Archive for category Landscape

Photo Essay: Old Dominion Hounds (November 27, 2010)

This photo essay is posted at KLM Images.

Twist & turn

Zigzag

The eye of the viewer can be guided by actual lines in an image, or by implied ones.

These two riders are stacked up on a slanted hillside watching hunting in the lower field.  Your eye naturally follows them down starting at the rump of the near horse and then reversing at the lower one.  It’s possible the horses are standing still, but the placement of the legs and movement of the tails creates doubt, so you follow the potential movement left and then right, instead of just left along the hillside and out, as you might if the far rider were absent. Read the rest of this entry »

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Photo Essay: Rappahannock Hunt (December 11, 2010)

This photo essay is posted at KLM Images.

Landscapes

Stacked ridges ending in the Blue Ridge (HDR)

I am far from satisfied with my skill at capturing landscapes and am constantly experimenting for better results.

In this essay, I post-processed some of the images for high-dynamic range (HDR) contrast, so let’s look at the results.

Ordinary cameras are more limited in their ability to respond to contrast than the human eye.  We see very well in both dim light and blazing sunshine, but for a camera we must choose those conditions in our settings or be disappointed.  Depending on the settings, the camera decides to set the exposure to maximize the overall utility of the resulting image, but this reduces the range of absolute darkness and absolute brightness compared to our own vision.  The theory behind HDR is to take multiple versions of the same image with different exposure settings, then blend those together so that the overall exposure is much broader than the camera can capture on its own, and closer to what we actually see. Read the rest of this entry »

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Photo Essay: Old Dominion Hounds (September 25, 2010)

The photo essay is posted at KLM Images.

The scale of mountains

It's a blue wall, but is it big?

One of the pleasures of living in the Piedmont area of Virginia is the constant presence of the Blue Ridge Mountain.  It’s not a high ridge in this part of Virginia, but it is unavoidable.  Though I see the ridge constantly in hunting situations, I find it a challenge to render well in photos.  Often it is in silhouette because of the time of day or just simply flattened by the lens and made insignificant.

It’s a cliché that a landscape can often benefit by objects in the foreground, either to serve as a point of interest or to provide scale.  In the second shot, I was standing lower than the stable, which was on raised ground.  Without the stable (and the fence) in the picture to provide perspective, it would not be clear that I was looking up at the mountain. Read the rest of this entry »

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Photo Essay: Old Dominion Hounds (September 4, 2010)

The photo essay is posted at KLM Images.

Can you spot the camouflaged hound leaning on the horse?

Lovely hounds

This was the first day of cubbing for the Old Dominion Hounds.

As sometimes happens, all the hunting activity took place off-stage, from the perspective of the car-followers.  We got to watch them leave and return, and in-between there was much appreciation of the lovely scenery and occasional faint echoes of hounds and horn.

Read the rest of this entry »

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