12 Days Until I Hit The Road
February 11, 2019
The next photographer that I have watched and learned from is Chris Nicholson. He is based in southern Connecticut, New York and Charlotte, North Carolina. He is the author of “Photographing National Parks”. He is also a partner and workshop leader with National Parks At Night LLC.
He not only covers the aspect of camera settings but covers etiquette. He covers how to do light painting. Light painting is the art using a flashlight at night to light up the object that you want to take a picture of. It is almost like sculpting by lighting up a tree, rock or a building. One of the things that people don’t realize is that when a photographer goes out to shoot in the early morning light or late afternoon light, you can take as many images as you need to get the exact one that you want. As Chris points out, what I learned from him, is shooting at night well after the sun has gone down, there are a lot of other things that have to be considered. Focusing your camera is very hard to do and he gives several techniques to do that. Also, it is not a matter of shooting multiple images quickly. Each image may take up to 10 minutes to expose so therefore to shoot 3 images it could take 30 minutes or more to get an image and then it may not be the one that you wanted.
He explains methods of how to shoot star trails. You know those pictures that you see where the stars make circles in the sky. You can take long exposures or multiple short exposures and combine those exposures together in your processing software.
He is a Nikon photographer and as of 2016 used a Nikon D3s and a D2x and multiple Nikon lens.