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One Hour Photo - Art Wolfe

Hello, welcome everybody to One Hour Photo. My name is John Greengo. If you're new to this series, these are one-hour segments of what I like to call casual learning that are part of my Fundamentals of Photography class. I'm trying to add one more each month, and in these classes what we're doing is, and these really aren't official classes, we're gonna be answering some of your questions. And so, questions that you've submitted about camera equipment, photography, and so forth. I want to answer those here because I didn't always have enough time during the actual recording of the Fundamentals class. And then we're gonna have an interview with a photographer, and today we have the great Art Wolfe here, and we got a number of his photos that we're gonna be looking at, and I'm sure we're gonna have a great conversation. And then on top of that we're gonna be looking at some of your photos, both Art and I, and we'll be commenting and making suggestions about how you can improve, or what w...

e like, or what we don't like about your photos. And so we'll have some information throughout the show as to where you can submit your questions and where you could submit your photos for future editions of this class. So let's go ahead and get started with the questions. And we're gonna start off with, let's see, what's our first question here? Oh, we gotta talk about where you can submit your questions. So if you want to submit your questions, you can do that at Facebook. Type in Creative Photography Challenge Group, CreativeLive, and you can just put in your questions anywhere in there and I will scour them out and find them. I just go in once a month and just kinda look through. I know a lot of you are posting your photos in there. We're not using those photos for the photo critiques, but I am looking for questions in there. All right, for this week our first question is: I use a Canon 6D but my lens is Sigma. What are the pros and cons to using a different brand? So Sigma as of late has been making some very high-end, optically very, very good lenses, and so, from an optical standpoint, it may not be a problem at all. In fact, it may actually be better than what's available with your Canon, Nikon, or whatever other system that you have. Typically when Canon, or Nikon, or any other manufacturer make a camera and make a lens, they're designed to work together, and you have warranties that make sure that they're gonna work. When you buy another brand, they're often reverse engineering how the focusing and aperture connect up with the camera, and it's possible, and Sigma in the past was a little bit guilty of having lenses that were not compatible, even though they were supposed to be. And they would have to be fixed by Sigma and you'd have to send it in and they would fix it for free but it was kind of an inconvenience because you go out, you buy a new camera, and your old Sigma lens didn't work on it. They seem to have addressed that, for the most part, for the last several years. And a number of their art lenses, or their sport lenses, as of the last three or four years, are going to beat the optical quality of many of the Canons and Nikons out there. They may or may not be as fast at focusing, and so most photographers who are pretty serious are gonna buy the name brand lens of their camera manufacturer. But there's a number of us, myself included, that do own some of those Sigmas because they are becoming quite good. There's also Tamron and Tokina and they can make some very good alternate choices that are sometimes a little bit less money and virtually the same in quality. Do you have a good tip for culling down photos from a travel trip? This comes from Heather Curbow. The way that I work when I'm traveling is that when I'm traveling, I want to get the best photos possible, and I don't want to spend a lot of time working on my computer when I'm on location. But I do want to try to note down anything that was really important that happened that I knew one shot was a better shot or not. And so I try to get through every day's photo, just in a real quick scan, and mark off some images that I know are garbage, and mark off a few that are really good. And I, sometimes I'll just give myself 10 minutes before bed to look through all the photos, mark down five or six that I know are pretty good, give 'em two stars, give everything else one stars. When I come back home days, weeks later, when I'm comfortable and I'm sitting in my office, and then I have a chance to look at the images on the big screen, then I'll do a more thorough culling of them. But I think doing two culls, one right away, and then one later on with a little bit of time to separate you from the emotions of shooting something. Because right then you might be thinking, it's the greatest thing in the world, and two weeks later, you might be thinking it's not quite ready for prime time yet. Next question, what is your opinion on Magic Lantern? This is Robert Stanton. All right, I'll be honest with you, I don't know a lot about Magic Lantern. I don't use it myself but it is a, and for those of you who don't know anything about it, this is a software hack to get into, mostly your Canon, a lot of your Canon 5D Mark IIs and 5D Mark IIIs. Magic Lantern made their own software, or firmware, that you load onto the camera that improves the camera's performance when shooting video, and gives you new options that the original manufacturer, Canon in this case, did not give you. If you are very serious about shooting video, I would look very closely at it. I've heard good things about it. It's interesting, that variable, to get actually more out of the Canon camera than Canon is offering you. And they might be pushing some things and so it potentially could cause some problems, but I have not heard of it. And so if you shoot a lot of video, it might be a good option to look into a little more closely. What are the pros and cons of an ultra-wide lens versus a wide-angle lens, stitched versus normal lens stitched? Okay, this is from David Hodgkns. And sounds like he's doing panorama stitching. And when you use an ultra-wide lens, like a 12 or a 16 millimeter lens, it's, I don't like to use the word distortion, it's a little bit misleading, but there is a stretching effect when you use a wide-angle lens. And when you try to take two wide-angle lenses and stretch them together, it's not the best way to do this. It's gonna be better if you can use the longest lens possible. And so most panorama stitching is gonna be really easily done and easily stitched together when you're shooting around 50 to 100 millimeters. And so that makes sense if you can do it. There are some environments that you just have to use a 24 millimeter lens, and so it's preferred to kinda get back a little bit, use a little bit narrower angle of view, and then stitch those together because of that stretching effect on a wide-angle lens. Could you please give us your advised setting shooting flat monochromatic drawings? Okay, they're using a Nikon D800. So if you're gonna photograph a painting or any sort of flat artwork, there's two things to think about. One is exposure and two is focusing. Now, first off, you should probably be on a tripod. You should have your drawing, or painting, or whatever it is, either hanging on the wall or on an easel. You could put it on the ground and shoot straight down, but it's a little bit easier if you don't have to put the camera right on top of it. There could be some problems in that case. And so I would lean it up against a wall and use a tripod. You would focus on it and it should be perpendicular to the sensor plane or the film plane in your camera. So make sure that your camera, or the painting, is not tilted that you're shooting it straight on. At that point, you don't need any depth of field, so you can use a middle aperture setting. Depends a little bit on what lens you have, but for a lot of people, that's gonna be around F8 or so. You don't need F22 'cause you don't need the depth of field and your lenses are not as sharp wide open at 2.8 or 1.4, or whatever they happen to be. So aperture at F8, the exposure can be whatever it needs to be for the given light. And so lighting is gonna be the next key and you probably don't want to shoot this under any sort of bright or harsh light. And so window light on a cloudy day would be a great way to shoot this. You want to try to illuminate it evenly. The professionals, if you have that option, you'd be in a studio with two or four lights on each side evenly illuminating it. But if you don't have that option, I would go next to a large window that's letting in a lot of even light to it, and try not to cast any shadows on it. And so that's how I would do it. I have a Nikon D and need to upgrade my Apple MacBook Pro. Which is the best Apple computer, laptop, or desktop for photography? So if you travel around a lot, it's obviously very nice to have a laptop so that you can take it with you. They have little card slots, at least most of 'em do these days, so that you can download straight into your computer and it's very, very convenient. But when you're looking at images, you usually want to see them on the biggest screen possible, and so most serious photographers are gonna have a desktop computer. Now you could always take a laptop and hook in a monitor. And so you just have it, you can just have a monitor at home, plug in your laptop to it, and your images will look great, and you'll be able to judge sharpness and composition a little bit more easily on the largest monitor. To be honest with you, pretty much all the Apple products are gonna be fine for working with photos. I do like ones that have a lot of connections as far as USB, thunder port, any Thunderbolt, any of the other connections, it's nice having that card slot. I know Apple introduced a new model, and I forget the names, because they're going crazy with the names, but they took out the card slot and a lot of the USB slots. And a lot of photographers have not jumped on that bandwagon yet 'cause you have to buy these dongles so that you can plug everything in. And so convenience is a big part of the issue, at least for me, but I think quality-wise, screen-wise, they're making some very good products. I was wondering if you know of a store that actually rents out cameras. I have a D500 on my mind, but since I'm not used to shooting manual, I'm a little scared to purchase and regret it. So that's understandable. When you make a big purchase, you want to be happy with the camera. I talk a lot about purchasing cameras, and it's not about finding the best camera, it's about finding the camera that's right for you. And rentals is a great way to do this and there's a number of places. And you can, of course, do a Google search. You'll probably end up at a place called Lens Rentals or Borrow Lenses, and despite the names, they rent cameras as well. And so they can actually ship 'em out, mail 'em to your house, you can keep them for a few days, or a week, or as long as you want, and it does cost a chunk of change. Now I'm not a big fan of renting if you know what you want and you just want to buy something because you could buy something brand-new and use it for two weeks, turn around and sell it, and it would be less expense than renting it for those two weeks. If you have the money to spend on that particular product. But for testing out two cameras or lenses side-by-side, it's a great way to do it. And it's kind of nice because in the world of photography, there's some really expensive cool gear that you can use. And rather than going out and dropping 10 grand on a 500 millimeter lens to shoot eagles that one weekend that eagles are in your neck of the woods, you rent the 500, you go out, it's like driving a Lamborghini for a weekend, and then you return it. And so I think it's a great experience and a great way for people to try out new gear. And so a little Google research, read some reviews, and you will find a good place. There are a number of stores. Here in Seattle we have Glazer's Camera that has gear right there for the professional and amateur. They can just walk in and rent it for the weekend and they're out. So it depends a little bit on where you live, but pretty much, no matter where you are, you can get it sent to you. I can afford a full frame camera, but is it okay if I get a crop sensor camera and the right lenses, and get in the path of learning? Do you strongly suggest to make the sacrifice and get the full frame one from the beginning? Cesar Quintero. Okay so this is the question that I get over and over and over again. As soon as people get into photography and they start learning what is what. The immediate question is, is should I go straight to full frame or should I take kind of the small step getting there. And I guess it depends a little bit on how sure you are about where you are going and what you are doing. For a student who was getting into photography and you didn't really know where they were gonna go, I would say definitely get the crop frame. The cameras are less money, the lenses are less money. Everything's smaller, lighter, easier to work with. For somebody who said they'd been working with it for a while and they know they want to get into a particular area, let's say portrait photography, and they knew that they wanted to go professional, they're gonna sell their work, and all the other professionals are using full frame camera, well then, yeah, you better get full frame right away because that's where you're gonna end up. I'm a big fan of taking steps as far as you need to go 'cause there's no sense buying a full frame camera if you're not really sure that that's where you're gonna go. It's a very tough question and there's actually another question that relates to this. I'm looking at the D500 and D750, they are now the same price, so the question now is full frame or DX? I know in your classes you compare them but help me decide. So the D500 and D750, D500 is a crop frame camera, D750 is a full frame camera and they may be the same price, but they are very different cameras. The D500 is a sports, action and wildlife camera. The D750 is kind of a mid-range full frame camera that is a very, very versatile camera. It's good for landscape photography, portrait photography. And so if you really are doing a lot of telephoto fast-action work, the D500 is gonna be the choice there because the focusing on that is tremendous. For more general purpose, then the D750 is probably gonna be the better choice. They're both highly rated, very good cameras, but as I said before, the choice between crop and full frame is, it's a hard choice for a lot of people. Most of the people that I encounter who are into photography have crop frame cameras. But when you look at the professionals, they pretty much are all using full frame sensors. And it's partly because it's a little bit like an arms race. When everybody else is shooting a full frame camera and you're trying to sell and compete against them, you need to have equivalent gear in that case. If you're doing photography just for yourself, it's probably more important that you have a camera and a system of equipment that fits your needs, that you can afford, that's something that you're willing to carry around and use on a regular basis and something that you really enjoy using. I believe the best camera is the camera that you are most happy using. Will you be doing one of your great tutorials for the OM-D E-M1 Mark II? Okay just in case you're wondering who selects these questions, I do, and I threw myself a softball here, okay. So Warren Davies, he was another one of my clients on another trip to Cuba, and yes, I am working on that class pretty much as we speak, it's nearing completion. It's an interesting camera because I did classes on the Nikon D5 and the D500, and their menu system was so long I had to change the layout of the class. Well it's gotten bigger again. It's the biggest, most sophisticated menu I have seen. And so here is a list of my upcoming classes. These are cameras that have just been introduced. I haven't really got my hands on all of these yet and so I do plan to have classes that address all of these. In some cases, they may be updates, they may be sole classes, but they're classes that you can look for in the future here at CreativeLive. And so I will continue to make them for all these major name brand cameras. All right, thank you very much for your questions. And if you would like to submit questions, you can do so once again at CreativeLive, the Creative Photography Challenge Group at Facebook. And you can also go to my Facebook page, which is John Greengo Photography, and you can just ask me there. I'll take a look in there. I may not answer it on Facebook, I may come back here and answer it. And so if you want to submit questions, go ahead and put 'em in there, and I will try to find them. All right, it is now time to welcome our guest on the show, Art Wolfe. He is a well-known photographer, internationally known for landscape, wildlife, culture, fine art, much more. He's won more awards, published more books than we have time for. Art, come on out, thank you very much. Hi John. It's great to have you here. It's great to be here. This is great to have you here now. You have a class. Now people might be watching this in the future, so there's probably a class already on the books that is already done, and what's this newest class that you have going on here? Well you know I'm not a gear head. Right. But I'm actually giving a talk on how I'm using technology to improve my work. Oh, nice! So it's everything from drawings, to the latest digital cameras, and focuses, and everything kind of geeky. And what's the name of this class? We have no name for it. But it is rolled into two other lectures, and one of which is called, Photography as Art, which I've been giving around the country in major cities and now secondary cities, and it's equating the abstract expressionists, mining their works for inspiration and moving your own work forward. And then there's a other class which is basically looking at how the world has changed, how small the world is, and how I traveled to all these different destinations working on multiple books to kinda amortize the cost of production and make a living from it. Nice, nice. So yeah. Here at CreativeLive, I've got to meet a lot of photographers that come in. And a lot of photographers, I gotta admit, have kind of come into their own in the last 10 years. And you've been going at this a little bit longer than 10 years. Some people don't know it, in one of your classes, I know you do a great visual storytelling from when you were a child and how you got into it. And so I don't want to tread on that exact same ground here, but there's a great story that goes into how you got into it. But for those who haven't seen it, take us back to when you first started to pay the bills in photography. What were you doing and how were you making money? So I was in college and I, well actually, going way back, I was painting pictures for my junior high teachers. They would bring me little black and white photos of the farmhouses that they grew up in, in the Midwest, before they emigrated to the coast. And I would take those little black and white photographs and render 'em into a watercolor painting. I'd matte 'em. I'd frame 'em. This is at the age around 13. And I would sell it to the teachers, and of course they would buy it for like $30. Beyond the money, it was such a great confidence boosting thing, that you could actually make money from something you were creating. Unconventional job. And my father was independent business man, small potatoes, but I grew up in that family, where I saw that he ran his own business, and so it was a natural evolution for me to get out of college, and I spent one year, one critical year for me, as a substitute art teacher which meant that I never taught art. It was chemistry, it was physics, it was orchestra, everything I was not qualified to teach. But it oddly enough, gave me the confidence to actually get in front of a group of people and actually carry on a conversation. Because prior to that I was really like the average person in the sense that the biggest fear, for most people, is actually speaking in front of an audience. So I got through that psychological barrier, being that one year art teacher. Yeah, building your skill set. But when you first started to shoot photos, and make money from it, what were you doing? Well, and in fact I go over it a little bit in my first lecture. My father gave me one of his old Speed Graphics that he used off an aircraft carrier in the South Pacific, and I used to take those big box cameras, the ones that you have to look at the image upside down, pull black cloth over. Use the little loop to focus. I mean it was the Ansel Adams model, and I was up on the North Cascades, you know, or Mt. Rainier taking black and white photos, and it coincided with the first year that North Face climbing shops opened in Seattle, and they wanted that work. And so I got those photos on their walls, which then gave me the thought to go to REI and Eddy Bauer and half a dozen other climbing-related shops and get work up there, and I started selling photos off the walls. And so I remember going to the old REI, you know the crickety floors. Oh, yeah. And they had the kinda like two sections and there was this ramp here. And I always remember there was these beautiful photos of owls and wild animals, and here's Art with this tripod. That was really weird 'cause I wasn't into photography, but the legs were really big. You know the first trip I went to Africa was to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. This was in November 1980, and I can remember the secondary part of that trip was to go out in the Serengeti, and I have some of the photos from back then. And the tripods were like 40 pounds. I mean, they were all metal and big and cumbersome. And, oh my god, we live in a great time now. Yeah. With lighter weight everything. Yeah. So you've been in the business for a long time. And I've seen that it. It's hard enough for many people just to kinda pick up photography and get good at it. It's another level to develop a successful business, and it's another level on top of that to keep on going for multiple decades. You've seen a lot of changes and revolutions in photography and society. What are some of the biggest revolutions and how have you rolled with the punches? What sort of changes have you made with the changing society and dynamics? Yeah, I think that for a lot of my colleagues, they would look back at the year 2008. I think, not so much the change in technology, but the change in economy. It was a year that was famous for the fact that Time Magazine bought five of their covers for a dollar apiece using Microstock. And it almost devastated the entire photo industry because, historically, in the last 30 years, we would find an agency that would represent our work. They would do the sales. We didn't have to get involved in the business end of it as long as we supplied the photos. But in 2008, of course, the world economy crashed, but at the same time, Microstock became much more known about, and the value of the individual photos just plummeted. And it followed by one calendar year the music industry. And so suddenly the value of a photo that we could sell, some people sold a single image for 50,000 or 100,000. Now, it was getting down to the point where it was pennies. And so I basically had to re-invent myself to fall back on my teaching certificate and start teaching more and broadly and taking people out on safari. But at the same time, I didn't completely let go of my love of books, and so I just had to create a different model of working on multiple books at one time, so I could afford to do books because, honestly, in today's world, a book publisher could never cover the cost of one trip on the international level let alone all the ones that would be necessary if you did a really broad reaching book. And so that's what I've been doing is balancing teaching one-day seminars around the country. Taking people on safari. Doing books. A little bit of TV. And selling raspberries on Sunday afternoons. So for the aspiring landscape photographer, just taking beautiful landscapes and submitting them to a stock agency is probably not going to get them too far. It isn't. And I often. Because so many people populate my classes that are successful women and men in business, but they always say the same thing, and I'm sure you get this, is like I just wanna justify the buying of my lens. And I say back to them, why do you need to make money from your work? If you've got money, you've got a successful life, use photography for heart and soul, for passion and happiness because the minute you try to make money from it, it becomes more serious and a lot of stress. So I think people should, I mean I'm not just saying it because I want a bigger audience. I'm saying it because I think creative people that are driven by passion live longer, happier lives. It's unequivocal. I'm very much in the same mindset. I think photography is a great activity. It's a great mindset. It's a great way to get you outside. It keeps you thinking about things differently. And so I got one question that I ask everybody in my interviews, and that is what percent of your working time is spent actually photographing? You know, I wouldn't know. I really don't know. I mean, can you estimate at 50 percent, five percent, 25 percent of working time? You've gotta think about all the time that you're Oh, my god. You're gonna depress me. working in the office. You know, I would say five to 10 percent. Okay. You know, if it's an international trip. I just came back from four weeks in Iceland, Finland, Norway, Germany, and the amount of time during those trips that I was actually taking pictures? Realistically, five percent. Okay, you're right in the ballpark with everyone else. And I guess the point I'm trying to make is if you wanna be a photographer, take Saturday, go out and shoot, and you're going to be shooting more than the professionals. Probably. Probably. Percentage-wise. But you know what's really interesting about that? You know, when I'm traveling, international travel's not a picnic. You know, you're cramped It's gettin' worse. into airplane. There's all these hula hoops you have to jump through going through airports. The minute I start working, it's like plugging in electrical current. It gives me energy. I'm virtually working, but that kind of work feeds the soul and the heart. And I don't wanna sound like an evangelist, but it's true. If you look at any of the painters that I studied, and I have brought into my lectures, all of 'em, unless they were like Jackson Pollack that ended his life pretty quick. Most of those painters really live long lives. In the Impressionist Period, Monet, Claude Monet, lived into his 90's when the average person lived to 48. And so what does that say about longevity, and all those Impressionist painters lived well into their 80s and early 90s. And so I think the creative process, and it, we're talking about photography, but it could be writing, it could be cooking, it could be dance, it could be Whatever gets you going. any of those things. Whatever gets you out of bed and really feeds the soul pursue at all cost. So you do a bunch of different things. You do public talks. You lead your own classes. You have workshops. What type of morning do you wake up the most excited for as far as what's going to happen that day? You're like, oh great. This is something I'm doing. Is it like a studio shot you're set up? Or you're on location? I've got a kind of a sub-group of photos that you're aware of called the Human Canvas. And I love doing those shoots simply because it's all in the studio. It's very different than the rest of my life. But what that speaks to is the fact that I'm creating something purely out of my imagination. You know, in fact you become vulnerable from that point of view because you could photograph a beautiful sunset over Puget Sound or Mt. Rainier or the Grand Canyon or whatever it is, and people can say, "Well, I don't quite like it." But you don't take it personally because that's the sunset. Yeah. But if they didn't like the Human Canvas, they're making a statement about what's in your coconut. Because you created everything. Yeah. Exactly. And so I was reluctant and a little apprehensive for introducing the work. But it has gotten an audience, and people do like it because I'm taking the human form, and I'm putting people into clay and baking them, or hand painting all sorts of elaborate designs over it. And the collective then is showing people other humans in a very different light. And invariably and always, people are like really, you didn't create that through a computer? No I just. All the imperfections of my brush stroke, which is getting even lazier is there. And people love that organic, real part of photography. The wanna know you didn't create that on a computer, but it was really the old fashioned way of painting. It means something. And it's kind of like in movies where when you hear they actually built a whole city for this versus oh, it's all CGI. Exactly. Even though it may look the same on the screen, emotionally, when you watch it, you take it in differently. That's exactly the point. So, now let's see. Where was I gonna go with this? I don't know. Welcome to my age. Okay, no. I had somebody on Facebook wanted me to ask a question. And I've kind of noticed a trend in photographers. When they start, people just kinda wanna take pictures of their vacations and their babies. And then they kinda wanna take pictures of things that they see. And they get better and better at that, but there's a kind of a limit of how good of things that they can see. So they start creating their own things. And so I have found that there's these kind of two separate categories of photographers. And you are one of best at working in both worlds. And one is having a really good eye for seeing something, because by the way, just in case people at home didn't know, this is my former boss here. I used to work with Art when we were doing it. You were doing the TV show Travels to the Edge, and so I've seen Art working in the streets and in the studios and everywhere else. And you've got a fantastic eye. Thank you. Thank you. I know there was times where we were in the van. You would stop the van, and you would get out with your camera, and I'm like, "What is this?" Because I don't see it. I don't see it. Every once in a while. And you would pick up great things. And so you have a great eye for picking those up, but you're also really good at creating something that is just like I would never have thought of that in a million years. And there are people who work in the studios that are really good at creating things, but if you take them up to Mt. Rainier, they will just be completely lost, figuratively. Yeah. How do you see those two different worlds? And do they bridge? Tell me about that. You know, there's a lot of things. Most things I can't do very well. Seriously. But when it comes to compartmentalizing ideas or book projects at one time, and I'll speak to that in my class, is that I'm pretty good at keeping bodies of work separate. So I can look at organizing. You know, I can be walking down a street in a back village in India, for instance, and see somebody that was amazing in their eyes, or in their wardrobe that they were wearing, and then I could be walking for the next five minutes taking pictures and see this stunning wall, which would be a perfect complementary color to the person's wardrobe. And I'll go back and find that person and drag 'em and put 'em in front of that wall. Because I have a really good memory for potential shots and you know, and how do we call this? You know, when you're taking different elements and you're combining them into a very stylized image. It almost borders on the commercial. Well, in fact, it does. And so I like shooting candid shots, but I also love, and this comes from my background as a painter and art. You know, I graduated from the University of Washington with degrees in art and art education. But the art classes were five years of graphic design and painting and sculpture and all those kind of things, and so I have that all ready to pull out of my memory when I see something that I could pull this and that and create something. And I have no apologies for that. It's just a different genre. Well, you haven't labeled yourself as a photojournalist that's documenting life as it stands today Exactly. in any particular location. No, in fact, I really wanna play on the word that I am an artist, and that I have always seen myself as an artist. I never was a documentarian to the purest sense. Never was a biologist. So I don't get caught up in labels like that. I was under the guise of being an artist. You know, you can open up the field. And so, yeah, I shoot a lot of candid shots. I shoot a lot of natural history. You know, early on I was a wildlife photographer. That's all people knew of my work, but in my brain I was a much broader interest. And as I've aged, and as a perfect parallel to a lot of the artists I studied, all of them, as they got older became much more abstract and broader in their work. And so I'm just following suit. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good message for everybody at home is you may just wanna put yourself in one category, but I think having a good range. It's kind of like a singer who can sing a lot of different notes. If you're a photographer that can deal with a lot of different situations, it's just gonna open you up. Well, in fact, I bring that up in my lecture where the last part is called Photography as Art, and I take people. You've been to Havana a couple of times. In the back alleys of Havana or Chinatown in Bangkok, or wherever it may be, we're navigating the dregs of society, the abandoned buildings, the abandoned cars, and we're finding amazing art within. And it's a great metaphor to find birth and renewal in what people have left on the street is a great metaphor. And it's very uplifting because I know, like, I've seen some photographs of yours that look like beautiful abstract paintings. You're like, oh, it's a rusted out car. And it's like if you have the mindset of hey, there's art potentially anywhere. And there's something beautiful and I can take a photograph of it. I mean, you don't hear about photographers like yourself falling asleep while they're out shooting. Well, you know. You're engaged. And it is really cool to offer that to people because not everybody can be flying around the world with a project like this, but they can walk down their own street, and if their mind and their eye is open, they can fill their whole afternoon within a block of where they live. Yeah. They just have to have that opening in their brain and we try to open that. This is taken by Art Wolfe. Do you remember taking that photo? I do. We were eating a lot of sand that day. It was out there in the desert north of Timbuktu, of all places. That's right. Mali. The sand was blowing so firmly right on that first 12 inches of the ground, so yeah. We were emptying sand in Seattle from our boots three weeks later. But it was like Lawrence of Arabia with a camera. And that's what I was thinkin' when I saw you. And so for those of you watching, the funny backstory is I'm shooting a picture. This is a picture of me by Art Wolfe. I'm shooting a picture of Art that Art has used on his web pages Exactly. in promoting his classes. And so let me just tell you a little bit of the backstory. Kind of the significance for me. When I was in college, and I was getting my degree in photography, I had my wall of inspiration, you might say. I put posters up of Nikon lenses, and I had this photo from National Geographic that had two photographers with these really long lenses sitting on a sand dune with sand blowing over them, and I thought, "I would love to be able to do that." That would be cool. Yeah, that would be really cool. All right, so thank you very much for providing this photo for this class. Just wanted to thank you in public in front of everyone. I want to get to your photos real quick, but there's one question I wanna just touch on because we worked on the TV show, Travels to the Edge. Your Travels to the Edge. You have a couple of kind of new episodes with Tales by Light. It's Tales by Light. And it was filmed by an Australian-based film company, and we went to New Guinea, we went to Africa, we went to Alaska, and Seattle. And we had a great time. And they're really good. I watched them on Netflix. Netflix original series. It was produced and funded by National Geographic Australia and Canon Australia. But it was a great group of people to work with as was our crew Travels to the Edge, which by the way, you may not know, still is broadcast in 70 countries around the world, and in 80 percent of the market that it was first introduced, well over 11 years ago. Every once in a while, I have somebody who says they saw me on the Behind the Scenes Specials. You know, in the Age of TV, you never die. (laughter) You always look good from back then. Exactly. And I actually remember you on TV back in the 90s doing a safari special with special guests. Well, you know, it's really interesting that you brought that up because I was on a plane recently, and I got this thing in my mind. My god, if I look back at the TV productions I've been involved in, they're just going to disappear in the ether, so I had my staff round up everything that I've ever been on and we've now transferred it to a digital file, and I'm going to produce a speaker's series on the life. The life that I've lived is fairly interesting. Yeah. And so, yeah, I had this show called Safari, where I took John Denver up to Alaska and we're sneaking up on bears. I took Robert Duvall to South Africa and we were sneaking up on rhinos. Peter Strauss with orcas, and the litany goes on. That's funny. I looked right out of the Village People. Big old mustache, long hair. You know, the whole nine yards. I looked like the Village People. So I wanna go with that is that we've seen this convergence of photo and video. And there's been a number of photographers that have just like picked up video, and they've like okay, I'm going to become a filmmaker. And you've used film to kind of promote what you do, That's right. and talk about what you do, but I don't know that you shoot that much video. Could you talk for a moment about photo versus video for you? Yeah, I mean, I still think there's a huge amount of work I could do on capturing a single, salient, emotionally impactful image. I don't feel like I can let go of that and start a whole new career shooting video, which the collective motion can be very inspiring. In fact, it's mesmerizing. Even just watching a dew drop, you know, fall off a leaf. I'm totally in the moment watching that, but I'm still so hard wired to shoot stills that I forget that I have really great capacity to shoot video. In fact, in my lecture I'm gonna show where I have been using video. And I've been more active as of late shooting video that could be incorporated into any of the talks that we give as a interlude, or to give one more layer in our communication. You're a great presenter and a communicator. You're very polished. Thank you. And so that combination of shooting stills, communicating to an audience. I've become a pretty good speaker. Really? And to be able to use inspiring photos, but also lace it with video is more impactful, more in depth, and that's the future. Yeah, the modern age kind of demands that extra level. Exactly. I appreciate that still philosophy 'cause that's kinda how I think as well. Yeah. All right, so you brought 10 images, and let's go ahead and take a look at 10 images from Art. Okay. So let's take a look at the first one now. Where was this shot at? Oh, my god. I'll never forget this. 'Cause it looks a little like Yellowstone. You got steam vents or something there. Yeah, this was shot at 16,000 feet. Oh, my gosh. In Northern Chile in the Atacama Desert. Wow. You took a bicycle ride down that way. I was down through Chile in the Atacama, yes. So it was freezing cold. It was three in the morning. And so and this was with a 1 DX Mark II. And it's part of the lecture on technology. I mean, star shots, as you know were just a thought five, six years ago, where you didn't have the high ISO's that enabled one to shoot a really sharp shot freezing the motion of the stars. And so this not only got the stars, the Milky Way rising above and beyond the geysers, but the geysers themselves. Did you add any light to the geysers? No. Or is that just the natural star light. That's the natural star light. Was there a moon out that night? Do you recall? Ahhh, I'm too old to remember whether there was a. No. It was a totally moonless night. Usually when you get that good of stars, usually there's no moon. Yeah. But it's amazing at how much it's picking up those steam vents on there. Oh, I know it. 'Cause that looks really good. All right, next up. I'm guessing Iceland. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's really interesting to me, John, when I started going to Iceland, you rode your bicycle around it. Those kind of photos were kind of new and fresh to everybody. And now people on my block go, "Oh, yeah. "I went to Iceland last year." Iceland's become the hot place to go. Well, not only that, but I think a big part of it is where we took the TV show. Because a year or two after the TV show started being broadcast all through Europe and Asia, whether it was Mongolia or Myanmar. Well, we didn't go to Myanmar with that show, but Iceland definitely it underwent a huge influx of tourists. I feel a little responsible for it, but then there's been a lot of work. It's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. So, yeah. This is where the icebergs come out of a lagoon and float around on the ocean's edge for a day or two before they float off and disappear. But it was an intentionally longer exposure, and so I like that depth that you create through the sharp and soft focus. Yeah, I love that. The analogy I use in my class is it's kind of like food. You got something soft and you got something crunchy in there and it's kind of nice to have that mixture. If that iceberg closest to the camera was not as perfectly sharp as it is, it loses everything. Yeah. Exactly. The color and the sharpness of that just really hold you there with that. Even the clouds moving there. Beautiful image. Thank you. All right, so you gotta tell the backstory. What's going on here because this is the type of shot people will look at like, "Could you imagine what the photographer's thinking "at that point." You know, I take tours up to Alaska every year. And I put 'em in front of bears that are running and chasing down salmon. There's actually salmon between me and you can actually see a little bit of pink under the water in the foreground and part of a tail. But yeah, it creates the illusion that the bear is about to kill you, but in fact, you are safe and these bears actually are so chilled out by being around people, and I think the fact that for over a hundred years, fly fishermen have been working these rivers in the backcountry of Katmai, that they have reconciled what humans are. We're not going away. They're not going away. And there's this peace that occurs between these great amazing bears and humans in close proximity. So that's what's going on there. But I remember I took a tour. I had like five women from the Midwest. They didn't know each other. They just all, unlikely, signed up at the same time, and they've never been around a bear. And by the end of the tour, they were so nonchalant and casual, but they got great shots. All right, I know some people at home probably have a few technical questions. Do you remember what sort of lens you had on? Yeah, this particular one was a two to 400. I was using ISO of about 4000. Out in the daytime? Yeah. Out in the daytime. ISO 4000 and a good depth of field and a frozen moment in time. Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you. All right. This was shot last year on the shores of Lake Natron on the border of Tanzania and Kenya. I love the color. I mean, it's so unlikely occurring that pink in nature. The palate of pink and blue with the blue background is perfect. Yeah. You know, Planet Earth II is coming out, and they have a video shot that's very similar that has a group of these, but it makes a beautiful still. And then these are big birds. I mean, they would be around four feet to five feet tall. And the males are substantially larger than the females as you can see in this shot. But it was just that beautiful pink and blue pastel colors that really, ah, and just perfect light. And I know most people who were there, if they were there, they would just go down to the water and take a shot. But it looks like you got a little bit low to the water. Yeah, I was laying on my belly in the mud and the guano to get the shot. I knew I could go back and take a shower and wash my clothes, but it was well worth it to get slightly lower. Yeah, 'cause you got their beaks above that horizon line in the background. They really stand out. You are such a good studier. I just want people to know how much work you go through on these sorts of shots 'cause they seem real easy in some cases. Speaking of which, this one took eight years to get because it was eight years from the time I realized I wanted to go to the Congo before it was safe enough to go there, and once the insurgency that was existing in Eastern Congo died down and they signed some treaties, I went. And I went and I drove from Rwanda into the Congo, and then I had pre-arranged a helicopter pilot to come in from Nairobi, Kenya. He flew across Kenya, across Rwanda, landed right where he had to land, picked myself up and another friend of mine, flew us up to the crater rim, dropped us off. We over-nighted on the crater rim, and photographed the world's largest crater lake. And I think it epitomizes the doggedness that one has to have if you see a photo that you want, you will figure out how to get the shot. Whether it's economically feasible or not, once you got in your brain, you do it. Well, I have a little thing in my class where I ask how serious are you about photography? Level One is rolling down the window of the car. You know, cause (mumbles). Okay? And Level Ten is flying all the way around the world to get a single shot. Exactly. We know that you're at a Level Ten. All right. This looks like California. I think I know where this is at. Yeah. This is right west of Monterey on the coast. And it's part of my technology where I'm now using filters to blur the motion. ND filters and this is actually. This particular photo exemplifies the fact that, historically, you'd have to wait til late in the day, to get the shot, but now we can get these in the middle of the day with a 10 stop filter. Ah, hah. So that's part of the technology. Convenience. Yeah, exactly. Nice, nice. And I went down to Mexico and did a story on Day of the Dead, which is in Patzcuaro, Mexico. It's in a tiny mountain town about an hour's flight southwest of Mexico City, and in a lake in that district is an island where Day of the Dead, which is a big celebration of past ancestors is held on November first, and out on the boat towards the island, these fishermen came in. Beautiful butterfly nets. And I also use this as an example of how I'm doing virtually an Ansel Adams. You know, using Lightroom and playing with curves and all those kind of things, filters to achieve something that's way more dramatic than the original color capture. Yeah, 'cause I was gonna say this is your first black and white of this series. Yeah. I was wondering, how much does black and white play into what you do? More and more and more. You know, we live in a time now, as I keep on telling people, it's a great time to be a photographer because we got the technology, we got the internet, where you could have the world's biggest gallery on your site if you put the energy in it. And you can transform a color image into a black and white, and then further work on it in Lightroom, or other post production, what are we calling it? Software. Software. Thank you. (laughter) Well, I always hesitate when you do like. You do a Porky Pig here. At any rate. So yeah, it's part of the way forward. And black and white photos can augment a color spread in a book and be really poignant, so it can be a design element that we all use. What I think is interesting is that, from one point of view, it's just a Photoshop trick. But it's a big part of our photographic history. Yeah. And so it plays in well. Well you know, people have this belief that Ansel Adams was such a purest, you know, But, boy, if he had lived in today's world, he would just go to town with the digital. Yeah. All right. So I think we're back in Washington. Yeah. Is this one of mine? (laughter) I don't think that's in my lecture, but I know where it is. I mean, when I teach workshops, I take people out to the Washington coast. And I'll be doing a workshop out in the Olympics Oh, nice. in the end of April. And so I love going out there for myself, but I love to take people from all over the country, and share what's so great about living here in the Pacific Northwest. I've worked a few of those workshops. They are a lot of fun. They are a lot of fun. That's a nice night there. Nice night. Yeah. And this is a look back. In one of my lectures, I talk about how the world is a dynamic place. That cultures are changing. Landscapes are changing. For good or bad, it's changing, and so I photographed this particular tribe of people in the mountains of New Guinea 25 years ago. And they had a very simple decor on their bodies, and I went to the village, and now when they are adorning themselves during ceremonial occasions, look what they've become. They've become the Skeleton People. So I had them climb these bamboo trees and shoot it in a different way than maybe I would have when I was younger. Well, I don't think you would have been able to shoot this without some sort of light 'cause you're shooting into the light, but you still have good light on their faces. Exactly. And so technology definitely helping out there. Absolutely. Nice. And before you even say anything, I look at this and I just like, uhh. Because one of the things that I love is a beautiful color gradation, and that blue and that orange almost feels like the blue and orange slider that you play with in Lightroom. But very nice moment here. Oh, my god. You know just moments before, the mountain was completely obscured by the clouds, and I've got a class up there, and you know, they've never been up to the Reflection Lakes at Mt. Rainier, and I kept on saying, "If that mountain comes here, "you are gonna have the best sunrise ever." Yeah. And it happened. And it was such a beautiful moment. And, you know, 10 times out of 11 you're up there and it's just kind of flat or the wind picks up, but on that particular morning, and it was about two years ago, it was like, you guys, this is perfect. Shoot this. Shoot it. And I was just yelling out all the things I was doing with the camera so that they would replicate it. But, yeah, it was a great morning. Again, it's my beloved Mt. Rainier. You grow up in Seattle. It's our mountain. Is it not? And you have been there to shoot, I'm sure, a hundred times. And it's placing your bets. You go up there and it's not good, it's not good. But you're waiting for that one because you know when you get that one, you forget about all those other ones. Yeah, and then we have the technology to drop in the filter and even out the exposure and, yeah, it's perfect. Yeah. Nice. And that is our 10 images, and if you're thinking about learning more from Art, he's got three classes, at least as of the recording of this. Yes. And that's actually the title image for your newest class, Photography as Art. So I have gone on to the work page, student work page of the Fundamentals of Photography class, and that's where I'm grabbing these pictures from. And I do tend to prefer images with people's names on them. So this is Frank Bergdoll. And so Art, I'll mention something and then you can chime in with whatever you think. This looks like a nice beach, but what do you think about the time of day? Yeah, it's a little flat. It's a little high. This person, Frank, you gotta work a little later in the day or get a little earlier up because when the sun is pretty much directly over it casts a fairly abrupt light, a harsh light on it. And subjects like this, where the continent meets the sea I think would be even better with a little softer light. Yeah, 'cause if you look at those shadows, they are just dead black. There's nothing there. And so that's that harsh light that we're talking about. I think it's a place worthy of exploring at different times. Yeah. And I think the other thing is, you know, I have this belief that everybody's born, they go to the bathroom, they eat food, they go to the bathroom, they get a camera, and they put the horizon right down the middle. And so I think that, you know, if we can avoid putting the horizon down the middle, we can create more depth in the image. But that will come as Frank photographs more and more. So we all start someplace and we move someplace else, and so this one I thought was interesting. There's a nice kind of palate to the background, but it's nice, but it's a little confusing because there are some lines that are. It's a mixture. There are some good elements in here with some confusing ones. Yeah, I would simply crop this image a little bit from the top and to the right. You could go ahead and do it. Because, yeah, the lines are critical in the image because I love the disruption of the lines right behind that what looks like a tri-colored heron. I'm not entirely sure what kind of heron that is, Yeah. but yeah, by just mitigating a little bit of those lines, minimizing the amount in that frame, it gives greater emphasis to the heron, but it also shows the sharp lines being obscured or distorted by the movement of the bird and I like that element. Nice. Yeah. I think that's an improvement there. Wouldn't you like to have Art Wolfe just reviewing all of your images all of the time. I think you have a new on-line service there. There you go. So one of the things I talk about. Well, you talked about the horizon straight down the middle, but the other one that just drives my opinion of hell is looking at uneven photographs in a dentist's office. I see this from time to time and it drives me nuts. And so first off, get that horizon level. Now, what do you think they should have done? Should they have pointed the camera more up or more down? What would you have done if you were there with your camera? You know, if I was there, and now I have to put my glasses on. Oh oh. Art's taking the computer. Watch out! I'm going to the crop. And I'm going to open the crop. He knows what he's doing, folks. And I'm going to make it a vertical because I want that diagonal line in the foreground to become more dominant. Oh, okay. And I think by doing that, and closing this, and I think it's a sharp enough image that I'm just playing with space. And, you know, almost everybody shoots big wide horizons as horizontals, but I think that diagonal of line on the shore gives me license to do that. And I think that improves that image. Yeah. And definitely gets that horizon out of the middle. And there's a reason that we got along so well is that we are bothered by the same things. Always correcting the horizon, but you know, as much as I'm a stickler about that, I never get it right myself. Neither do I. So I always correct it Lightroom just as you've done it. Yeah, yeah. And so, yeah. Making that vertical doesn't make you think differently. That's great. All right. Next one, here. Now this actually by somebody we both know, Emily Wilson. And I love that background. And I love a good, clean, colorful background, and I've got a few suggestions myself. Okay, let's hear yours. So I would like to see a little bit more detail in that robe, so I'm gonna raise the shadows. If we go too far, you get into a little too much noise, but I wanna see a little bit more in the shadows there. That little upper left part is just kinda breaking the background for me a little bit, so I'm gonna bring that in just a little bit, and I don't have the room to kinda move it left and right as I might like to, but one other little thing that I will do with people photographs like this is I will go down to effects, and I will add a vignette. Now, obviously, that's too much. And my rule of thumb is go until it's like, okay, that is way too far, John. And so you see I went 42. So now I'm gonna back off and do about one-third of that. And I can't do that math in my head right now, but somewhere right about here, and I'm darkening the corners just a little bit, so that it keeps your eye into the photograph. And I might, if I was gonna work on this just a little bit more, just actually I want to get it out of that frame right there. Just a little less floor space right there. And so just cleaned it up just a little bit. Wanted to see a little bit more in the shadows there. So my only critique on Emily's photo is not really after the fact that she shot it is before your would have shot that, Emily, is the next time. The person, obviously, is facing slightly to the right. I would have moved my self, my body to the right, so that I could put that background behind her more. I like that area. So you mean to the left. Yeah. So I'm moving right to put the subject to the left, and put a little more space in front of where they're looking and therefore getting the body out of the middle. Yeah. When the subject, like this person is in the middle, it's analogous to having the horizon in the middle. Okay, let's move on. All right. We only have a few images here. And so we're up at Glacier Park. Now, I wanted to ask you about this one. I included this one because I know you're here. When you get that sunrise just hitting that one ridge, should the shot be taken before it hits there, or should you wait til you kinda get the whole thing? Yeah. What do you think about just having that sliver there? Yeah, I would have preferred just to have that black and white or dark and light. I think that one slice of orange is making both of our attentions going there. I love this composition. What I would do with this is just simply make it more of a panoramic. I would just open it up. And there's about five or six different panoramic profiles, one of which, and you can find them down here, if it was 16 by nine. That's probably too tight, but 16 by nine actually now takes the horizon out of the middle. I love where the rocks are in relationship to the distant mountains and the reflections. And then, I would just drop in a neutral density filter here to kind of take down a little bit of the brightness on that top. Because that color really draws your attention. The main thing there is it gets the horizon out of the middle. It puts greater emphasis on the rocks in the foreground. It's a beautiful image. And so there's a couple here that are actually very similar, so we got two trees here, and what do you think about the kind of overexposed sun? That's kind of hard to deal with. That is, you know, we have 'em in our own images. It's a beautiful shot, but yeah, maybe I would have moved left and had the trunk of the tree kind of obscure the brightest part of the sun. And maybe they've done that, but there's still, you know, with clouds, the brightness of the sun is kind of spread out into a larger area and that may be part of the issue. But it's a still a very nice shot. So getting potentially, I think maybe, a little closer to the tree. Get that tree bigger and then the clouds on the top. I don't like the way the one on kinda the top left is getting clipped. Yep. And so maybe include that, and so, ahhh. Let's see. What did I just lose? Right there. So we want to get to the next image, which is kind of a similar image, but they backed off. Now, were they more or less successful here. You know what? Are these worked on images? Do you know? I don't know. 'Cause I would see. By just bringing on the highlights. Yeah. Opening up the shadows. And I think the composition, given all the things we've said about horizon, I think the horizon is nice. It's a big, open space. Just taking down the highlights a little bit works on that, and let's go to the next one. Oh, that's a really nice shot of the eagle. And these are a challenge to get sharp. Yeah. And so, at first, when you get your first sharp photograph, you're just happy with it. Yeah. So that, I mean, that beats the first 10 years of my eagle shooting. Right there. (laughter) Thanks a lot. And we'll see you next time around on the show.