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Block UserPhoto Blog: Outdoor Portraits
“Capturing Alaska”
with Wayde Carroll
Outdoor Portraits
Lately I’ve been taking a lot of outdoor portraits for various reasons and I thought I’d go over a few relatively simple techniques that can help to make nice “people” photos.
Most of us visit the outdoors with friends and loved ones and invariably we end up taking the obligatory “Look, I was here!” photo. How many times have you seen the grand scenic with this speck in it and your friend claims “That’s me!” and how often do you see the uninspiring image of someone standing in the exact center of the composition? Mmm Hmm..
Well, let’s work on that!
I know this is "Capturing Alaska" and most of these images are from California,but these techniques will work anywhere!
The first thing I always look for is a great background that will give you a sense of the place you’re so happy to be. You can give a feel for a place just by showing a small portion of it. You don’t have to show the entire grand canyon to show you were there. Take the beautiful landscape shot, but for your portrait search for something that represents the scene.
The next thing I look at is the lighting. Lightly overcast days are great because the sky acts as a giant softbox and you have nice even lighting everywhere. The light just before sunrise and just after sunset is beautiful. You can get a nice soft, warm, light and your subjects aren’t squinting.
Obviously we can’t always wait around for the perfect time of day so the next thing I look for is open shade. If my background is in shade, that’s great. Then all the light is even. I’ll usually add some fill-flash to my subjects to warm up the skin tones and put a highlight in their eyes. If you can get your subject in the shade but your background is in bright sunlight, it takes more effort but you can still get a nice photo. In this case you need to set your exposure for the background and add light, via on-camera flash, external flash, or reflector, to bring up the exposure on your subjects. An off- camera flash cord works well here because you get a more interesting lighting when the flash is up and to one side. A direct flash creates a very flat look.
The most dreaded scenario is having direct, mid-day sunlight straight overhead creating deep shadows in the eye sockets and causing serious squints. You can add fill-flash but the squints remain. If everyone insists on wearing their sungl**** then no worries, shoot away!
Then I think about composition. The dead center of your frame is usually (though not always) the least interesting position for your subject. Experiment with different compositions and see what excites you.
Above are four recent portraits. The top was taken here in Alaska but the others were taken in California last week. Spring has sprung her but we haven’t caught up to the Outside yet!
The first image was taken at Kincaid Park. We don’t have much greenery yet but I thought we could still get a nice outdoor feel by placing the couple amongst the aspen trunks. I had the couple meet me just before sunset so I could get a little highlight from the sun but still have nice even shade to work in. They really wanted an outdoor photo so I made sure to make them part of the environment. This was taken with natural light, no flash.
The second image is from a wedding in Auburn, California. I had taken several nice fill-flash photos with this background earlier but just before sunset I noticed a beautiful golden glow and rushed to grab the bride and groom and get this photo. This is natural light as well. It’s my favorite photo of the day. It pays to keep an eye on the light and take advantage of it!
The third image was taken in the American River Canyon in the early morning, just outside of Auburn, California. This couple also wanted to be photographed in the outdoors. I scouted this location the day before and new exactly where I was going to shoot. The combination of the shade, foreground and background wildflowers, and river in the background made this a perfect spot. For this photo I used a little fill-flash, with my flash mounted on a bracket, to reduce ugly shadows, and set to –1 stop so it just adds some warmth and catch-light in the eyes. I also used a split neutral density filter at an angle to keep the sunlit river from being overexposed.
The final image was taken in the middle of the day. As you can see the contrast from the shaded areas to the sunny areas is extreme. To avoid harsh light on my subjects I brought them into the shade and used my flash to bring their exposure up to the level of the bright sun. I have a small photographic umbrella and a mount that allows me to shoot my off camera flash through it and create a softer “studio” light.
Photo Blog: Wrangell, Alaska.
“Capturing Alaska”
with Wayde Carroll
Wrangell, Alaska
During my southeast Alaska trip last summer I spent a few days on the island, and in the town, of Wrangell. I don’t think I’ve ever been more comfortable in a new place. Everyone I met was extremely friendly and generous. I had total strangers offering me rides, bicycles for the length of my stay, and a promise of a car and a place to stay if I return (which I definitely will).
Add to this the mind numbing beauty surrounding the place and you’ve got one of my favorite destinations ever.
This is another stop on the Alaska Marine Highway accessible to the state ferry but not to the giant cruise ships and there are only around 2000 people who call Wrangell home so the pace is laid back. Its’ close proximity to the Stikine River ( compared by John Muir to Yosemite Valley) and the Anan Bear and Wildlife Observatory, makes it an ideal base camp with plenty to offer.
Besides the scenic river and the bears, you can search for the ancient mysterious petroglyphs, or rock carvings, that can be found at Petroglyph Beach State Historic Park. For such a small community it is surprising that they have a world class museum that houses many historical displays from its’ Tlingit roots through the Russians occupation through the gold rush and up to todays tourism and fishing based economy.
Explore Chief Shakes Tribal House and Totems, hike through the stunning Tongass National Forest up to Rainbow Falls, or climb the Mt. Dewey Trail to the spot where John Muir camped during one of his Alaskan adventures.
Oh yeah, there’s a pretty nice little golf course as well, Muskeg Meadows.
Photo Blog: 2008 Speedo/ Alaska Swim Olympics Pics
“Capturing Alaska”
with Wayde Carroll
2008 Speedo/ Alaska Junior Swim Olympics Pics
Last week I got to photograph some of the 2008 Speedo/ Alaska Junior Swim Olympics for Alaska Newspapers and the Seward Phoenix Log. I love sports and shooting action but when I got the call and heard the words “indoor swim meet” I said “no problem!” out loud but harbored serious concerns internally. Action, indoors. I knew this meant two things before I even showed up: low light and horrible color balance!
The event was held at Bartlett High School. I had never been there and I had never shot for Alaska Newspapers before. I was excited to get the gig but worried it would be a failure. What a difficult situation for a first assignment with a new client!
I was scheduled to shoot from 2pm to 4pm. I searched the internet to see if I could find anyone’s photos from that venue, what I found was less than encouraging: dark, bleak, green. Just what I thought. I decided to scout the location that morning so I would know exactly what I had gotten myself into.
I arrived at the pool around 9:30am and was happy to see that the competition was already in progress. Now I could make some tests under actual shooting conditions with action to boot.
While the lighting was a ghastly green, and somewhat low, it wasn’t the worst I’d ever seen and it was fairly evenly distributed throughout.
The first thing I did was photograph a gray card and set a custom white balance to it in the camera. This gave fairly accurate results as far as skin tone etc. I also chose to shoot in RAW so I could make any color corrections necessary more easily in post- production.
To freeze the action I wanted to make sure I maintained the fastest shutter speed possible. I had to push the ISO to 1600 to get 1/500 of a second at F4. This was actually about one stop under exposed but I’d rather hold the shutter speed and boost the exposure later than risk an unacceptable amount of out of focus images. One stop under doesn’t increase the noise too much but I didn’t want to go any lower than that.
The next important step was to consult with the meet officials and find out where it was ok for me to shoot from. Nothing is more embarrassing than being hollered at in front of one thousand people because you’ve positioned yourself, say, in front of a judge you hadn’t noticed! (Yes, I learned this previously the hard way!)
With that settled I shot a couple of events from different locations and went home to review the results. Everything was acceptable and I felt fully confident going back to the event later that day. Doing a little pre-planning makes for a much more relaxed, creative, and stress-free assignment!
I shot the event in manual at the settings I had previously determined. I had one camera with a 70-200mm F4 lens that I used for close-up action. On a second body I had the 24-70mm F2.8 lens for wider views. For the most part I used the auto-servo focusing that tracks your subject as it moves but once in a while, if I had a specific composition I wanted, I would just pre-focus on a spot and shoot multiple exposures as the subject(s) entered my framing.
I was happy with the results and my clients were too!
Photo Blog: Eek, AK.- Birthplace of Photography!
“Capturing Alaska”
with Wayde Carroll
Eek, AK- Birthplace of Photography (for me).
My wife and I were lucky enough to spend a year living with the Yup’ik people in southwestern Alaska in 1995/1996. My wife was teaching and I was desperately trying to work out how I could get myself out of a career I hated. Eek was the name of the village and is the place I started to pursue photography “seriously”.
While my wife taught native children in the K-12 school, I spent time feeling very weird about not being able to work (no jobs for me in this small village of 300 people) and made lists of all the things that were meaningful and enjoyable to me and that I could see myself actually earning an income with. My lists kept narrowing down to photography.
I had a bachelors’ degree in art with an emphasis in photography and never really considered that I might do it as a career. I was a musician, outside of the dreaded career, and thought I’d end up doing that but eventually realized I didn’t want to spend all my nights and weekends away from my family. My new bride, Lisa, and I wanted to have kids someday and I couldn’t see the two lifestyles meshing well. Not that people can’t, I just couldn’t see it for me.
As a photographer I was able to combine a love of cool gadgets with a passion for art and love of adventure. Photography became a reason to explore the world in intimate detail.
While not many photos survived later edits from that first year of “serious” photography, living among the First Alaskans, as Alaskan natives are known, was an incredible luxury for a budding photographer. I was fascinated with the village, it’s people and their culture. A love for the Alaskan bush was born in me that has only grown with time.
My good friend, John O. Mark, who was the principal of Eek school (and first Alaskan native to become a principal!) while we were there, has since relocated to his home village of Quinhagak. It took me about eight years to finally make it back out to the bush after heading back to California. These images are from that trip. I take great pleasure in being able to visit with the Mark family and photograph their village. I can honestly say, that as a boy growing up in California, I never imagined that I’d be eating caribou stew, dipping dried salmon into seal oil, and enjoying steam huts with Eskimos!
I will be heading out to Quinhagak again this summer and I can’t wait.
Having a camera constantly around my neck has drawn me into observing things in minute detail and forced me to get involved with the world. It has become an obsession, always searching with my photographers “eye”.
In photography I have found a career in which I’m never thinking about when I can retire. Now, I don’t plan to.
Photography Blog: Petersburg and Mitkof Island
“Capturing Alaska”
with Wayde Carroll
Petersburg and Mitkof Island
I’m still trying to finish editing and captioning all of last summer’s images, hoping to be caught up before this coming summer’s onslaught of stock trips. As you may guess, summer is a extremely busy and productive time of year when the majority of Alaskan images are captured.
This week I’m highlighting the four days I spent in Petersburg, on Mitkof Island in southeast Alaska.
I really, really, loved Petersburg. It is a genuine, working, fishing village founded by Norwegian settlers in the late 1800’s. Because of its location along the Inside Passage it is not accessible to the major cruise lines, thus it has a distinctly different feel than places such as Ketchikan that are swamped with tourists and jewelry stores.
I happened to arrive just before the salmon season opened and it was such a thrill to see the fishermen readying their boats and gear. I truly felt as if I had stumbled in to an Alaska of yesteryear.
The harbor is a great place to wander around photographing authentic Alaska but the town and the island, Mitkof, have so much more to offer. Hammer Slough, which runs into the harbor, hosts an amazing array of early 1900’s stilt homes along its’ banks. The beaches, surrounding islands, and mountains, add to the scenic splendor. If you can get a ride or rent a car and cruise along the Mitkof Highway you will be rewarded with stunning hiking, pristine views of several different ecosystems from muskeg bogs to remote beachfronts that are so devoid of human traces and so clogged with driftwood that I felt like I was in the lost world. When I stumbled on a nearly complete bear skeleton at the high tide mark my sense of adventure, and heart rate, were heightened to the extreme. Something had been gnawing the bones and I was a little worried about finding out what. It was glorious to scramble around in such a wild and stunningly beautiful place.
As with any travel, the entire gamut of lenses, from fish eye to extreme telephoto, can be used. One of the main concerns with photography in Southeast Alaska is rain. I’d say that I had only five days without rain during a three-week trip. The trick is getting out anyway. Even if it’s a rainy day there are often breaks in the weather, which can give you periods of bright sky and even sunshine. If you’re sitting in your hotel room and try and rush out during the break you’re going to be sorry. You don’t have to be standing out in a downpour with your camera, but be near an interesting area in your car, a coffee shop, under dense trees. I try to keep moving, exploring, and let the weather open up when it will. In a light rain I’ll just wander around with my camera tucked into my jacket. I have a small umbrella attached to my backpack to hold over a tripod-mounted camera.
Shooting while it’s raining is also a viable option. The images of the fishermen working and the one of the boat tied up to the processing plant were taken during a steady downpour. Like long exposures, rain can add a silky effect to water.
Many of the other images that appear to be a nice sunny day were in fact taken during short breaks in the weather. Just be prepared and be out there!
PS- Keep an eye on the ocean. You never know when a pod of Killer Whales may be cruising by just off shore.