Through Ashland Artisan Gallery and Art Center I am offering an outdoor fall photography workshop on Saturday, October 25 2008 from 9-12 AM. I will meet participants at Ashland Artisan Gallery before we depart on a walking photography tour of the fall scenery in downtown Ashland and Lithia Park with the goal of photographing fall colors and themes, landscapes and abstracts.  I will offer my personal experience and knowledge on lighting, composition, texture color, technical settings and artistic vision.  It should be a fun and casual morning of photography in a beautiful setting to learn and improve.

The workshop is open to all photography enthusiasts with basic photography knowledge, a camera and a tripod.  The Art Center is able to make this workshop available for only $30.  The workshop has space for 10 participants, so call or stop by the gallery early to reserve your spot.  You can call Ashland Artisan Gallery at 488-5698 or come by at 163 East Main Street across from the Varsity Theater in Ashland.  For more information please contact me at sean@outdoorexposurephoto.com or 840-9237.

I am very excited to announce that my photo titled Lunar Eclipse Over Mt. Shasta has been selected as the category winner in the Creative Digital Category in the 2008 Windland Smith Rice International Photography Awards which is an international competition sponsored by Nature’s Best Photography Magazine.  The 2008 contest received over 20,000 entries.

The award-winning photographs will be published in the 2008 Fall Awards Special Collector’s Edition of Nature’s Best Magazine, due out mid-November. In addition, my photograph will be featured in the annual exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, one of the most prestigious and highly-visited museums in the world, running from mid-November through April 2009.

Nature’s Best will be posting the winning images on www.NaturesBestPhotography.com by the end of November.    In addition, the NATURE’S BEST PHOTOGRAPHY AWARDS will be displayed in galleries on AOL Pixcetera and MSNBC.

This is a very exciting recognition of my photography and I’m honored to be selected along with the other winners.  I’ll post more information about the exhibit and magazine as it becomes available.

In situations involving low levels of light it can often be beneficial to obtain a longer exposure to allow the sensor/film more time to absorb color and glow. There can be a lot of color and light bouncing off clouds and hills that our eyes can’t pick up. Cameras are able to “see” into low light scenes by leaving the shutter open and collecting more light. If I really want to pull as much light and color from a scene as possible I’ll often use a neutral density filter (ND) along with my usual filter stack (polarizer and graduated neutral density when needed) and also set the ISO on my camera down to 50 in order to extend what was already going to be a long shutter speed.

A neutral density filter is a neutral gray piece of glass or plastic that is placed in front of the lens.  Since it is neutral it doesn’t change the color of the image or do any other special effects.  All it does is reduce the amount of light that can pass through the lens to the image sensor or film (kind of like wearing color neutral sunglasses).  By reducing the amount of light coming in, the exposure time needs to be longer to get a properly exposed image.  One effect of longer exposure times is the blurring of anything moving within the image (water, clouds, wind blown trees, etc.).  Another affect is that if there is low level colored light washing over the scene it will saturate in the image over time.  I use Singh-Ray neutral density filters because they are some of the most color neutral filters available and give excellent results.  I also use Singh-Ray Graduated Neutral Density (GND) filters.  GND filters are neutral gray at the top and fade to clear near the middle.  They are used to hold back the light in one part of an image (like a bright sky) in order to balance the light across the scene.

The two photos above were taken one right after the other, the first at 6 sec @ f/20, ISO 100 with a 3 stop GND for the sky. The second was taken at 30 sec @ f/20, ISO 50 with a 3 stop GND and a 3 stop ND. Quite a difference 24 seconds of shutter time can make.