I am happy to announce that I now have an online ordering portal here on JonPFischer.com for my 8th edition of the Fischer Photography calendar. This year’s ‘American Landscapes’ edition brings images from across my portfolio together to celebrate the diversity and beauty of the natural world. Visit the Fischer Photography Shop to order now, or browse the other special offers being added daily this fall. Not finding what you’re looking for in the shop? Head over to my full Portfolio to custom order from a wide variety of my …
Lightroom for Landscapes – Controlling Color
Without light, there is no photography. So it’s no wonder that when it comes to editing, most people dive into the light first. However, light and color are tied to the hip when it comes to editing in Lightroom. Where in Photoshop you have different blend modes, such as luminosity, that helps decouple these two elements of the image, in Lightroom where one goes, the other isn’t far behind. So understanding these two parallel concepts on their own as well as how they interact is vital to your ability to create …
Lightroom for Landscapes – Controlling Light
Without light, there is no photography. So it’s no wonder that when it comes to editing, I first start with the light. The human eye can see at least twice the dynamic range as your camera’s sensor, even the best cameras out there no where near the human eye in this regard. Add in a slight misjudgment of exposure settings that need to be corrected, or simply artistic style decisions that you wish to make, being able to successfully edit your RAW files in Lightroom for light correction is the …
Show and Tell – Barn Burner Vertical
As they say, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” – as so was the 2018 Fall trip to the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina. And that enemy in our case was Hurricane Micheal. It’s path up the east coast put it squarely over where my shooting partner and I were planning to be. So a detour into Kentucky was quickly planned on the fly so we would be on the outer edges of it’s influence instead of sitting right under it in a downpour for 2 days. …
Landscapes 301 – Ultra-wide Compositions
The ultra wide lens is the single most effective tool in the Landscape photographer’s kit to bring a huge swath of earth and sky into a single image. It is also one of the most difficult to use effectively, as it is not forgiving of poor composition skills, demanding more out of the photographer with every shot. Get it right and you’ll be rewarded with a dramatic sweeping view that pulls the viewer in from the near by blade of grass and throw them all the way to the tallest …
Photoshop Fundamentals – Understanding Layers
Making the jump from Lightroom to Photoshop can be an intimidating proposition. Much like that first time you switched the camera from Auto all the way to that frightening ‘M’, suddenly you had more tools to work with than you knew what to do with. No longer was the camera handling everything behind the scenes and making the majority of the decisions for you; now you had to know the correlation between Shutter Speed, Aperture and ISO to make the image you wanted. While Lightroom isn’t exactly the ‘Auto’ of …
Show and Tell: Possum Kingdom Invasion
“If there’s one thing I know, it’s never to mess with mother nature, mother in-laws and, mother freaking Ukrainians.” – Skinny Pete Storm Chasing – it has become extremely popular in recent years, however it’s also very dangerous, not only to you, but others on the roads as well. Mother Nature is not to be taken lightly when she’s full of anger and fury. For this single reason, I choose not to chase on my own, but instead have formed friendships with a couple of experienced chasers whom I trust. …
Show and Tell – Artists Palette, Death Valley
The for my first major trip of 2018, I set my sights on Death Valley National Park. One of the few places with a good chance of being ‘camping weather’ at the end of February, and a location I had wanted to shoot for some time. Clear skies during the day and partially cloudy skies at night frustrated me much of the time. While the weather wasn’t as cooperative as one might hope, I can’t complain too much either as I think the warmest we ever saw was in the …
The PNW Chronicles: The Mountains
For a Texas born and raised photographer, I consider the Pacific Northwest my second home. I traveled west most of my young life, most of my relatives lived in California or Oregon, so every year we almost always boarded the first flight headed that direction after the end of the school year. And while I’ve visited Southern California enough for all the Hollywood glamour to more than fade from my eyes, the Pacific Northwest has done more than an equal amount to capture my soul. From the coasts to lush …
Death Valley National Park – February 2018
For my first major trip of 2018 I set my slights on a location I had not visited since I was a kid in the back seat during a family vacation – Death Valley. I distinctly remember driving through Death Valley during some family vacation, it was late enough that the rental Town Car had an outside temperature gauge which was of course an interesting stat for a dash through the valley in what was most likely June, but I’m also fairly certain we didn’t stop to experience the valley …
Landscapes 201 – The Magic Hours
“Noon” – a four letter word to a landscape photographer. There is nothing more important to the quality of our landscape images than the quality of light entering the front element of the lens and ultimately onto the sensor or film. There are two distinct times of day when the light of the world is at its best; sunrise and sunset. These two times are known as the Magic Hours and each is split into two halves. The Blue Hour and the Golden Hour. Blue Hour occurs in the period …
Landscapes 301 – Long Exposures
Photographs have the ability to not only show the world as it is, but also how we perceive it, and with the right tools, far beyond how the human eye can interpret it. In some ways the camera is inferior to the human eye (which in the wide natural world is far from being all that impressive), but in other ways the camera can be manipulated to capture views of the world that the human eye never could. Examples range from capturing the Milky Way in all of its detail, …