Pierre Steenberg

Lightning adds interest

June 18, 2017 • Leave a Comment

All of us have seen some great images of dramatic lightning. Most of those images are taken at night. Those images are easy to take because since it is dark when there is no lightning (it is night) you can just leave your camera's shutter open with a small F.Stop until you have a good strike. Actually, most of those images contain multiple strikes...

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Good light

June 11, 2017 • Leave a Comment

Have you ever stood before a wonderful scene in poor light? How did the images turn out? That bad, uh? Yeah, I have certainly had that experience. Let's play with the opposite scenario. Have you ever seen great light but had a bland scene to pair with it? How did the images turn out? Yeah, mine turned out pretty good as well. So what is the lesson...

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Too much cloud-cover?

June 04, 2017 • Leave a Comment

You are on location. The scene is beautiful. You have all the makings of a good image, but one element is missing. The missing element just happens to be the most important element; good light. There are too many clouds. The excessive cloud-cover blocks the sun. For the place you are at diffused light just makes the scene look flat. Even with lead-...

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Combining lead-in lines with light drawing the viewer in

May 28, 2017 • Leave a Comment

Over the last month of so, we have been spending a lot of time with lead-in lines. By now you should know how important they can be for landscape photography. Many good landscape images either have lead-in lines or a strong foreground element. We have also stated in the past that a photographer can use light to draw the viewer into the image. Remem...

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Clouds and God-rays

May 21, 2017 • Leave a Comment

I just love God-rays! I love that warm sunlight that bursts through the clouds and falls upon the land. To get such God-rays one has to be out when cloud cover breaks up, usually after storms. Since I lived in Hollister, California for a number of years, I know exactly where to go when storms break to maximize my chances of getting God-rays. I do n...

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Size and perspective

May 14, 2017 • Leave a Comment

Here is an image that I do not consider to be good. Yet, I may actually print this one large. Why? This image is one of size, scale, and perspective with a little surprise. It is the kind of image you look at for a while wondering why the photographer bothered to take the image; then burst out with excitement exclaiming, "wow, look at that!" You...

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Water movement

May 07, 2017 • Leave a Comment

We most often shoot in the direction of flowing water or against the flow of water; upstream or downstream. But who says those are the only two ways of shooting flowing water? If the water is flowing, I do not just look at the direction of the water, I look at where the action is. Are there rapids? Are there sections where the water is more bubbly?...

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Movement and blending multiple images

April 30, 2017 • Leave a Comment

Whenever there is movement the photographer always aught to ask him or herself whether or not he or she wants to show that movement or freeze that movement. Photography 101 teaches us to use a slow shutter speed to show the movement because whatever is moving will be blurred thereby given the human brain the notion of movement. Photography 101 teac...

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Look for the simple and the different

April 23, 2017 • Leave a Comment

When we are in a place where the main attraction offers many photographic possibilities it is so easy to just look at the main attraction that we do not even see other possibilities. We can be focused on the main attraction so much that we don't even bother to look at anything else. Hey, you will leave with the images you came for, so it is not tha...

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Using height and multiple lead-in lines

April 16, 2017 • Leave a Comment

If you have been following this blog for the last month or so you will know that we have been talking about lead-in lines and using elevation in our compositions. If you have not been following along, you may want to read the last number of blogs to catch up. We spoke about elevation and its impact on our images. We talked about using lead-in lines...

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