I had gone through 4 batteries and still had one remaining. $160 and 10.4 oz is much cheaper, much lighter, and far less likely to be problematic than any solar roll or generator that I know of.
That’s all well and good you may be thinking, but extra camera batteries won’t power a laptop. Well, you got me there; however, I’m here to tell you that if you are going on a long, remote photo trip, you should seriously consider keeping it simple and just leaving that laptop at home! What is the most important use of the laptop to the digital photographer?......for editing our images of course. Sure it can store images, but lots of devices can. My feeling is that I can edit at home on my big beautiful flat screen while sitting in my super comfy office chair. When I’ve invested weeks of my life and thousands of dollars to get to a remote place, the last thing I want to do is edit images. I’d rather spend my time going out and creating more images! Leaving the laptop at home on a long, remote trip makes for one less device to charge, one less thing to get stolen, one less thing to carry.
Here are my strategies for storage and backup. If I’m off on a shorter remote trip, say up 10 days and if I want to keep things as light as possible, I will bring extra batteries for my camera and all the compact flash cards that I need for the trip. I will keep the images on the cards and not store them or back them up until the trip is over. If I start running out of card room, my extra battery or two will give me the juice to edit images while looking at them on my camera monitor and I will create more storage space that way.
On a longer trip where I’m shooting so much that I am forced to download cards or if weight is not an issue, I will take along portable storage devices. My favorite product to date is the Sanho Hyperdrive SPACE Portable Storage Device and Memory Card Reader. I own two and they are available with capacities ranging from 40GB to 500GB. My preference is for a device that does not give an image preview. My philosophy is that if I need to see something larger than the 3 in. wide image on my camera monitor, I can wait until I’m at home. A portable storage device without a monitor is smaller, lighter, and cheaper. One Hyperdrive weighs a tad over half a pound and is about half the size of my SB-800 Speedlight flash unit. Put a memory card into a Hyperdrive, turn it on, and then watch as your card is quickly downloaded and data is verified from card to device. I like to have two Hyperdrives on a longer remote trip. I download each card to both of my Hyperdrives and then I carry one of them and I give the other one to one of my traveling companions and make sure they keep it in a safe place. If I’m concerned about moisture or shock, I’ll put each Hyperdrive in it’s own tiny Pelican box. The Hyperdrives always stay on our person or nearby. They never go into checked luggage that could be lost. This storage and backup system is redundant and fairly fool proof. It helps me sleep at night.
So the next time you leave for a long, remote photo trip, remember: Keep it simple! Consider leaving the laptop behind, carry plenty of freshly charged extra batteries, and carry a portage storage device or better yet two.

A Great Small Camera

Some of the wilderness trips I do call for going light and fast. That's when I reach for my Panasonic LX-3. camera It's a truly amazing little machine. At 8 oz., it's boasts a super fast f2.0 Zeiss lens, a 10 mp sensor ( the cons of more resolution in a sensor this size outweighs the pros ), the option to capture in RAW format, and a decent video mode. I've printed some images from this little camera at 12 x 18" size and they look great. I've been enjoyed putting together some stills and a little video from some the trips I've taken this camera on. Here's a show from a packrafting trip I did this past July.

Glacier National Park Photo Workshop

I returned home a week ago from teaching a photo workshop in Glacier National Park. We based out of the town of West Glacier and spent 4 days exploring various locations in the park. It was the end of the season in Glacier and there were very few visitors in the park. The weather was moody. I love it like that. Our first morning out was spent on the east side at Two Medicine Lake where we were greeted by a cold, snowy sunrise. Later that afternoon we made our way to Lake Saint Mary and had a great shoot at my favorite beach. The rest of the workshop was spent on the west side of park along McDonald Creek, up Avalanche Gorge, and on the shores of Lake McDonald. Fall is a beautiful time to visit Glacier.

MY BHUTAN SLIDE SHOW

Check out this slide show of images from Bhutan. My wife, Heather, and I spent 23 days there last October. We spent 17 days trekking along the border of Bhutan and Tibet. The rest of our time was spent wandering through and near the towns of Paro, Punaka, and Thimphu.

Bhutanese Adventures Part 3

As I waved goodbye to the chile lady (Bhutanese Adventures Part 2), I turned my attention back to the farmhouse that I was originally drawn to. Was anyone home? The front door was open. I wandered closer, admiring the attention that had been given to the upkeep of the house and grounds. Forever drawn to color, I snapped a few shots of some bundles of chiles drying near some closed windows. I stepped back and made a few shots of the house front with the melons, the neatly stacked lumber and firewood, and a cat.

I waited and watched and noticed a body move by inside the house. The person had not seen me. I continued to watch and the hunched over body of an old, white haired woman moved by the door again. I waved over my guide, Phuentsho. I told him that I’d seen the woman and I asked him to see if he might be able to engage her and get her into the doorway where I could stealthily make a photograph of her in front of her home.

Phuentsho marched up to the door and politely called for the woman. She came to the door, but stayed a few steps inside where she was still in the shadows. Now I could see her face. This woman has seen a lot I thought. She’s seen some change. I’ll bet she could tell some incredible stories. Phuentsho asked in Bhutanese “How much are the melons?” The woman stepped closer to the doorway and replied, “They’re not for sale”. This led to more conversation and the woman slowly stepped further and further forward until she was in the perfect, soft, wrap around light of the doorway. I shot away while she and Phuentsho chatted.

Pretty soon she was stepping out of her house and sitting down on the steps. She was tiny. Her mouth was stained red from a life of chewing bettlenut ( a common Bhutanese practice ) and she was dressed in the traditional female Bhutanese outfit, the kira. A kira is a large piece of woven cloth that is wrapped around the body in a series of folds. It is held in place by a two-part brooch with a connecting chain, the koma. This woman’s koma really caught my eye. It was beautifully and intricately hand crafted.

I asked Phuentsho to see if it was OK for me to continue photographing. She said it was fine. I was standing pretty close now, maybe 6 feet away from her. Regardless of the permission she’d given, part of me still felt the intrusiveness of the camera in my hands. I photographed quickly, capturing an image and then dropping the camera to nod and gesture, even though I could not understand a word of the conversation. She asked some questions about me to Phuentsho. I replied through him. When we were finished and left her home, I could see that a neighbor was going to drive some cows in front of her home. To complete the story, I positioned myself and snapped a last shot of the woman and her house in the distance with the cows in the foreground- another satisfying day of discovery in the “real Bhutan”.

Bhutanese Adventures Part 2

Just find a unique and interesting background and wait for something good to happen. That’s the travel photographer’s mantra and it was my ticket to photographic adventure on this day in Bhutan. One day wandering through a rural agricultural area, I came upon this farmhouse. On first inspection, it looked like nobody was home. What really caught my eye were the ubiquitous chiles hanging to the right of the doorway and a group of melons lined up on a pile of wood. This could be good I thought to myself. Now all we need is some people.

I wandered downhill of the farmhouse and noticed a woman harvesting green chiles in a field. I wandered over to her with my guide and they exchanged small talk while I quietly assessed the shooting opportunities. Mmm….busy scene and the overcast conditions were making the sky quite a bit brighter than anything else. I held my fire while the woman handed me a chile to examine. Better wait until she’s done I thought. Just watch her. Maybe you’ll learn something. If I’m lucky, I’ll catch a shot of her walking in front of the farmhouse.

In time, she finished her harvest. All of her chiles filled a large burlap bag which she loosely stitched shut. There was a short, but steep trail leading up to the farmhouse. I’ll offer to carry her bag up. I gesticulated. She nodded. The bag was way heavier than it looked. Arms burning and heart pumping audibly, I made it to the top of the trail where I placed the bag on the ground and backed away to catch my breath.

My guide helped the woman put the bag of chiles on her back where she tied a makeshift harness with a piece of rope. As she walked in front of the farmhouse, I snapped my favorite shots of her. My patience had paid off. I already had my background in mind and I was delighted that this small, strong Bhutanese woman had gotten between me and it.

Stay tuned for Bhutanese Adventures: Part 3 to hear about what happened next.

Bhutanese Adventures Part 1

On the second day of my three week trip to Bhutan, I had to sit my guide down. “We’re not typical tourists. We’re different” I told him. “Rather than going to all the same places that every other tourist to Bhutan goes to, we want to see the real Bhutan”. That sitting down made all the difference for the remainder of our trip. Whenever we had a chance to get off the beaten path and just wander, we did! Once of my favorite things became wandering through rural agricultural areas and visiting with and photographing people while they did their day’s work.

This particular day, we were slowly making our way down the narrow, windy road from Cheli La pass and I spied a beautiful farmhouse surrounded by apple trees. “Phuentsho, can we go check that out?” Phuentsho, my guide, nodded: “Absolutely, let’s go!”. Tshering, our driver, quickly stopped the van, I grabbed my camera bag and we were off.

We spent about a half hour at and around the farmstead, chatting with the woman who lived there. She had many projects going. Phuentsho translated and after securing permission for me to photograph, my photography field day began. At last, the real Bhutan.

The family had recently harvested all of their red rice, a hearty, nutty tasting variety, and the woman had the rice drying on the concrete slabs in front of her home. Twice daily, she would turn the rice so that it dried properly. I photographed her as she did this. It took a while so I was able to shoot from several angles as well as shoot a bunch of verticals and horizontals from each spot. I ended with a lot to choose from when I was finished.

We then moved on to an area behind the house where the local distilled spirit called arra was being made. Home brewed arra remains the most popular liquor in Bhutan because it is natural and manufactured locally. For centuries arra has played a significant role in the Bhutanese way of life, being consumed on numerous occasions such as religious ceremonies, marriages and festivals. It is distilled from a fermented grain mixture. While we chatted, the woman changed the water in the Khataw, the aluminum condensing pot, which has to be kept cold for condensation to occur. A cold Khataw causes vapors from the heated fermented mixture below it to condense on its bottom. This fluid, arra, then drips down into a collection vessel.

This was all so fascinating to me. I photographed, recomposed and thought of little else. I was in the moment. I was in the zone. The “real Bhutan” was starting to unfold.