Shooting Silhouettes
One of the subjects I shoot more than anything at night are silhouettes. They are perfect to capture with little effort and all you need to do is get the right location and subject…then plan for the best light and volia!!! you have your powerful silhouettes. Shooting into the sunlight causes your cameras light meter to close down for the bright light. The result is a dark subject and beautiful background. With digital, all you need to do is check your LCD on the back of the camera and see if your background is exposed the way you want. If it is and the foreground subject is black, then you are all set.
There are so many great subjects that make a perfect silhouette and you can use the ambient light from daytime or nightime or set up lights yourself as I do many times with pregnant women. Studio silhouettes make pretty strong photographs and you can tailor the lights to get just the look and feel you need.
Whether you are indoors or outside, silhouettes can make for some incredibly dramatic photographs. From the camels walking along the sand dunes in India to a lone woman on the UBein Bridge in Burma at sunset to a model in the desert of Joshua Tree……silhouette possibilities are endless. There is nothing else like a powerful silhouette!!
Afterglow: Shooting after dark
One of my favorite things to shoot are images after dark. I love to venture out before the sun sets and get shots that are almost surreal and that are hard to perceive with the naked eye. With a little bit of effort, you can get the most beautiful cobalt blue skies, car trails and star trails, gorgeous motion blurs and have timeless images that have a completely different look from a daylight shot.
I love shooting stars at night and recently bought a book called Creative Night, by Harold Davis, which has really peaked my curiosity and has made me want to try more ideas. He is a great photographer and a master of shooting star trails, which is something that I want to try more of. When you are shooting after dark, so many subjects can take on a whole other look and feel and many times I can sense during the day, how they might look at night. Sometimes you need a 6th sense, because you don’t always know if it is a waste of time or not. But more often than not, the creative possibilities at night and produce some of the most powerful pictures that you might ever take.
I love shooting car trails and look for great shot ops wherever I am, whether I am in Los Angeles or abroad. Setting your camera in the right location on a sturdy tripod, with a cable release and exposure time anywhere from a few seconds to even 30 seconds, can produce dramatic results.
Many times I count how many seconds it takes for the car or cars to travel from one point of my viewfinder to the other and then I know how long to set my exposure for. When I was shooting the Golden Gate bridge last week, I knew that I needed more than 30 seconds for the cars to go across some of the bridge, but I chose around 15 seconds and that worked just fine for most of the shots.
When I shot the cars going down the amazing curves of Lombard Street, I I did have the exposure at 30 seconds, which also often was not enough to capture the entire car from top to bottom. But when you shoot many images, you can use a layer mask in Photoshop, and paint in car trails wherever they are missing and finish your image perfectly. When shooting car trails at night, being a master with layer masks is the best tip I could give anyone.
I tried to get a different angle of Lombard Street on my last trip to San Francisco. Form several blocks away, I was able to find the view I wanted and it gave me this incredible zig zag look which was just what I wanted. Lombard Street is probably the most famous street in the city and capturing it at night is my favorite way to shoot it.
On the shot of the Oakland Bay Bridge from below, I knew in my head what I wanted to get but it was not the easiest shot to capture. It is illegal to climb down to shoot it from this vantage point but it is the only way to get this angle. Being a photographer often means having everyone tell you that you cannot take your photos. It’s pretty frustrating and it happens to me all over the world. From shooting at the Louvre in Paris to the Disney concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles,
all of the guards will for sure tell you to get rid of your tripod. Shooting after dark, almost always, requires a tripod so putting up with security guards is something we all have to deal with constantly.
At Los Angeles international Airport, LAX, my favorite view is from the top of an office building overlooking the airport. Being an instructor at UCLA, they gave me special permission to go to the roof with one of my students and I was able to capture time exposures of all of the cars just after sunset. I tried to get the cobalt blue sky, that appears for about 10 or 20 minutes, a little time after the sun goes down. After the sky went darker, she and I continued to keep firing away and got many more great images. These kind of locations are not your typical places to shoot but they are iconic and to get good images for my stock photography collection and these are what I strive for.
One of the bonuses you get from long exposures is that you usually are shooting with a small aperture. The long exposure requires you to have a pretty small f/stop and in turn the bonus that gives you are the beautiful stars from your bright light sources. 
This means that most street lights and bright lights give you the multi shaped star patterns and add some zing to your images. It is just a nice little incentive to try and go shoot more at night. You can see this in many of my night shots including my image of the Blade Runner like pedestrian walkway in the middle of the freeways in Shanghai. I never get tired of shooting in Shanghai, especially at night because of the endless possibilities for shooting after dark. Grab your tripod and go look for some incredible night locations because they might just be some of the best photos you could ever take!
The Super Wide View
Choosing the right lenses for your photo arsenal can be perplexing and expensive. After a basic lens, the most common lens that people usually buy is some sort of telephoto lens that often is a zoom telephoto. I use these lenses all the time and the 70-200 f2,8 IS from Canon is my workhorse. But many people do not realize the importance of a wide angle view or even a super wide angle view. I love to shoot super wide shots and one of the benefits of having a digital camera with a full frame sensor is that you can shoot incredibly wide shots that are sometimes breathtaking. There are different focal lengths for wide angle lenses but if you want to try something different, shooting super wide can open up a whole new world.
The following three images were all shot with my 14mm Canon f2.8 lens, which was very expensive. Other manufacturers make similar lenses that cost much less but can give you similar results. I travel with my 16-35 wide angle zoom and also with my 15mm f 2.8 fixed lens but many times also take my 14mm lens. The 16-35 is another workhorse for me but the 15mm gives me an incredible amount of curvature and distortion in the images because it is not rectilinear. The 14mm lens is rectilinear and is about as wide as you can get with no distortion. For the ultimate in wide angle shots, you can always make a panorama shot with multiple images, but if you want to capture as much as possible in one frame, then super wide is your ticket. Super wide shots give you a totally different feeling than backing up with a normal wide angle lens.
The first image was of the Eiffel Tower and I wanted to get as much as possible of the tower in the image without shooting from too far away. I was on a tripod at twilight and was able to get a tremendous amount of the tower in my frame
The second image of the south tower of the Twin Towers in Los Angeles was shot vertical from the roof of the north tower. These buildings are the sisters of the Twin Towers in New York and were designed by the same architect. I wanted to get as much as possible in my frame and so the 14mm was what I needed.
The last image was in Burma when I had spent the day with seven amazing monks that I had “borrowed” from a local monastery. I had also asked for seven parasols, which I knew I would use somehow in some of my shots. I decided for one of the shots to get down on my back near a temple and asked all of the monks to circle around me and look down. I had put on my 14mm lens knowing that I would need as wide as possible lens so as to not cut off any of their faces. The 14mm was the perfect choice for the job…..and I was completely happy with the result. Super wide angle shots are like nothing else……and well worth the investment!
Images in the United Nations
I was fortunate to have the Untied Nations in Bangkok want to use four of my images from Asia to be on permanent display. The 4′ x 6′ images are in the General Assembly room of the UN and it was really an honor to be included in this prestigious exhibit. They have invited me to come see them next time I am in Bangkok and I can’t wait till then!
