All Over the Map

Last summer, as I set out on my ten-week, 10,452-mile road trip of teaching assignments, lecture gigs and personal shooting, I thought I had a pretty clear idea of what I'd encounter along the way. Well, it didn't quite work out that way, and as I was often pushed beyond my photographic comfort zone, I was reminded that there are only two kinds of photography: good and bad, regardless of subject.

I began the trip by traveling to Badlands National Park in South Dakota to set up accommodations for my 2010 workshop. Then I moved on to Whidbey Island, Washington, where I had a few days for scouting and shooting before my first workshop began. The region rendered varied photo ops, though it did present challenges because not a lot was in bloom and there was not a lot of color.

Whidbey Island. It was late in the day and the grasses were swaying from a constant breeze, so getting a sharp image at a low ISO wasn't going to happen. I could, of course, raise the ISO to accommodate f/22 and a shutter speed fast enough to stop the grasses. But rather than fight the movement, I decided to use it; in fact, I'd even exaggerate it. I set ISO 100 and tried longer exposures with a neutral density filter, but the grasses lost all detail in the foreground on exposures longer than a few seconds. After trying various shutter speeds on the inconsistent grass movement, I got a couple of shots with the right blend of softness and detail.

The Wheels. Then it was on to Colfax, Washington, to photograph in the Palouse region, where I came across a couple of unusual situations. The first was the Dahmen Barn in Uniontown, where the iconic feature is a fence constructed of hundreds of rusty metal wheels. It took a bit of looking around, but I did manage to find clear, balanced compositions. In one case, I felt the cloudless blue sky was too much negative space for the scene to work, but for stock photography, photographing negative space could help the salability of an image because it allows for text. In the photo here, I cropped down from the top to a panoramic format to edit out much of the sky. I used to be reluctant to crop to a panorama because of the loss of file size, but with the quality of the D3X's files, I'm able to create images like this.

Goat's Beard. It's basically a large dandelion, and I photographed it atop the Palouse region's Steptoe Butte at sunset. I don't pick wildflowers in order to reposition them for an image, so I looked for a Goat's Beard on the edge of the hill to shoot through into the setting sun. I didn't see any, and time was quickly slipping away. So, since Goat's Beards are weeds, I reluctantly picked one. The previsualized idea was to photograph through the Goat's Beard with the setting sun in the background, low on the horizon, to bring in the orange color. Since I don't carry a vase and my clamps were back in my room, I took off a boot, placed the weed in one of the eyelets and set the boot on my truck's tailgate.

Arabian Oryx. When I moved on to San Diego, California, it was to visit friends, but when they took me to Wild Animal Park a photographic situation soon turned up. Now, I'm not a wildlife photographer by any stretch, so I had no expectations of getting any keepers. The animals were pretty far away most of the time, and we were driving around on a tram, which is obviously limiting, as I like to wander when photographing. And I had no tripod, of course. I took a few shots with my D300 and 70-200mm lens and 1.7 teleconverter. The backgrounds were almost always difficult: too bright and/or too busy. But I started to see possibilities and began to take this shooting session a bit more seriously. I was beginning to think about software to deal with the backgrounds, maybe even using it in other ways to enhance the images. Then we came across an isolated and wonderfully posed Arabian Oryx; behind it, a clear blue sky, which is a great palette for adding backgrounds later on, sort of like a green screen in the movies. When I got home I opened the photo in Photoshop and, with Nik's Silver Efex Pro, created a black-and-white version and added a vignette and a textured background. No matter what the subject matter, I found my basic approach worked well: isolate and simplify; use line, quality of light, shutter speed and framing; previsualize software post processing.

Consider the comfort zone widened.

Visit Tony's website, www.tonysweet.com, to view a collection of his images, learn about upcoming workshops and keep up with his Visual Artistry blog.