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Greetings,
I recently returned from a workshop in Death Valley co-led by my old friend Cliff Zenor. We hadn’t seen each other since….a while. But it was like no time had passed at all. We had a great time, a great group, and great conditions, even if the clouds were too thick when they finally decided to show up. Stupid clouds.
During this workshop I was shooting a lot with a telephoto lens and to achieve sharp focus throughout some images I needed to take several shots with blending them for focus in mind. I write about that toward the end of this newsletter. So don’t leave before the credits role!
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Death Valley workshop report
Cliff Zenor and I, along with five intrepid souls, had a wonderful time exploring and photographing Death Valley. It is a fantastic place for graphic landscapes, abstracts, big skies and varying color. And in the winter, it sure was a lot warmer and drier than northwest Washington.
Visit my blog post for a few more pictures.
I’m hoping to go back in the not too distant future. If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll put you on the early notify list for any workshop that gets planned.
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Olympic National Park in the spring
 I began visiting Olympic National Park as a kid. About 35 years ago I started backpacking in the park, drawn there by images I’d seen in magazines by people like Art Wolfe, Pat O’Hara, and Ross Hamilton.
And my backpacking adventures led directly to what I’m doing now.
My spring Olympic National Park photo workshop is coming up soon and I still have space available. Don’t miss out on one of the best times to be in the park.
Spring is one of my favorite times to visit Olympic National Park. The streams and waterfalls will be full, the moss will be green, and the forest lush. We'll photograph falls and streams, Lake Crescent and forests, moss and ferns and, perhaps, even some elk. And we’ll be visiting the beaches for some seascapes and sunsets.
The cutoff date for the hotel we’re using is April 1. So if you’re thinking about joining us, just know that there may not be any rooms available at our hotel after that date.
Take a look at my May Olympic workshop page for more details and some pictures of what we might expect to see.
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Bandon & Palouse
There are also spaces available in the Bandon, OR and Palouse workshops.
Hotel cutoff for Bandon is April 20 and for Palouse is April 14. The hotel in the Palouse is full every night in June so if you want a spot, be sure to act before that cutoff date.
Head on over to my Workshops site for more info.
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Sitka openings
And I still have two openings for my the first of my two scheduled Sitka tours. These tours are centered around photographing humpback whale and other seafaring critters (otters, seals, sea lions birds, fishing boats). We’ll also spend time exploring Sitka and the surrounding area. And probably a raptor photo session too....
For more info, take a look at my Sitka page.
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Zion
I’m just about ready to post a fall Zion National Park photo tour. Just a few things to button up. The dates will be October 28 – November 1 and it will be based out of Springdale, UT.
I already have a few people on the early notify list, which will go out about a week or so before a general announcement that I’ll make. If you’d like to be added, or just want to make sure you’re on the list, just reply to this email and let me know you want to go to Zion!
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Blending for focus
 One way to achieve sharp focus from the front to back of a landscape image is to use hyperfocal focusing. This usually works well with wide angle landscape images as long as your foreground isn’t too close. Back in the film days, one got accustomed to knowing just how close one could get to a foreground and still get sharpness from the nearest element to whatever was in the distance.
And with wide angle lenses, that distance was almost always close enough to create dynamic landscapes.
But with lenses much longer than, say, 28mm or so, you often can’t get close enough to the foreground to create those landscape images with a dynamic in-your-face foreground and still achieve sharpness in the background.
And with normal or telephoto lenses, it’s nearly impossible to get an image with a sharp, relatively close foreground and a sharp background. Not in one shot anyway, you usually end up sacrificing sharpness in the background. You can often get "good enough" by focusing partway through the frame and using a small aperture opening like f/16 or f/22. (beware of the one-third of the way myth)
These days, we can create a series of images focused at different points in the same scene and blend them into one image that has focus throughout. You can do this with Photoshop or one of the stand-alone programs specifically meant for the task (Helicon Focus or Zerene Stacker).
Lately, all the blends I’ve done have been in Photoshop. And Photoshop has been doing a great job with them.
The key, I believe, is to take enough photos that are focused at different points through the images: give the software enough to work with. I figure, the more points the better. And that will depend on the composition. The picture above was made from blending eight images shot at 72mm and f/11 (for a bit of depth of field in each), focusing on the footprints in about three places and then some of the distinctive ridge lines.
The camera was, of course, mounted on a sturdy tripod.
In Lightroom I didn’t do too much, just applied lens corrections and dust removal (applied to one image then synchronized to the rest).
The blending was done in Photoshop. Here’s a tutorial I wrote way back in thePhotoshop CS5 days (2012) but nothing has changed in the current version of Photoshop, except maybe that the blending code is better than it was back then.
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It's nearly spring
I can tell spring is nearly here by all the stuff coming up in the yard and the buds on the plum tree. Winter isn't quite done with us though. Not yet.
That means it's almost time for flowers and more yard projects! Like this flower box I built to replace an old, falling apart box.
But I still (yes, still) need to finish up going through last year's images. So, off to that project.
Be sure to let me know if you're interested in Zion or any of my other trips!
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