This week’s image is another shot from my brother, an expert landscape shooter. As you can see, he’s also able to get some interesting wildlife.

Click each image for a larger view.

I went on a hike last week and I was able to get this shot with my G9 right at sundown. I was hoping for some better storminess for a compelling background, but it was a pretty clear night.

Spring is upon us and I am badly craving some outdoor excursions and landscape shooting. Largely as a result of convenience, I’ve been doing a lot more portraits lately, but I also really love landscapes. Click the photo above for a larger view.

This week’s photo is another from the trip I took with my brother last fall to Moab. I WOULD have posted one of mine, but I wasn’t able to get any of the lightning. Why didn’t I get lightning? I click the shutter two seconds too late. Yeah, it sucked.

The trick to this shot (without a $300 lightning trigger) is to shoot in relatively low light, which we had at sunset. We were also lucky enough to have a pretty great lighting/thunder storm in the distance, just above the mesas, while we were bone dry. With the low light, we were able to close down the lens and leave the shutter open for quite a while, around 30 seconds. The trick was to have it open while lightning struck.

We were shooting pretty much in tandem - he just started one frame 5 seconds later than I did. So, my shutter closed and about 2 seconds later I saw the lightning bolt. Three seconds after that, my brother’s shutter closed. In those type of situations, one considers tossing the other person’s rig over the 1000 foot drop-off. Luckily, I restrained myself and this great photo resulted.

I like shooting landscapes. The light - being outdoors - the fact that the subjects don’t get tired - can all be very refreshing. So, this week’s Flickr finds are in tribute to landscapes. I found it very interesting that a search on just landscapes pulled up 1.6 million photos. Even more interesting, 11 of the first 20 in the search were by a person named
Christian Frölich. He has some nice shots. See below for one of my favorites. You can see Christian’s entire collection here.

Click here to see the photo at Flickr.

My brother’s birthday is this week (Happy Birthday Bro!) and I’ve been thinking about a good gift to get him. He’s a great photographer in many areas, including portrait and architecture. Some of his best work, though, is in landscape (the photo at the top of the post is his - you can click it for a larger view). I’d like to get him something for that in particular.

As I’ve given it thought, the following are the top 5 things I considered getting him and 5 great tools for the landscape photographer (in fact, a lot of these would be great for any photographer). Mmmmm… gear.

Hoodman HoudeLoupe

At around $70 this is one of the most cost effective gifts. It allows the outdoor photographer to more effectively see his camera’s LCD screen in the bright sun. I have one of these and love it.

You can check it out at Hoodman’s site here.

Gitzo Traveler Tripod

A good tripod is the cornerstone of landscape photography. If you’ve read my previous posts, you’ll know that I LOVE Gitzo tripods. Their build quality, great locks and overall cool look make them the best in the industry. The Traveler version is perfect when carrying it out in the field. It folds up to a ridiculously short 14″ and weighs in at only 2.2 lbs (for our metric readers, that is 35.5 cm and 1 kg). This one can get a bit pricey, though, with a price of $640 on B&H Photo. If you’re going this far, you might as well get their titanium version (it’s only $2,500).

Hmmm… maybe I’ll give my brother my Gitzo tripod and get this one for myself…

Check out the Gitzo site here for more.

Epson P-3000

When shooting in the field there never seems to be enough memory cards and the LCDs are never large enough. The P-3000 by Epson aims to help both problems. When a card is full you can plug the card into this small device and download the pictures onto its 40 GB drive. You can then view them on a crisp, bright 4″ display. It accepts a wide variety of card types and can view most popular camera raw files.

It comes in at around $400 and can be found on Epson’s web site (which has a few nice mail in rebates for a few months, knocking the price down to $300).

Garmin eTrex Legend HCx

I love geotagging my photos. If you haven’t tried it, you should. In brief, GeoTagging is a method that allows you to capture the location you took the photo at and store it in the photo’s metadata. You can then display the photo on a map using Flickr, Google, etc.

The Garmin eTrex is a small, handheld GPS unit that allows you to capture the location that you later synch up to your photos.

GeoTagging brings landscape (and travel) photography to a whole new level.

You can check out Garmin’s GPS units at their site. The eTrex Legend (which I have) is around $230. Make sure to get the HCx version. It has the better sensor, which allows you to get readings when under tree cover, in valleys, etc.

If you’d like to learn more about GeoTagging, you can check out some of my previous posts on the subject here, here, here, and here.

Photoshop CS3

Panoramas are cool. They can depict a landscape in a vert unique way. They can, however, sometimes be a bit of a pain to stitch together. Well, that isn’t the case any longer for anyone with Adobe Photoshop CS3. Besides being the industry standard for serious photography, this most recent version does an AMAZING job automatically stitching together a series of shots meant for a panorama. You have to see it to believe it.

You can pick up a copy of Photoshop for about $649 and can learn more at Adobe’s web site here.

This is a shot from my trip to the Canyonlands near Moab, Utah last labor day. It’s a nice shot of the white rim and reminds me of warmer times - it’s a particularly cold day here in Denver.

Click the picture for a larger view.

White Rim, Canyonlands

Canon Rebel XT, 2.8 24-70L at 24mm,
f9, 1/250 sec