Read The January 2019 Dan Bailey Photo Newsletter
Published: Tue, 01/22/19
Hi ,
New years are always exciting, they’re like blank journals. You start them off by staring at a thick stack of blank pages and reveling in the excitement of how you might fill them during the course of the next few months.
January has the same feeling, because you know that it’s filled with unending potential for new ventures and productive compositions. It’s the blank canvas for your next opus, and you know that in the next eleven and a half months, you’ll fill it with an inspiring number of amazing stories, photographs and insight that you’ve gained from all of the experiences that you’ll have.
Now that we’re three weeks into the new year, have you given much thought to what you want your photography to look like in 2019? If you haven’t already done so, take some time during the next few days and reflect on what 2019 will mean for you and your photography. How will you quench your thirsts for adventure and creativity this year?
What new ideas do you have, or what special projects lay on the horizon that you hope to start or complete this year? What kinds of pictures do you hope to shoot? Are there certain photography skills that you’d like to learn or improve upon, or is there subject matter that you’ve been dying to explore?
You don’t necessarily have to plan things out in detail right now, but start tossing those ideas around in your head and see where they lead.
Behind The Landscape ebook Deal Extended -Subscribers save 20%
At the end of November, I released my brand new ebook, Behind The Landscape - A Manual for Seeing, Composing and Processing Captivating Imagery.
In this comprehensive guide, I take you behind-the-scenes during the creation of sixteen of my favorite landscape images I’ve made in the past five years.
For each example, I walk you through the entire process. I let you look over my shoulder as I outline the exact gear I had with me, the specific concept I had in mind, my creative approach, potential problems I faced, and how I solved them.
I ran a 20% special deal when it came out, but given that the launch coincided with the beginning of the holiday season, that may not have been the best time.
With that in mind, I’d like to extend the deal again. If you missed the deal or if it just wasn’t on your radar at the time, I’m giving you another chance to download the guide at the 20% discount price. Through the end of January, order here and use discount code BTL20 to claim your special deal.
Behind the Landscape has already gotten some very good praise from your fellow subscribers, Visit this page to see what others have said about it. I’m really excited about this book, because it’s structured very much as if you’re taking a virtual photo workshop with me.
With a horizontal format, 105 full-page spreads and a special bonus, BEHIND THE LANDSCAPE is packed full of practical photography tips and creative insight from my 20+ years as a professional photographer and instructor. And of course, it's filled with stunning imagery! I really think it can help you improve your seeing skills and your compositional techniques, so I hope you’ll check it out.
Photography Tip - Shooting Telephoto Landscapes
Although wide angle lenses are often touted as being the ideal choice for shooting landscapes, don’t discount your long glass for this purpose. You can achieve stunning results by using telephoto lenses for your nature scenes.
Long lenses give you increased relative size of the subject in your frame and greatly compressed perspective. You can apply these characteristics with great creative advantage by portraying prominent, striking subjects against bold backdrops. You can also use the extremely shallow depth of field inherent in telephoto lenses to throw your background elements way out of focus.
I love using my Fuji 100-400 lens for shooting this kind of imagery, although you can also get similar results from any mid to long range prime or zoom lens. Check out my most recent blog post. Extreme Telephoto Landscapes to see more examples of how I use this technique and spark some ideas for yourself.
3 Blog Posts You Might Have Missed
Looking through my web traffic stats for last year, I’m able to see which posts were the most popular, and which posts hardly saw any viewers in 2018. Here are three of my blog article which were only viewed a handful of times last year. They’ve been up of awhile, so maybe you saw them awhile ago. Either way, I think they offer good insight about creativity.
Being Self Critical Within Your Creative Process
This post explores the four roles of creativity as they affect our own search for original ideas, how we evaluate and put them into practice and how we often put up our own roadblocks that prevent our ideas from getting out. It’s based on a fun book I read about 25 years ago by Roger von Oech.
Comparing Yourself to Last Year & Trying to Recreate The Past
This one seems timely, since we’re at the start of a new year. It’s inevitable that as humans, if we experience a glimmer of creative success on any given day, in any given situation, we inevitably try to recreate it in the future and try to match it, or improve on it.
When looking at our photos form last year, we would expect, or at least hope that we can improve on what we did last time, but sometimes it just won’t happen, for whatever reason, and that’s ok.
In this post, I talk about how this affects our creativity and how not to let it drag us down.
Photography Books Recommended by My Readers
A few years ago, I asked my readers to recommend their own favorite photography books. Here are some of the titles they gave. Do you have any favorites of your own? List them in the comment section and I’ll add the to the post.
Flickr - The Best Photo Sharing Site
Last last year, SmugMug purchased the photography site Flickr, buying it out from under the massive Verizon/Yahoo conglomerate. The reason: Flickr is a great site and it deserved to be given the prominence and care it deserves.
Photographers love Flickr, because it’s very much geared towards photography and interaction in a way that most other social sharing sites like Instagram and even 500px aren’t.
Flickr isn’t a popularity contest. It’s not about metrics, ads or influencers. It’s about photography and it’s always offered a great way to display your images, view and follow other people’s work have discussions about photography. In many ways, it’s always been the best photography sharing site of all.
I’ve been on Flickr for years, but I'm sad to say that I kind of fell off for awhile. However, I’m back on and I would like to encourage you to get back on as well, or consider joining, if you’re not already on there.
You can see my own photostream here. I also have a dedicated group. My Outdoor Adventure Photography Group is a great way for you to share your images and have me, and your fellow shooters see them. It’s better than using email and much more visually engaging than Instagram. I’d like to see this page grow with more photos and even some
discussions.
If you’re a Fuji shooter, I would also recommend joining the Fuji X Forum group which is the official Flickr group of the excellent Fuji X Forum website.
Around the Web
Patricia Davidson is a landscape photographer based in Oregon. I follow her on Twitter and have always liked her photography. Landscape Photography Magazine ran a profile interview with her last year. She’s got a great eye, so this is worth a read.
20 Brilliant Novels About Photography - Looking of something to read? Digital Camera World post this list of fiction titles that revolve someway around photography. There’s a good mix here, from mysteries, suspense, historical fiction, crime dramas, romance, and contemporary fiction. I’ve read one of these books; I might have pick up another one!
SmugMug just released a brand new short film called Framing The Journey. Made with my good friend Karen Hutton, this is a wonderful vignette that profiles her approach to travel photography and being a creative human being. Karen is such a wonderful artist and this is a beautiful film. It’s worth six and a half minutes of your time
Do you listen to podcasts? Light Stalking has compiled a list of the best photography podcasts out there. With a wide range of styles and topics, there’s something for everyone on this list who wants to engage and listen to people talk about the art, craft, method, history and business of photography.
Ok , that wraps up my January newsletter. I hope you enjoyed this issue and are inspired to get out and shoot some awesome photos this year. Thanks so much for reading, enjoy my recent posts and have a great week!
-Dan
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I just got back from the Great Smoky Mountains, where we just finished our third Fujifilm X-Photoraphers Nature and Travel Summit. These 4-day intensive workshops are specifically designed for Fuji shooters. We teach photographers how to
get the most from 
Last fall, Skylum announced that the were developing a catalog module for Luminar which would make it not just an image processing program, but an asset management tool as well. Originally, this update was slated
for early 2018. I was very excited to hear 
I often get questions from readers and workshop students about how I exposure for my scenes. Which exposure mode do I use, how often do I bracket, and in what increments? Which metering pattern do I prefer, center
weighted, spot or multi segment? 
I’m excited to announce the release of my brand new ebook, BEHIND THE LANDSCAPE: A Manual for Seeing, Composing and Processing Captivating Imagery. In this comprehensive eBook, I take you behind-the-scenes during the creation of
sixteen of my favorite landscape images 
In one week, on December 18, Software will release Luminar 3. This much-anticipated update to what has become a very popular photo editing app will contain the new Library module, which will now allow you to use Luminar to
import, store 
Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. Best wishes for lots of joy and good cheer during this most wonderful of seasons and for inspiration in the coming year. Follow @Danbaileyphoto Wishing everyone a very Merry
Christmas and 
Happy new year! Now that 2018 is officially a wrap, it’s been fun to look back and remember all the adventures, projects and fun times that the past year brought. With my 50th birthday trip to Islay, 2,674 miles of    |
Unsubscribe to this newsletter |