Spirit Dance - Lost Lake, Oregon

I've come to realize that not nearly enough night photos have been posted to this website lately. I have a huge stash pile of unprocessed night shots on my computer, but really got sucked into post processing landscape photos lately and working on a few new workflows that go along with them.

In regards to night photography, has anyone traveled to Sweden to shoot the Aurora? I've been researching Abisko National Park there and it looks down right amazing. Just looking for any insider tips that anyone may have. I've pretty much got the whole thing scoped out, but it never hurts to grab a few tips from others before a trip.

The Shot
I made two trips to lost lake this past summer. The second attempt was too late in the year for any Milky Way action over Mount Hood, but it did yield some light aurora / air glow color around the horizon. I messed around with the ISO settings as much as I could to capture a bunch of "reflective light" in the water. Usually for star shots without the Milky Way I tend to keep the ISO much lower, but this time a high ISO setting yielded so much more star light in the water.

A Place We Call Home - Alvord Desert, Oregon

I've been attempting to bring new topics to the table with each blog post and adding a little bit of what I know and even including some resources I used to find this information. This week I want to touch a bit on data / computer backup. No matter who you are ( photographer or not ) if you've got important data on your computer of any kind, being finances, family pictures, photography portfolios and so on it's very important that you back this data up. Even the best hard drives and best computers in the world fail at times. Unfortunately a single bad hard drive or disk failure and you've lost everything... most likely forever. That's where a good backup solution comes in.

I backup in a few different ways to cover all my bases. First there is at home backup which is done in my actual office. To do so I use (2) 6TB Western Digital Hard Drives which mirror ( are a direct copy of one another ) each other. You can do this with any size hard drive, I just chose to use big hard drives since I have a lot of data to store now and in the future. If you don't have a lot of data right now, hold off on a huge hard drive, since they do get much cheaper each year.

My personal preference for running this mirror back up is Mac's Time Machine which works really well. It actually allows you to jump back to a certain point/date in your computer's life and restore anything and everything that you had at that point. You can restore it all or just restore selective parts. This could include settings, files, and anything else that is possible to screw up. If I ever make a mistake I can revert to how things were in the past. My computer is currently setup to backup once a day on my home storage drives.

In lieu of mirror backups which require you to have double the amount of hard drive space as data you wish to back up there are also other disk configurations that do save you a small bit of space when backing HUGE amounts of data. These are known as RAID backup configurations. After reading up on these I decided the good old mirror back up was good enough for me at this point. But depending on your situation ( especially for time lapse photographers ) you may want to look into this.

The next line of back up I use is Crash Plan which is an unlimited online backup solution. The current plan I use costs around 5$ a month and allows for unlimited backup of your data. You can determine how often you would like Crash Plan to back up the files on your computer and even specify which files you do and don't want to backup. Personally I just have them backup my entire computer. 

If you decide to use Crash Plan and have a large amount of data to initially backup you will need to order a Seed Drive which costs a few extra bucks. In my case I had 2 TB of data which would have taken 40 days to upload to the Crash Plan Servers using high speed internet, so a faster more efficient Seed Drive was necessary. Once you order this drive Crash Plan sends you a hard drive in the mail which they claim to hold 1TB ( I found it to be more like 1.3TB ), you in turn put as much data from your computer on this hard drive as you can and send it back to them. After a few days it's on their servers. Now all you have to do is turn on the Crash Plan Program on your computer, now it only took a day for me to fully back up all my remaining data to their servers. From there on out it's all automatic and on their cloud.

In the case of a fire, robbery, or any other freak accident, all my data is now on the Crash Plan servers and backed up each night via high speed internet.

That pretty much covers my entire backup plan making sure that I never lose any sort of data no matter what problems may come at me. It seems like a lot of work, but is always well worth the cost.

If you want to see how I backup and store data in a very safe yet minimal way while on the road check out my post on Using Your Nexus 10 or Nexus 7 to Transfer Picture Files from Your Camera's Memory Card to an External Hard Drive.

The Shot
I've recently been going through my shots from this past year and stumbled across the Alvord Desert Album. I almost forgot about these pictures, which is funny since they are some of my favorites from the year. This particular night the sunset early and the Milky Way was bright by 8PM. I saw some clouds starting to roll in so it was time to get as much shooting done as possible before clouds encompassed the desert. After taking 15 or 20 different night sky compositions there was no longer any view of the stars or even the sky for that matter. This was one of my favorites from the nite. If you're interested in learning how I post processed or took this shot head on over to www.LearnStarPhotography.com for my Free Star Photography Tutorial and Star Photography Post Processing Video Tutorial.

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Sounds of the City - San Francisco, CA

Are there any web sharpening gurus out there? It's really nice to be able to share photos online and have them look exactly like they do on your computer screen at home. Unfortunately most sites compress your uploaded photos down to a maximum size which in turn really degrades the image. Due to this fact I find myself uploading to most social media sites at a maximum of 900 pixels wide lately, although I would really like to upload much bigger, say 2048 pixels wide.

The only place I really upload full size anymore is to Smugmug which holds my photo portfolio. They have some pretty good web functionality that sharpens your picture depending on the size at which it's being viewed. This allows me to upload my full resolution image and still get pretty good results no matter what size I view it at. I have noticed even Smugmug's sharpening is not quite as sharp as the real thing as viewed on my computers screen. If you have Smugmug you can turn on this functionality by going into your gallery settings and changing the sharpening amount from 0.200 to 0.400. That seems to do the trick, at least for me. That being said, if you really want to view my pictures in full detail instead of viewing them on this page, go ahead and click the picture below to see it over in my portfolio.

I personally love using TK Actions Web Sharpening Tools ( select "Special Offers" upon clicking the link to pick up a copy of your own ) to get my photos ready to post online. I recently found a video Sean Bagshaw posted about using these actions that's really informative for anyone that wants to give it a shot.


The Shot
This is one of those iconic locations that everyone seems to have a shot of. Usually I stray away from this sort of location, but once in a while it's fun to give them a run. We had a tricky time getting down there and encountered some signs and warnings along the way, but none the less here is one of the shots I came away with...

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Learn Star Photography.com Launch

A few months ago while updating some stuff on my website I had an idea... an idea that I thought would make a cool website and change the way people learn about star photography.

When it comes down to it, those of us that want to create pictures or art for that matter shouldn't have to look far and wide to find a way to get started or learn some new and informative tips and tricks. My goal was to create a place for beginners and even well accomplished photographers to come if they wanted to learn more about star and night sky photography or just connect with others that have the same goals in mind.

I know when I started getting into photography it would take me hours to dig through internet articles, tutorials, text, websites and every other option known to man in order to figure out one or two things I wanted to know about photography. Through trial and error eventually I was able to learn enough to produce a picture or two of my liking, but only after wasting a ton of creative energy along the way.
 
In response to these problems I decided to contact one of my favorite star photographers, Michael Shainblum, and see if he was interested in joining up with me to give everyone the information they are looking for in one easy to find place...

Overall photography, art, or any other creative process should not be so much about finding the information needed to get started, but instead devoting that energy to the creation of something you love and want to share with others.

That being said, Michael and I are excited to announce the launch of www.LearnStarPhotography.com which focuses on night sky & star photography education, tutorials, mentoring and workshops. No matter if you're a beginner, intermediate, or expert looking for advice in the shooting or post processing aspects of star photography we got ya covered!

Now that you no longer have to spend countless hours searching for a few tips and tricks to get started, you can get out there and start creating some awesome stuff on your own!

We hope you enjoy the website. What are you waiting for head on over to www.LearnStarPhotography.com and check it out!

The Shot

Well with the launch of the new site, I guess it's only fitting to share a new star picture. This was taken in Big Sur California at McWay Falls. At this point I hadn't yet tested out the D800's ability to take long exposures at high ISO settings, so what better time to give it a run? This shot was captured at ISO640 and an exposure time of 628 seconds. Less a few noisy areas in the photo ( Noise reduction took care of almost all of it ) I was highly impressed with the outcome for such a long exposure. For those of you interested in doing it on your own, all the skill sets required are provided on the new website:) Enjoy! 

A Year in Photos - 2013

In late 2011 I picked up a camera for the first time and started to mimic other photographers that I really liked in order to learn the skills that I deemed necessary to start out in this whole photography thing.

2013 was something completely new. Using those learned skill sets my goal was to build a unique style I could call my own. In doing so it seemed like a good idea to share these skills with others as well, so workshops and tutorials it was. I find teaching to be one of the most rewarding ways of learning/teaching photography as well as meeting others with the same passion in life for beauty in art and adventure in the wild.

Obviously I'm still constantly learning each and every day, and that's they way I hope it stays for the indefinite future. Here is a collection of my favorite photos from this past year. They are each special to me in one way or another, being the actual time of the shoot or the trip and/or moment that went along with it.

So here's to good times, great friends, new learning experiences and last but not least, the non-stop adventure we call life!

Thanks for following along.

Synesthesia - San Francisco, California

I am excited to announce that www.LearnStarPhotography.com is now up and running!

Michael and I just got done recording a new set of video tutorials that will cover both of our complete star photography workflows and provide a picture for you to work along with us at home. You can buy both video tutorials in our Star Photography Post Processing Master Class and get my Under the Stars Lightroom Presets as a free and added bonus. These video tutorials include Lightroom and Photoshop skill sets such as RAW file adjustment, digital blending and a full section dedicated entirely to luminosity masking.

Thanks for checking out the new website, we really hope you enjoy it:)

The Shot

On a recent trip up the California Coast we decided to gun it from Big Sur to San Francisco hoping to catch a nice sunrise over the Golden Gate Bridge. Thankfully we did because this sunrise was one of the best I've seen. As we waited for the sun to come up the crescent moon sat right over the top of the bridge and brought some amazing shots in the twilight hours. About 30 minutes before sunrise the sky started to get extremely colorful and that's when I captured this image. Click here for a quick video I recorded right before sunrise:)
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