How does one get images like these.....?

Tony - very nice wildlife images. You are obviously a patient person.

And regarding the original post... if it were easy to get the images in question, there'd be a lot more of them. Aren't the best landscape, wildlife, etc., opportunities are available in the early morning... does anyone out there disagree?

M2C = My 2 cents.

antonoat said:

Hi
I am inclined to agree with you, trouble is whenever I see these amazing moments
I rarely have my camera with me, I suspect that is true for many of us here.
best regards
tony

http://www.wildoat.zenfolio.com

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Tom D
http://thomasdowd.zenfolio.com/

A well balanced, insightful response - nicely done, with overtones of blackberry, chocolate and pepper.....Seriously.

Steve Bingham said:

Ednaz said:

I will add that it doesn't have to be first sunlight in the morning to get rays like that. I've seen and shot them in coastal Oregon rainforest nearly mid-day when a cold front slammed into warm moist air and suddenly everything went foggy and misty. Same thing in New Jersey a few times.

That's true about almost anything photographic, though. One of the reasons that professional photographers have so many great images is that they spend 100% of their time shooting. They are, in fact, insane enough to set their alarm clock because the weather says a cold front is going to hit the next morning. Most of the time when I am up before the sun, it's because I have an early flight someplace. I've missed a flight or two when the light was so fantastic that I detoured off to shoot, but I can't do that every day.

And the photoshop versus dedication to seeking the perfect light argument: there's a reason that the best photographers still chase the light. You could photoshop the rays, but do you have the time it would take to get the image right on every leaf and tree trunk, and would you even have the knowledge of what those tree trunks should look like? There's a reason to shoot in the rain, or in the first sunlight when it stops - real water looks different than sprayed glycerin. Those who know, will know. If you want to be known for your photoshop technique, that's OK - but that shouldn't be confused with photography.

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Really? Do you realize that Photoshop was invented so that photographers could replicate in software what they used to do in the darkroom? Ansel Adams comes to mind with his many developing and printing techniques. If you had no darkroom how would you replicate his disproportionate reduction (potassium ferracyanide)? In Photoshop you would simple dodge the highlights only. How about simple dodging and burning (he did this many, many times on each print)? Contrast reduction masking? (why masking was included in Photoshop). Red contrast masking? Double printing with masks? Multiple enlarger printing (Jerry Uelsmann is certainly a great photographer), developing and printing for maximum tonal range (levels and curves in Photoshop), and the list goes on and on. After over 30 years of teaching darkroom technique to thousands of students, I am only too happy to see Photoshop come along. And yes, I consider myself a photographer, as did the dozens of magazines that published my photos.

You see, Photoshop is simply another tool in the bag for the competent photographer. Get it as good in the camera as you can, then make it better in the print. The best landscape photographer I know (and I have a half dozen friends that make 100% of their living doing this) uses Photoshop along with his 4x5 and Canon Mark III and Nikon 14-24 combo. Yes, lighting is everything, but Photoshop finishes the job. Without it, you will lose out to those who are proficient in it!
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Steve Bingham
http://www.dustylens.com
http://www.ghost-town-photography.com

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Tom D
http://thomasdowd.zenfolio.com/

Nice pictures = Right place, right time, right equipment and the awareness and game-plan and the ability to be there for the possible event. I would guess that the images were favorite haunts of the photographer. I suppose less challenging than catching the perfect rainbow after the storm...and how many of those do you see? M2C's

terrycasablanca said:

Sorry, I know this is hardly D3-D1/D700-specific, but as a D700 user this is the forum I always post in and trust.

None of the photos below are mine, however I'd really like to achieve a similar effect, i.e. shafts of light shining down onto the forest floor. However, I've never managed this in any of my "forest" shots. What might I be doing wrong? Does it only work when the conditions are quite foggy?

I must be honest - I've never actually "seen" shafts of light quite these in forests I've been in. I'm wondering if it's something that the camera picks up even if the eye doesn't, or perhaps I've just never been in a forest in the right conditions?







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http://www.rsrvd.co.uk/

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Tom D
http://thomasdowd.zenfolio.com/

First of all, let me say I love these images, no matter how they are produced. If real, all the better, but they are beautiful!

Here's one that shows a sun ray. What it doesn't show is the Navaho kid off to the right throwing scoopfuls of sand to catch the ray. No matter...it still looks great (to me!).



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Ken Jones

It is all about being in the right place at the right time.

I've got a couple of shots with light like this throught the trees - shot in the morning when the sun is breaking through fog.

You need something in the air to scatter the light - or in the water

http://www.flickr.com/photos/26955787@N02/sets/72157611757515073/
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I dont stand for the others, but the first photo is surely post enhanced by some computer program.

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http://flickr.com/photos/namnguyen/

Am amazed that so many believe these shots are the result of Photoshop. Images like this are captured by beginners and camera club members all the time, way way before Photoshop was heard of.

You check your area then the weather forecast then get up early and press the shutter or wait for sundown.

Carl

Get up early ....rain or shine.
Boris



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http://public.fotki.com/borysd/

I may be wrong, but I do not believe at creating photos at post, like photoshop.
For me (I know it is arguable) it is fake!

Answering your question, I managed to get some quite similar photos, not only the sunlight quality and angle is very important, but there needs to be some sort of difusion element in the scene, like humidity, mist, smoke or even dust to philter and materialize the light beans.

In cinema, we use mainly smoke machines to create this effect, but regular fire smoke will do, if you can use it safelly in a forest environment.
Some examples:
http://www.pbase.com/image/119469388
http://www.pbase.com/jdrpc/image/111705825
http://www.pbase.com/jdrpc/image/107521880

Dear Friends,

I took these photos today morning using my Nikon D700 + 24-70f/2.8 Lens

Regards,

Biji Mathew

Steve, your passionate questioning of my attitude about photoshop is probably misdirected. Jerry's work begins with incredibly well exposed, lit, and composed images. He begins with what would be terriffic photographs on their own, and then creates montages with them. However, he doesn't draw light rays with a brush. Nor did Ansel Adams airbrush clouds into his images. While they may tweak and optimize an image, and in Jerry's case do mashups, here's a very, very real line that they don't cross, which is adding something to an image that didn't exist.

I used to do multiple exposure, multiple sandwich work in black and white, registration pins, lith film, burning and dodging with color contrast film onto multi-contrast paper, and the result was made of photographs but it wasn't photography in the end, just like a collage made of photographs isn't photography, but a collage. The art work takes place in a different plane of the process.

The early poster seemed to suggest that you could amble out in mid-day sun, shoot the woods, and produce a convincing simulacra of fog with horizontal sunlight. I haven't seen it done yet. The guy who shoots all the liquor and soda ads with water flying everywhere - yep, he uses photoshop to layer them, but he doesn't create the water images with it because you can't get it right, which is why he gets paid per shoot what he gets paid.

The early poster it seemed to me was laboring under the worst mis-perception of digital photography - that you can be a hack shooter and produce beautiful, breathtaking final images. I know from seeing your work that you don't labor under that misperception, (although the passion of your defense of photoshop does make me curious now about what line you've crossed that makes you so urgently defensive). A bad photograph can be photoshopped into a bad image. No alchemy changes lead to gold.

I do a lot of photoshop post, I probably average five or six hours of adjustments, burns, dodges, local contrast on the fine art work I sell. I also do screen printed photos on polished and textured aluminum (some with real silkscreens, some digitally printed, and the silkscreen images sell for about 20x what a digital one does - that's the market's assessement of authenticity of art), where the images have been stripped to pure colors. I call the first photographs. I call the second silkscreens.

If I had the hands of a painter, I could produce the second in a way that would be indistinguishable from something that began with a camera exposure. The first, however, could not. (yes, there are photorealist painters, but most of them work through close copying of a photograph, not creation from the mind.)

You don't have to agree with where I draw that line. Photoshop is a slippery slope, and if you're going to slide down that slope, seems to me the world should value it.

Artistic processes command a serious premium in the art world over digital photographic processes. My metal prints are such that you couldn't tell which was hand screened and which was printed on my Epson 4000, but the hand screened prints are considered to be art, not photographs. Fair? I stopped trying to change the minds of buyers. I'll squeegee ink through a screen if I can get my vision that way. Images shot on film, and wet printed, command many times the price of images shot digitally or printed digitally.

Here is one I took last year. Perhaps not quite as dramatic as your examples but unmanipulated nonetheless. Right place, right time is the key.



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I post images because I desire feedback. Please feel free to comment, critique and or PP any image I post unless otherwise noted.

Darren

-Wayne

Then augment the results with a little Photoshop magic!

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Kabe Luna

http://www.garlandcary.com

brightcolours said:

Steve Bingham said:

brightcolours said:

RonAnnArbor said:

Um, not for nothing, the ONLY way you can tell if it is real or photoshopped is by asking the photographer.

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You can tell easily. The photoshopped "rays" lay over the image, dont go through them. The real ones leave sun spots on trees and the ground, and cast shawdows in other areas.

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And THIS TOO can be done with photoshop. Using layers it is very easy to make some rays behind the trees, some in front, and provide bright sunlit areas. I have done it for a client.

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I have never seen an attractive and convincing example of it being done with photoshop. Maybe your client is easier to "please", or you actually did a convincing job.... hard to tell without seeing it.

Anyway.. again, the above photos are real. Yes, maybe the colour balance has been altered on some or many ways, but the scene is real. And it shows.

brightcolours said:

brightcolours said:

brightcolours said:

In my many many many years of photography, including getting out of bed at 4 am to get sunrise photos, I have never seen anything like the photos posted occur naturally.

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I have seen and photographed them, early autumn (september, netherlands) was the best time for me.

brightcolours said:

Of course, you may live in a part of the world where that does occur, but I apparently have never been there.

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Steve Bingham
http://www.dustylens.com
http://www.ghost-town-photography.com

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This shot was early in the morning, gone in minutes, and the only reason I got it was I had my camera with me.



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Paul
Just an old dos guy

Try camping....

The conditions that create these kinds of light rays occur frequently in the spring here in Ohio. I shot the first image about 30 years ago on film. It was a foggy early spring morning and the sun was just starting to break through. The second one was taken in 2006 while on a casual hike with my trusty Coolpix 8800. As I recall, I was cursing the fact that I didn't have a "better" camera and tripod with me at the time; but at least I had camera and was able to record this fleeting image.
Dave Jolley
http://www.pbase.com/hockingphotos

...are God's way of making us feel lousy for not getting up early.
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Kind regards
Kaj
http://www.pbase.com/kaj_e
WSSA member

It's about time we started to take photography seriously and treat it as a hobby.- Elliott Erwitt