Pierre Steenberg

Explore

October 24, 2021 • Leave a Comment

We are back at the Cholla garden today. You can find this "garden" in Joshua Tree National Park. The garden can be difficult to photograph if you seek to do landscape photography due to the large number of Chollas. The best advice I can give you, as mentioned in a recent blog about this cacti garden, is to explore. Just walk around until you find y...

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Shooting from elevated positions

October 17, 2021 • Leave a Comment

I like shooting from elevated positions. The higher your elevation the longer or deeper the foreground - it stretches the foreground out. This translates into more depth. It provides a bird's eye view. It just makes the image more interesting as we don't usually see things from higher up. Who does not want to see things from above the trees? A hig...

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Exposing for a post sunset sky

October 10, 2021 • Leave a Comment

When the sun goes to sleep it can light up the clouds. The exposure value difference between the sky and the land increases dramatically and quickly. What I mean is that the sky can still be bright but the land turns dark. This often necessitates a longer shutter speed to get enough light to get detail visible on land. On the flip side of things, t...

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Dealing with too many of something

October 03, 2021 • Leave a Comment

The art of photography is to create some form of order, flow, and balance. We do so by choosing carefully what to include in, and what to eliminate from the frame. We spend a lot of time composing the image. We move around to change the relative perspective and position between elements in the scene. But what do you do when you arrive at a scene an...

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Foreground

September 26, 2021 • Leave a Comment

In many cases, strong lead-in lines start at the bottom edge of the frame and also act as the foreground element. Such lead-in lines are powerful as they lead you into the image. Ideally, we want the lead-in line to be the lead actor, the star of the show. We want to grab the viewer's attention and invite him or her to journey into the image. So in...

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Composing with a strong sky

September 19, 2021 • Leave a Comment

So the sky is where all the action is. But what if clouds beyond the brightest part of the sky are not as beautiful as in the other direction? In other words, you cannot place the bright nice section of the sky more in the middle of the image, horizontally speaking because if you do one side will have great clouds while the other not so much. This...

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Vignettes

September 12, 2021 • Leave a Comment

Perhaps the title of today's blog gives it away. You just looked at the title again, didn't you? Well, try your best to forget what topic this blog is about, just for a minute. Close your eyes for a bit, clear your mind and just look at the image below, making a mental note of your eye movement through the image. So, which path did your eyes take...

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Shoot while waiting

September 05, 2021 • Leave a Comment

So last week we looked at positioning the sun at an exact point in time. That image started about two hours before sunset as I arrived at the location and started scouting for a sunset composition. But now that a suitable composition has been found and we still have one to two hours to burn before sunset, what do we do? I always use this time for t...

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Positioning the sun

August 29, 2021 • Leave a Comment

I a recent trip to Joshua Tree National Park I decided to stop at a particular location to wait for sunset. As I always do I explored the area looking for the right composition. This usually means looking for a good foreground or lead-in lines, and so forth. This bowing Joshua tree caught my attention and I got the idea to position the sun at its t...

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Shoot a series

August 22, 2021 • Leave a Comment

We often think of photography as a single image capturing one moment in time. But then again, video is simply a bunch of still images stacked together and played fast enough to show smooth motion. Why not try to shoot in a series. Perhaps tell a story by using multiple images. One could also show progression with a series of images. A person could...

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