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Digital Outback Fine Art Photography
Handbook
© Bettina & Uwe Steinmueller
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3 Outdoor Photography
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3.1 Nature
3.2 Landscape
3.3 Animals and Birds
3.4 Flowers & Cactuses
3.5 Travel or Urban Landscapes
3.6 Colors & B&W
3.7 Nature Patterns
3.8 Macro
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This book is about outdoor photography. The question we often get asked:
Why not people? First of all it is just a personal decision and as such
it needs not really a justification. But this question often comes as
an offending "Don't you like people?". Why should we not like people
because we like nature?
We like Photos of friends and children. But then these photos are part
of our private life and will not be shared in a book like this.
So here we are: Outdoor Photography is our main subject. If you like
other areas of photography that is wonderful and we might enjoy them.
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| 3.1 Nature
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Star Fish in Tide Pool |
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In our normal life we are often distant from nature which is not mainly
formed by man. What draws us to photographing nature:
- Infinity of different landscapes, animals and plants
- Patterns of color and structure
- Nature is so organic and not constructed on a design board
- Watch a flying bird and you can realize how primitive a modern airplane
is
- Nature differs over the seasons and with the weather. The same place
looks never the same.
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| 3.2 Landscape
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Davenport in Morning Light |
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| We started photographing mostly landscapes.
This is the nature at large. Nearly all landscapes today have some traces
of man and it can even be a beautiful part of it. Especially landscape
photography is dominated by the light and weather conditions. Many landscape
photographers rarely photograph outside the sunrise/sunset boundaries.
We think there is a lot to be photographed outside sunrise/sunset but
have also to admit that the light condition during day time is often far
from ideal.
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| 3.3 Animals and Birds
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Hummingbird in our Backyard |
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Seems to be a strange to talk about "Animals and Birds". But actually
we consider Bird photography as an photographic topic by itself. The
reason is that there are so many and good bird photographers. Birds
are around us everywhere and there are so many species with spectacular
shapes, behavior and colors.
The famous bird photographer Arthur Morris made even the term "Birds
as Art" the name of his web site. There is a whole school of bird photographers
following Arthur to create very artful bird photographs.
Photography of wild animals has also a long history and the "National
Geographic" magazine got work for many wildlife photographers.
Since we are in California we also love to photograph birds and other
wildlife but more from the perspective that we find a lot of birds if
we look for good landscape photo locations.
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| 3.4 Flowers & Cactuses
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Bee at Villa Filoli |
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| Also a broad special section of photography
is the art of flower photography which we like very much. Flowers come
as wildflowers and cultivated garden flowers. Both show rich colors and
patterns. Also recently we discovered the beauty of cactuses.
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Cactus at Big Sure |
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| 3.5 Travel or Urban Landscapes
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Soho NY |
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We also love to travel and photograph what we find on our way. The
urban landscape can be as exciting as pure nature. Take New York as
an example. It draws us to Soho and Greenwich to explore this kind of
landscape. These are mostly places where time painted and structured
the scene.
Our most loved urban landscape is Venice in Italy. This city is created
by man but the time/nature made it so beautiful. We always regret finding
places which underwent restoration as one has to wait for many years
until it gets beautiful again.
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Venice Portal |
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| 3.6 Colors & B&W
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Fall Colors |
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Color is a very subjective issue and even very much related to the
social life in different countries. It is also very much related to
the intensity of the sun. Some colors which might look beautiful in
Mexico look very off in Germany and vice versa. We now live in California
where the sun is so different from our home country Germany. This new
environment also changed our photography a lot.
We will not show a lot of B&W here in this book as we currently less
focussed on B&W. But first let us say that we love the abstraction
of B&W photography. So why not do both? We really would love too but
we feel it is hard to switch instantly between thinking in color and
in B&W. That is why we right now concentrate on color and of course
we love color too. It might also explain why we love also photos which
are quite monochrome.
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At a Japanese Tea House in Hakone Gardens, Saratoga CA |
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| Still it is our dream to make a B&W book
about Venice: the probably most colorful city in the world.
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| 3.7 Nature Patterns
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Floating Grass at Alviso |
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Nature patterns are organic and hardly can ever be created by man.
Most of the patterns are hard to to show in their full beauty on a photograph.
Even the size of the print can then make a big difference. We have seen
the wonderful structures of the Bryce Canyon photographed by thousands
of photographers and only few succeed to capture Bryce beyond it's cliché.
Please understand us correct we still have to do this exercise and will
most likely fail too on our first attempt. It is just so difficult to
capture the nature at large on small photos.
But this challenge is the fun of nature photography. There is never
the one and only perfect picture.
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| 3.8 Macro
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| Although macro photography opens an entire
other spectrum of nature photography this is not really our subject. We
rarely photograph objects with a ratio larger than 1:2. We need to se
objects with our naked eyes before they get our attention and then we
think about how to capture its colors or patterns.
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| © Bettina & Uwe Steinmueller
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