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Palm Canyon Oasis at Anza Borrego

Sandra and I packed up our cameras and favorite lenses and headed to Anza Borrego State Park, an immense desert wilderness. There we joined a group of student photographers that combined learning about the natural history of the area with learning about how to take better pictures.

Take a look at my gallery here!

Here are the most important things I learned about photography while there:

• Lighting is the most important ingredient for any photo.
• Always shoot on manual exposure, otherwise you don’t control the lighting.
• The lighting level should be set to maximize the details of the subject of your photo, too dark and too light areas outside of that are less important.
• Every photo should tell a story, this is the basis of composition.
• Make your exposure a little darker to get blue skies, also shoot away from the sun.
• Get up early!
• Control depth-of-field, which often means carrying a tripod…

Digital SLR’s have much larger sensors than their point-and-shoot counterparts, which give them much smaller depth-of-field for a given aperture size (f-stop). Sometimes this is desirable, you can put the focus directly on your subject and blur the foreground and background, like this photo here. But this is not always desirable, when you are taking a landscape photo you often want the entire shot in focus — you need a very large depth-of-field.

To get a very large depth-of-field you need to use a small aperture (a large f-stop) like f16 or f22, which also means there is less light falling on the sensor, so the exposure needs to be longer. And a longer exposure will only work if you take it on a tripod, you just can’t handhold a 1/4 second exposure even if you have image stabilization. So you need a tripod.

This is also true for macro photography, I have the wonderful Canon 180mm f3.5 Macro lens, but taking a photograph of a nearby small object at f3.5 will result in a razor-thin depth-of-field: if you are shooting a photo of a bee, only part of its head will be in focus, and the rest blurred. So, again, you need a very stable platform for your camera — a tripod. Unfortunately that won’t stop the bee from moving, so for insects I do bump the ISO up as much as I can even in bright light so I can narrow the aperture (increase the f-stop) and maintain shutter speed.

So: serious photographers use manual exposure, and own a good tripod.