Paul Gardner

The night sky is near and dear to my heart. Looking at the night sky is what got me started with photography. When I go on a photo trip I almost always take star shots, at least one. When people see the shots they always ask "how did you do that". The answer is pretty simple, just point the camera up and let the exposure go as long as you want. There are a lot of different ways to take a shot of the sky; longer exposures for star trails, short exposures for nice pin point stars, moon lit starscapes or even astro-photography where the camera is on a tracking mount that allows you to follow the stars. I do all of these and I thought I would share a variety of night shots taken under a variety of conditions from the pitch black skies of Hawaii's big Island and Death Valley to Moonlit Yosemite and Artificially lit camp sites. I have included my camera type and exposure settings for each shot to give anyone that wants to give night photography a try a place to start with their cameras.

My settings for each photography vary wildly depending on all kinds of factors such as ambient light, sky conditions, foreground subjects, type of stars I am looking to get in the photo or how patient I am. The last one comes into play a lot, especially on cold nights. Night shots can take a lot of time. With the dark frame long exposure noise reduction turned on in the camera, a 20 minute shots turns into a 40 minute waiting game as the camera takes a dark frame of equal length as the light frame. If I am in a hurry and really not looking for star trails but a more static shot, my ISO goes up and my f/stop goes wide open to get as much light into the scene as possible. When I have a landscape scene that has foreground objects or is moonlit I will stop down the aperture to make sure everything stays sharp, but not far enough down to limit how much star light gets in the shot. There are lots of trade offs depending on the conditions. I have figured them at by trial and error and I encourage everyone else to do the same. Night shots are fun and most of the time extremely rewarding. I will leave this post with one last shot showing what is possible when the camera is on a mount that tracks the stars allowing for really long exposures without the trailing stars.

While in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in early June I spent some time in the water shooting wave abstracts. The set I previously posted where taken right on the beach in small shore break. A few days later a little bit larger swell showed up and I was able to go out to the sand bar and get in some deeper water. This really let me get under the larger waves a bit to get some other unique angles. I really love how waves look underwater after they have broke. It reminds me of a big thunderstorm that looks like it is about to burst with lightning.

Possibly one of the biggest things that I miss most about the East Coast are the frequent thunderstorms. California doesn't have thunderstorms on any kind of regular basis. I think that I have seen lightning 2-3 times in Los Angeles in the almost four years I have lived here. While I was on vacation in the Outer Banks of North Carolina in June I had the opportunity to take some lightning photos during a brief late afternoon/evening thunderstorm. I spent a good couple hours, all the way until it was dark and storm had moved too far off shore, shooting the lightning. The first and second photos are composites of several shots taken over a few minutes from the same location and the third is a single exposure.

Lindsay and I decided that instead of trying to deal with crowds, parking, more crowds and traffic to watch the Rose Bowl Fireworks show that we would instead hike up into the mountains just up the street from our house to get a vantage point over the entire LA Basin. While we were not the only people in Pasadena to have this people it was much more relaxing than sitting in traffic at the Rose Bowl. We managed to find a nice flat spot with a great view not even a quarter of a mile up the Echo Mountain Trail and set up camp for the evening. With two hours to go I set up the camera and then we broke out a card game to kill time until sunset and the fireworks. The view from the mountains was amazing. Everywhere we looked there were fireworks shooting up into the sky with the Rose Bowl show as the centerpiece. The Rose Bowl show was fantastic but the real treat was after the fireworks were done and we were at the bottom of the trail. Looking back up into the mountains we could see the hoards of people walking back down the mountain with their headlamps glowing. Every single switchback on the trail was completely lined with lights. It was as if there were extra stars in the sky. I managed to take two shots before we had to get going to beat all the traffic back home. Another plus to the moment was that the stars were actually out. Lucky for us, to the north of LA there is really nothing but desert so there is no light pollution to kill the skies.

I am finally back on the East Coast and at my favorite place: Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. First thing I did when I arrived was put my D3 in its water housing and head into the ocean. I was hoping for bigger waves but all I had to work with were one foot and under waves splashing on the shore. I made it work and got some really cool shots.

On our way up to San Francisco Lindsay and I stopped by Gorman Hills again to see if the flowers had gotten any better. Lucky for us they had. The temperatures had warmed up and the winds had died down enough for the poppies to come out of hiding.

Lindsay and I took advantage of a gorgeous spring weekend to go up north just a little bit to search for wildflowers. Our quick day trip took us up CA14 to Lancaster and the Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve, then off to Gormon Hills followed shortly by a visit to Carrizo Plains National Monument. All the areas that we visited had great displays of wildflowers. I am hoping that the displays stay around for a few more weeks so I can get back up to shoot some more photos.

This past weekend I made a very very quick trip to Lone Pine to show my cousin Dan and my friend Camilo one of my favorite places in California. We were up there for less than 24 hours but managed to get some good weather and great photos. The famous Sierra Wave cloud formations even decided to make an appearance.

Here are some more panoramas from my sierra trip two weekends ago.

Two weekends ago my friend Matt Yachmetz and I took a trip up to Lone Pine, California to see the results of a massive snow storm that hit most of California. We spent two nights camping in 15 degree weather in the snow. It was a really great experience that I will detail more in another post. For now I just wanted to get one of the first of many panoramas that I took up on the blog. We met up with the guys from Xrez.com who specialize in gigapixel photography and they inspired me to get back into taking big panos. This particular shot was taken up in the Inyo Mountains on the road up to the Cerro Gordo Mines. The fins running back into the photo are Rift Dikes from volcanic fissures. This mosaic is composed of 47 images shot at 105mm with my Nikon D3. The final stitched image is 258 megapixels.

This Saturday will be the opening night of my solo show at Heritage Wine Company in Pasadena, California. I would love to see all my friends that can make it there. Click for Details

While on Christmas vacation in Virginia Beach I had the opportunity to use the Nikon 24mm PC-E Til/Shift Lens. Long story short I loved it. Major depth of field for landscapes. I shot an HDR while out at Cape Henry Lighthouse. I used the newest version of Photomatix to Fuse the set of 5 images together instead of doing a tone mapped HDR. The result is very natural looking. HDR software is finally starting to mature to the point where it is capable of producing wonderful imags.

I went out to the Malibu area late this afternoon hoping to catch the tail end of a nice swell and get some great wave/surf photos. When I arrived at Leo Carillo the sun fully blocked by thick overcast skies. For all practical purposes the sun set at 3pm. With no sun, small waves and cold water I pretty much wrote the trip off. Sunset was at 6pm and by the time 530pm rolled around it was dark and gray. I jumped back in the car and headed towards home. Just as I was getting ready to turn off PCH I looked in my sideview mirror and saw that out of nowhere at literally the last second the sky started turning red. I was fortunate enough to be right at the entrance to the beach at Point Dume and made a quick right hand turn and pulled off the road. The color was fading by the second so I quickly cobbled together my camera, tripod, timer and gradient filters and ran out on the beach. The only object I had to work with was a closed up lifeguard tower. I managed to take three shots of the tower and then moved down closer to the beach and took three shots of the water and sunset. For my first shot at the beach I had enough light to autofocus on the small rocks in the foreground. After a 15 second exposure there wasn't enough light to autofocus or manually focus. I tried my best but ultimately ran out of light. All of this happened in the very last minute of light. The entire shoot round trip from the car and back was maybe 3 minutes.

This is just a fun time lapse in HD of the lake behind my house in Virginia. I was testing the export to video feature in Lightroom 3 Beta. The video isn't that exciting because there were no clouds.



Lake Time Lapse from Paul Gardner on Vimeo.

It has been a long time since I have picked up my camera or had any reason to be really excited about photography. That feeling has now changed with the arrival today of a Nikon 24mm PC-E Tilt/Shift lens. I have been wanting to try this lens for a very long time to see what it could do for me. Originally I was trying to get a D3s and the 24mm PC-E on loan from Nikon but the D3s was not available so they sent just the 24mm. The lens came in the mail yesterday but before I played with it I decided to do some research and learn all the optical theory behind a perspective correction lens. As of lately all the forums are showing the same thing over and over again; tiny miniature looking scenes achieved by an extreme tilt upwards. I am convinced that most of the people taking these kinds of shots have no real, true understanding of what is going on with the lens to achieve that effect. Or even worse they don't know what the lens can really let you accomplish besides making things look small. Here is my obligatory miniature parking log photo. The effect is not quite as exaggerated as some photos because this lens is much wider than the usual 45mm or 85mm PC-E lenses.



The effect is cool but its nothing to write home about. I wanted to know how this lens could make my landscapes shine. Without getting into the gory details of how the optics work; I learned that with the proper settings you can get a nearly unlimited depth of field, or at least enough to get foreground and backgrounds in a landscape completely sharp and in focus. Now I see why the great landscape photographers use large format technical field cameras. A little tilt goes a long way to bringing everything in the shot together.

Here are a couple examples of what this lens can do. I shot all these outside my house. The first shot in each series has zero swing (tilting side to side in landscape orientation), wide open aperture f/3.5 and focused on the foreground subject. The second shot shows the effect of tilting the lens to move the plane of  focus to the orientation I wanted to get the entire subject in focus. The third shot shows a decrease in aperture size from f/3.5 to f/32 to extend the depth of field.



Notice in the first shot the very front of the fence is in focus but the shallow depth of field does not allow the far end of the fence to be in focus. The tilt rotates the plane of focus counter clockwise about the vertical axis until it is at the same angle as the fence relative to the forward direction of the camera. Notice the depth of field is now shallow left to right in the second image. The left wall and right side of the image are not in focus. The third shot is f/32 which extends the depth of field perpendicular to the plane of focus which is running down the fence line. In the third shot almost everything is in focus; front to back and side to side. This is not possible with a traditional lens.



The same concepts are in play in this sequence of shots. With a standard lens it is impossible to get the pen, the remote and the picture on the back wall all in focus at the same time, especially with the pen being only a few inches in front of the lens. I focused on the pen in the first shot and the tilted the lens down until the plane of focus crossed the pen, the remote and through the back wall in the second shot. The first and second shot are at f/3.5 and again you can see the narrow depth of field in both except that the first is narrow front to back and the second is narrow up and down. In the second shot the depth of field ends about halfway up the computer screen. To solve that I stopped down to f/32 and the depth of field extended all the way up to the painting on the wall. Again, not possible with a traditional lens.

I am really looking forward to taking this lens out in the field for some landscapes. After playing around with it for a few hours I can definitely see the potential of this lens to change the way I take landscapes. Something that I discovered about this lens is that I have to spend much more time at the camera thinking through the shot I am about to take. The lens is completely manual in every aspect so it forces you to get back to the basics of composition, focus and exposure.; there is no point and shoot with a tilt shift lens. I know that I have gotten away from the basics and have relied to heavily on the incredible auto-focus and metering systems of my D3. I am finding a lot of excitement in stripping down the camera and making all the critical decisions on my own.