Recent content on Stephen Bay's Photography Blog
Landscape photography often involves significant travel. If you’re like me, you live in the middle of a big city and there are very few opportunities to photograph the natural environment without getting into a car or boarding an airplane. I’m luckier than most – I live in San Diego and have the coast within a 20-30 minute drive of my home. But before I moved here, getting to a…
The holy grail for landscape photographers is to be able to accurately predict sunrise and sunset colors. I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of thinking that the sunset was going to be great only to have the colors fizzle out. Or perhaps you thought there wasn’t much potential and started driving home only to be stuck on the interstate when the colors exploded. In this…
During the past year, I’ve been sharing many of my astro-landscapes and one thing that people have repeatedly asked me is how do I get my foregrounds so detailed and clean. Usually the problem photographers have when shooting the night sky is that their foregrounds are too dark, too noisy, or both.
Reflection of the Milky Way and night sky on the surface of a lake. I often create nightscape photographs by combining multiple images into a single final composition. This isn’t because I’m trying to add objects that weren’t there or create a scene that never existed. The images all share the exact same framing; the only differences are the camera settings and post-processing…
I do a fair amount of printing on metal (Chromaluxe) and I’ve tested out many different printing labs. Along the way, I’ve run into a wide range of problems. It can be extremely frustrating when you have a file that prints perfectly on most media (paper, canvas, etc) but comes out with major problems on metal. Printing on metal is not like printing on paper. With paper, I can edit my…
In December, I like to photograph the various public Christmas trees in San Diego. I haven’t got around to capturing all of them yet, but here’s a short list of the ones that I think are most beautiful. 1. Liberty Station The Christmas tree at Liberty Station in Point Loma is by far my favorite tree. The tree is an 88’ tall Norfolk Pine and is located in the North Promenade.…
With programs like Starry Landscape Stacker or Sequator image stacking for noise reduction has become very easy to do. The main question then is how many images should I stack? This question can actually be answered analytically with math and statistics but I’m not going to go into the details except for the final result. If you want to learn about the derivation, I suggest you look at the…
Two of the most popular techniques in astrophotography are image stacking and star tracking. Both of these are an attempt to reduce noise and get cleaner, higher quality images. As someone who makes large prints, this is very important to me and I’ve experimented quite a bit with both methods over the years (I started astrophotography in 2017). To give you some additional context, I want to…
Here’s a recent photo I made of a rainbow above San Diego’s downtown. I’ve been trying to get this image for a while now, probably a year or more. But I always kept missing. I would go to a spot where I thought a rainbow would appear and wait but I had no success. Rainbows are difficult to photograph in San Diego because it doesn’t rain much and when it does rain you need…
If you are a landscape photographer, you’ve probably heard of Manhattanhenge where the sunrise or sunset aligns with the streets of Manhattan. It’s an incredibly beautiful sight to witness with the warm light spilling all over the scene. However this isn’t just something limited to New York, and you’ll be glad to know we have this same effect in San Diego although it occurs…
This is a photo of the White Lady cave in La Jolla. It gets its name because according to legend a young woman on her honeymoon was washed out to sea when caught by the tide here and was never seen again. Later, visitors claimed to see her standing at the entrance in her wedding dress. The White Lady cave in La Jolla.
I’m a good note taker and over the years I’ve collected a number of photography quotes. Until now, I’ve kept them in a text file on my computer, but I thought I would share them. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of photography quotes you can find online, but these are the few that are meaningful to me. Not all of these are from photographers. Quite a few were made in the…
One of the problems landscape photographers face is how to adequately expose for the foreground without blowing out the sky. To be clear, when I use the term “blown out” I mean when the highlights are so bright they lose detail and color. You may have also heard this described as clipped highlights, burn out, overexposed skies, or a washed out sky. The tones become flat, textureless,…
So you received your notification from the fair and have advanced to Tier 2 where you need to submit physical prints. Now what? You first need to decide three things before proceeding.
Normally, I like to take wide landscape shots where I try to get everything in the frame including an epic sunset. But lately, I’ve started focusing more on intimate scenes, like this photo, where I isolate a small section of the landscape. This is from the La Jolla coast and taken just before sunset. I’m standing on a low cliff and pointing my camera down towards a part of the beach…
I often get asked where’s a good place to photograph in San Diego. Usually the question is from someone visiting but even locals will occasionally ask me for ideas. San Diego is a large city and it’s hard to know all of the areas even if you’ve lived here your entire life. I’ve been photographing multiple times a week for years and I’m still discovering new spots.…
I’ve been working on a project to photograph sea caves on the San Diego coast . This has been on going but I started devoting a lot more time to this in the past year. Approaching this as a project has been very helpful in focusing my efforts, planning more effectively, and staying motivated especially during times when inspiration wanes. However most of the photographers I know don’t…
As a photographer, you’ve probably heard of DNG files and are wondering if there is any advantage in using them and if so, is it worth converting your existing library of raw files. I shoot exclusively in raw format but for the past few years I have been converting them into DNG and deleting the original files. In this article, I’ll go over some of the advantages and disadvantages of…
Here’s a short end-of-year checklist for photgraphers. Make sure you have up-to-date backups of your files. If you don’t have any backups, now is a great time to start. The general rule is that you should have 3 copies of your data with at least one offsite. The offsite copy could be a hard drive at the inlaws house or in a safety deposit box. You can also use a cloud provider like…
Panorama of the San Diego skyline taken from Point Loma. This is stitched together from six individual photos to create a very high-resolution photo. I recently made this panorama of the San Diego skyline. This was a planned shot where I waited for the conditions to be right. Because I print my images, sometimes very large, I wanted a panorama that was stitched from multiple individual shots to…
This is an issue that initially confused me to no end. If you look online, you’ll find competing recommendations for what whitepoint you should use for monitor calibration. The guidance from most photography sources says to use D65 (or 6500 Kelvin) as the recommended whitepoint. But if you look at the graphic arts and printing industry, their literature says to use D50 (or 5000 Kelvin). Why…
Traditionally prints are signed with a pencil and I prefer to use one whenever I can. Pencils work great on matt paper which has a rough surface that picks up the graphite in the lead. However, I make most of my prints on various types of glossy, luster, or baryta papers which are coated and prevent the pencil from leaving a visible mark. I’ve tried many different pens and markers and none…
I’ve been photographing the sea caves around San Diego for the past several years. They are one of my favorite subjects, I really enjoy finding, exploring, and photographing them. To me, discovering a new cave is like coming across a hidden pirate’s treasure. I’m not sure why i’m so drawn to the caves but they’ve always seemed like a comfortable space offering a bit…
I made this photo at Imperial Beach Pier which is only a few miles north of the border with Mexico. I didn’t do a lot of planning on this day but I felt like photographing at the coast and making a seascape. Usually I check the directions of the clouds and the tide levels before deciding exactly where to shoot sunset – in this case I realized that conditions would be good here and I…
As someone who prints a lot, I often get asked if it’s worth buying a possibly very expensive printer and printing your work at home. There isn’t a simple answer but in short I would say that if you enjoy the printing process, then by all means go ahead and get one. It can be fun, artistically rewarding, convenient, and may be cheaper than using a lab. The flips side is that you can…
This summer I made a few trips out to the California desert to photograph some abandoned trains and railway tracks. There are lots of these spots maybe just an hour east of San Diego. Most of my shooting was done with the Milky Way as a prime subject of the composition. But on the last trip out, I decided to ignore the core completely and point my camera in the other direction.
This is the second in a series of “making of” articles where I cover the creative and technical choices behind a photo that I’ve been working on. This is intended to give an overview of the important decisions in a short and easily digestible manner. Crescent moon setting behind the California Tower in Balboa Park, San Diego on 4/21/23. Planning This photo of the crescent moon…
I thought I’d start a “making of” series where I cover the creative and technical choices behind a photo that I’ve been working on. This is intended to give an overview of the important decisions in a short and easily digestible manner. Close-up of sand verbena in the Anza Borrego desert. This first photo is from two weeks ago when I went out to Anza Borrego State Park.…
Although I am a photographer, I think it’s important to study the work of other visual artists especially those in different mediums. Painters, illustrators, graphic designers, collage, and other 2d artists often approach their work with a different mindset and I feel there is much that photographers can learn from them. In a painting, nothing is accidental and everything was the result of a…
If you’ve ever had a hard time finding a photo that you took before, couldn’t find the original raw file for a jpeg that you have, or found multiple copies of an image but couldn’t tell which was the final version then read on. I help a lot of people with editing their photos and invariably one area that people need assistance is organizing their photo files. Often their photos…
I recently tried out a new software program for star stacking called Kandao Raw+. Up to this point I had been using Starry Landscape Stacker which has worked very well so I was a bit skeptical as to whether Kandao Raw+ could actually bring anything new to the table. But I was pleasantly surprised and the short summary is that Kandao Raw+ works extremely well and even handles problematic cases…
Adobe just released a new update to Camera Raw with a feature they call Super Resolution (this should be available in Lightroom soon). The main point of this update is to use AI and machine learning techniques to learn how to upscale an image to a higher resolution. In traditional upscaling methods, one basically stretches the image to cover more pixels and it works much like curve fitting in…
Lightroom has a great set of tools for editing your images. However, if you are not careful while processing many of the adjustments can create halos in your images. These halos can occur in any image but are more likely to be an issue in pictures which have hard edges set against an area of smooth tones. For example, a mountain or a building set against a bright sky is an ideal situation for…
Blend if and luminosity masks are two different methods in Photoshop for determining how a layer is combined with those beneath it. They are both similar in that they use the brightness values of the image pixels to perform a weighted average between the current and underlying layers. Blend if and luminosity masks are almost interchangeable and can often be used to obtain the same end result. For…
With today’s high resolution cameras, focus stacking is pretty much a necessity to get the maximum detail out of the sensor. Even with wide angle lenses, it is hard to get enough DOF to cover the foreground to the background and have everything sharp when viewed at 100% magnification. You could stop down to increase the DOF but this actually doesn’t work well with high megapixel…
If you have a photography website, you’re probably aware that the biggest obstacle to obtaining quick page load times is the size of your image files. You want to use large hi-resolution photos with low compression to present your images at their best. But inevitably this means large file sizes which load slowly. Slow loading files annoys users and makes them more likely to give up and…
When I first started focusing on landscapes (I shifted from travel photography) I was always chasing the light and seeking that epic sunrise or sunset. If I didn’t get a fantastic color burn, I said to myself, I’ll come back and keep coming back until I get it. I thought if I had a great foreground adding an epic sky would make the image even better (literally my logic was it had to be…
Recently I’ve been trying programs like Topaz AI to correct some issues in photos that I that I messed up technically. Topaz and the other AI based filters (E.g. Luminar AI, Photoshop Neural filters) essentially work by artificially generating textures and image detail so in theory there’s no limit to how much they can sharpen, remove noise, or magnify the existing detail in a photo.…
I have been a longtime user of Crashplan’s cloud backup service. I signed up in 2015, initially on the home program for $5/month and then switched to the small business plan for $10/month. It seemed to work well and at the start I had a only few TB of data. The upload wasn’t super speedy but it wasn’t terrible either. I don’t remember exactly how long it took me to upload…
I often get questions about the exact location where I’ve taken a photograph. For well known spots that can handle a lot of traffic, I generally have no problems answering this and may even offer up tips about the best time to go, where to park, weather conditions, etc. However for lessor known spots I might only provide a general location such as the name of the park (e.g. Joshua Tree NP)…
Beginning photographers often ask me how best to improve their work. I have a bit of a reputation for doing technical images that require a lot of Photoshop, so I think they expect me to say something about mastering post-processing and how that can take an average photo to the next level. But while post-processing is necessary, it is not the most important thing in my opinion. Other photographers…
When I’m making a photograph, whether it’s a photo I’ve planned out well in advance or it’s something I stumbled upon in the moment, I think about the following elements: Subject Light Composition Uniqueness Technical Quality The first 3 are what I call the big three. These are the most important factors and if you get these right you’ll have a terrific photo. The…
For some reason I like taking photos of astro subjects from the middle of the San Diego. Usually this results in a lot of pain because the objects are so dim and the light pollution from the city tends to wash everything out. To some extent, one can bring out these subjects with post-processing but there is a limit because the data (and information contained in the data) simply isn’t there.
Probably the most technically difficult shot to achieve in landscape astrophotography is a tracked panorama. But if you can successfully pull it off, it will yield the ultimate in image quality. I’ve done a few when conditions allowed (i.e. I had extra time for setup and I was able to carry of all the required gear) and thought I would share my equipment setup.
I love to print my own photos but when I started printing I was overwhelmed by the incredible number of papers available. There are hundreds of options on the market and I was paralyzed by having too many choices. So I took the easy way out. There were a few sheets of luster paper included with my first printer, so I tried them, liked the result, and I just stuck with that paper for many years.
Get a free video download where I go over the basics of photographing the Milky Way. You’ll learn everything you need to get started including: What camera gear do I need? How do I plan a Milky Way shoot? How do I take photos in the field? How do I post-process my images? The video is over 1 1/2 hours long and is jam packed with information.
As a night sky photographer, when I’m looking for locations to photograph, I pay close attention to the amount of light pollution in the skies. The stray light from building and roads in nearby urban areas can easily wash out the stars and make it hard to get clean images of the Milky Way. For example, look at the following two pictures taken with the exact same lens and camera:
While I was out on my last shoot, I did a quick test to show the effects of diffraction on image sharpness. If you don’t know what diffraction is, here is the dictionary definition: Diffraction is the process by which a beam of light spreads out after passing through a narrow hole or across an edge. Practically what this means is that when you use physically smaller apertures, the light…
When I need to make a print, I have a step-by-step checklist that I go over to minimize preventable errors. The last thing I want to do is send my file to lab for an expensive large print and then notice a dust spot when it’s hanging on my wall. 1 - Calibrate your Monitor If I haven’t calibrated and profiled my monitor recently, I will do so before starting to work on an image for…
Creative Goals I’m going to move away from stamp collecting. In the past, I treated landscape (and travel) photography like stamp collecting. I had a list of locations and I wanted to make sure I had at least one photo from each spot. Once I got my shot, I moved on to the next one in my list. When I first moved to San Diego, this served me well as I had no images and didn’t know the…