
Jackson Hole Total Eclipse Guide

Both myself and Thomas Macker from the Art Association were featured this morning on Jackson Hole KHOL 89.1 radio. Brielle hosted both of us to talk about the 4th Teton Photography Symposium.
For the spring Teton Photography Group program, we’re covering photographic composition. It’s the most important aspect of photography, well ahead of exposure and basic camera management. If you don’t know where and how to point your camera, all of the exposure controls in the world won’t help you.
We’re bringing in several professional photographers and artists for this one. Attendees will enjoy speeches from:
Each of these speakers brings their own photographic and artistic genre to life. Each is special in their own way, sharing their knowledge with the audience. They’re all worth listening to, as how they view the world will help you better view yours.
The symposium is on Mar 14, 2015, from 830am to 315pm at the Black Box Theater in the Center for the Arts.
Come, enjoy, learn and ask questions. I know I will!
Listen to the radio interview here:
Thanks to Kelly for recording this for me in her Toyota FJ (hence the tin can sound).
Some of my Old Bill’s Fun Run time lapse footage was used in the 2014 1% For the Tetons Video Blitz Film Festival. Check out the film here:
Any part with the race, banner or runners were my shots. There were taken with a Nikon D800, Nikon D300s, and a Sony RX-100 to create the footage for part of this film.
I used Nikon lenses with aperture rings to take all of the shot sequences to avoid flicker. When building up a time lapse video, flicker is the bane of time lapse shooters. It’s caused by subtle variations in the aperture setting when the camera takes pictures. You’ll never notice these in normal shooting but if you lay the shots down in a video sequence, the effect is distracting and ruins the video.
There are software tools to “de-flicker” or deflicker the video sequence. That’s all fine but it’s another step. All of Nikon’s new lenses are G series without aperture rings. I rarely use them but for time lapse. But when you need it, there’s nothing better. The only way to directly avoid this problem is to leave the G lens wide open or stop it all the way down. Both of these options aren’t as ideal.
Canon lenses and cameras used for time lapse shooting suffer from the same problem. If you are lucky enough to own a lens with an aperture ring and are thinking about selling it, consider that if you’re ever going to shoot time lapse, you’re selling off a superior tool.
If you own a Mac and have ever downloaded pictures to your computer, you’ve been prompted to add images to iPhoto. This is a very handy program for you to organize, edit, and share your photographs.
The program is built in, it’s free, and it’s quite powerful for the cost. Many people use the software and been quite happy with it.
However, if you photograph a great deal, are serious about your shooting, and really need to upgrade your images, the only major software on the market now is Lightroom. It has far more capability than iPhoto, being able to manage images with keywords, collections, heavy editing, and seamless integration with Photoshop.
What happens when you have overwhelmed the abilities of iPhoto and you want to expand your repertoire, go pro, or whatever else you might like to do with your images? How do you get these images out of iPhoto and into Lightroom easily? Unfortunately there’s no easy answer. There are software packages out there to do the conversion but there’s nothing that’s truly dominating the market.
You are most likely going to need to convert manually. Before you break out in a cold sweat, don’t worry, it’s not a terribly complex deal, just a bit laborious. However, once you make the switch to using Finder to organize your photos on the Mac then use Lightroom to edit the ones you want to work on, you’ll be set.
I spent the afternoon with a private lesson student working on exactly this process. There were over a hundred events in iPhoto to convert. At first it seemed overwhelming, but once I shared the tricks and procedure of how to make the conversion and organize the files, the student saw it really wasn’t a complex process. Just a bit laborious. Once the folders are set up in Finder and the files are exported as originals out of iPhoto, it will be much easier to manage, view, and share these images.
If you’d like help with this process, contact me and I can arrange a lesson show you how to make the daunting task manageable.