Slickrock and Shadow

Yoga Pose Silhouette from the massive Redwall Cavern Yoga, photography, limestone, water and sand all mix together nicely at Redwall Cavern, Grand Canyon.  Here in the largest sandbox on the planet, the sound of the river permeates everything.  Sand between my toes gives off warmth.  It feel like the center of a natural perfect universe.  These feelings inspire contemplation and some personal stretching to reach towards the natural within.  MyKaela assumes the Natarajasana, Lord of the Dance, pose with grace and understated power.  Beautiful.  Peaceful. Photographing silhouettes is easy if you follow two simple rules: 1.  Expose for the background. 2.  Focus on the foreground. Easy, right? It is, in manual mode.  Camera modes automatically assume you want to expose and  focus on the same object.  You as a photographer need to take over the exposure part and let the camera still do the focusing.  This is a...

A-Bay Sunset with Palms Trees, an Orange Sky and the Pacific Ocean Highly contrasting situations landed themselves to photography of silhouettes.  On my recent trip to the Big Island I found myself gazing at a wonderful sense over "A-bay" in Waikaloa.  The palm trees clustered together in a way that allowed the sunshine to come between a couple of them.  Moving slightly to one side I was able to get the composition I desired. The next artistic decision related to exposure.  If I decided to try to expose properly for the trees, the sunshine and the sky would be "blown out" white.  That would lose the beautiful colors of red and orange.  Instead I exposed for the sky and allowed the palm trees to simply go to black. In another situation on the other side of the island, I did the same thing at sunrise. Pololu Silhouette at Sunrise

Cooper Island Sunset Sunsets:  They're pretty, they're peaceful and you want to remember them.  For many people sunset is their favorite time of day.  We all love to gaze into the dimming sky to see colors that make their debut and disappear 10 minutes later. From a photographer's standpoint, sunsets present some technical challenges.  The dim light requires larger apertures or a longer shutter speed.  The extreme differences in contrast are another problem.  You cannot naturally have the bright sunset and a dark sailboat each shown in detail.  You must choose which you want to photograph (specifically, which will you expose for).  For most of us, the sky is the star of the show and we should expose for that. An automatic camera will expose for the whole scene.  In this case, that won't work and you'll lose details in the sky.  I set my camera on manual exposure, take a test shot and check my histogram.  You can also enable...