When you gear up for a winter photo expedition, short or long, the first thing to consider is you. If you’re cold, cold, cold, you won’t be able to focus on the process of capturing a good photo. So dress warmly, and take more clothes than you think you’ll need. Know your vehicle is in good shape, pack enough gear and food that you could survive the night, and bring along your cell phone. Always let someone know where you are.

Winter days are often overcast. Taking a good photo can mean a long wait for the perfect light. Wildlife shots always require an investment of patience. You can’t anticipate what that elk, or wolf, is going to do, when. So you wait, hope, and do what you can to stay warm.

When you have that chance for the shot you want, your equipment needs to be ready to work with you. Have it “tuned up” annually. For analog cameras, have the battery, the shutter, and lenses checked. Be sure your meter is accurate. With digital cameras, bring some extra batteries and be prepared to keep your camera dry.

Professional-grade digital cameras handle inclement weather better than others. If your digital camera doesn’t fit that classification, snow sifting into it can fry the circuitry. To reduce the risk of that damage, seal your camera in a ziplock bag. Whether you are skiing, hiking, or snowshoeing, you can keep batteries warm in your pants pocket. Keep the camera itself in a good-quality external bag to avoid condensation from your body, or an unexpected collision with a tree, from damaging it.

Pack along a tripod and use it to avoid camera movement – this becomes most important if you hope to enlarge any of the pictures you take. Wrap the tripod legs with insulation to keep bare hands from sticking to them. You can buy leg wraps or tape on use pipe insulation from the hardware store.

Sound like a lot of work? The great thing about winter photography is that when you make the effort to be out, you’ll find very few other photographers in your way. You will find glorious expanses of snow unmarked by human activity. And weather creates interesting photo opportunities.

In fact, the snow itself presents interesting opportunities and  challenges. When you really look at snow, you’ll notice its color changes with the light that’s on it. Snow in deep shadows under pine trees is usually blue, at other times of the day, you’ll find snow that’s yellow, pink or red.

When you compose a scene with snow, keep in mind that the eye goes to white or bright areas first. If that’s the foreground of your shot, that’s where a viewer will look. Details will be lost in bright areas, and, a viewer’s eye will be attracted there, possibly missing your intended subject. So be aware of color casts, shadows, and highlights and use them to direct the viewer’s eye to the subject. And if you want to communicate a sense of cold, work with the snow’s blue tones.

Film choices will make working with color simpler so ask questions when you buy your film. For instance, Velvia film gives a warm tone that offsets blues and shadows. If you’re working in digital, exposure latitude is quite limited. (What’s that mean?)

For more on taking photos in the snow, take a look at this book by Livingston’s Tom Murphy, “Silence and Solitude – Yellowstone’s Winter Wilderness.” And don’t forget – if you breathe on your lens and it freezes – it doesn’t matter what kind of effort you put into photo composition, or your gear.

Article by Jenna Caplette, with tips from the staff of F-11 Photo & The Print Refinery™

Save the school year and your sanity!

Wednesday is the day my grade schoolers come home with a week’s worth of completed assignments. I hate Wednesdays. That’s not true; I love to see their work, talk about what they’ve been up to, and get a glimpse inside their school-brains. But after that I’m left with a stack of guilt. I can weed out the spelling tests and math homework but it’s tough deciding which stories and drawings to keep. The more I save, the less confident I am that I’ll ever really look back on all of them. This conundrum occurs weekly. By the end of the year, I have one large drawer-full and at least one unwieldy stack of each child’s projects. We refer to that section of the office as the Art Cave because they rarely see the light of day after entering. I can’t store these forever but I’m not about to throw them out. So how do I archive the art cave?

I don’t put them in scrapbooks if that’s what you’re thinking. I wouldn’t make it past page two. If you’re on that level, my hat’s off to you. I digitize them and, here’s the important part, store them in an organized, backed-up vault. If that sounds daunting, let me put in other words; I take pics of them with my iPhone. Here’s the process:

1. Download the Google Photos app. You could rely on iCloud, but it’s not as easy to move and organize them afterward. Google Photos offloads pics from your camera roll into your Google account automatically.
2. Set up a work table near a window, but not so close that you’re in direct light. Start snapping, making sure your lens is perpendicular to the document. Google’s photo scan app also works well for this but requires four extra clicks per piece to auto straighten and optimize. I ain’t got that kind of time.
3. Once your batch is “scanned,” select them all and add to a new album. You can be finished here and they’ll always be accessible in Google Photos. I take it one step further. I download the album (select all, press Shft + D and they arrive in a .zip) and save it to my local photo archive, which is a Network Attached Storage device that contains a few redundant hard drives. In the past, I’ve uploaded it right back into my google drive, because I wasn’t sure about the future of Google Photos or confident that I’d be able to find the online albums later. Using my local hard drives instead feel less paranoid.
4. Strut around the house for a few minutes. You’ve just tackled a major project in hopefully less than 15 minutes. The digitized versions are not only manageable but ready to be printed in a series of photobooks that you’ll proudly display on graduation day.

I still save a few of the actual projects, but after digitizing them, most can go away. Yes, in the garbage. I know it’s difficult. But I need that space to store the children who will be home all day long once school’s out.

Photography invites you to notice, to look, to see and to focus. When you photograph a flower, you see the fine details and make choices about which aspect of the flower to document. The stamen? The inside of the flower? The edge of a petal? Because your back yard or garden is a place where you have some ability to control and modify the environment, its ideal for practicing macro or extreme close-up photography. Think of it as making portraits of plants, single petals on a sunflower, the curve of bloom, the textures of a zucchini, the work of bees pollinating.

Many point-and-shoot cameras have a “flower” mode that sets the camera up for macro pictures. Designed to get as much in focus as possible, Flower mode helps you hold still for a sharp picture. It also sets an outdoor white balance, so the colors will be accurate for average sunlit conditions.

Macro photography can be done with cameras that have changeable lenses in several different ways. Many zoom lenses include some macro, but can leave you wishing for more. Dedicated macro lenses are for those who live for closeup photography and demand uncompromising quality. If you want to find out about this style of photography before committing to an expense like a new lens, consider adding a close-up filter or extension tube to a lens you already own. Each of these methods provide different benefits, so you may want to try more than one. Filters and tubes are budget friendly enough that you could do both and experiment.

Now, select your image file size. Go big. Choose the largest file size in your camera’s menu and then select the highest quality—generally called “Fine.” This setting provides enough resolution to crop pictures and print enlargements. Memory cards for a digital cameras are larger capacity and cheaper now than ever, so don’t bother to “save space.” You can’t get a crisp print from an undersized file. For resizing and other fine tuning, you can edit your images in a program like Adobe Photoshop. Need help? Stop in and we’ll show you how to make changes to your settings, and check our class schedule for learning opportunities with like minded photographers.

Now that you’re ready to work with your camera, your next task is to consider shooting conditions. With macro photography you’ll quickly discover that the slightest breeze creates movement, blurring your subject. And, good lighting is essential.

The best natural light is often that of bright overcast skies, early morning, or evening. Otherwise, choose a breeze-free time of day and be prepared to modify the light to create the best photographs. Notice where your own shadow falls to prevent accidental shading.

Use bounce or diffused flash to light deep shadows and create sparkling highlights. Or, try light modifiers like reflectors and diffusers to catch and redirect sunlight to fill shadows. This kind of reflected light looks soft and natural. Consider a gold reflector to mimic sunset light and bring out warm colors.

In the harsh midday sun, placing a diffuser or a plain white umbrella above your subject softens and diffuses the light while preserving details in the highlights and shadows. An umbrella also can be useful to block the wind.

Macro photography is best accomplished from the stability of a tripod, whether you have a phone, a point-and-shoot or a camera with changeable lenses. Once you set up your camera, look carefully at the background and foreground of the picture for objects that compete for attention with your chosen subject. Sticks, rocks, grass and leaves that are out of focus and mostly invisible in your viewfinder can become glaringly apparent in a photograph. A single blade of grass or a dead weed can spoil an otherwise perfect picture.

Two essential macro photography skills are patience and intimacy. Patience while you wait for a playful breeze to pass. Patience to find or create the perfect lighting conditions. Patience to checking the details. Intimacy to be willing to see and experience photography in ways you have never done before.