Photographing wildflowers in Carrizo Plain and Antelope Valley

In May I picked up my Sprinter van in Fresno, CA. After 2 months of waiting, planning and researching, I am ready to take the van back to Fresno to have Field Van start on the work…

I have been using my new mirrorless camera for about two weeks now and have some thoughts. If you are into wildlife or sports photography the new mirrorless cameras can be game changers…

As you may be aware, I recently purchased a Nikon Z9 mirrorless camera. I have only had it  short while but so far, my first impressions are very positive. One of my favorite features, being new to mirrorless, is the ability to see the exposure in the viewfinder as I am taking pictures…

I spent the Labor Day weekend exploring some new locations. It just so happened that the holiday weekend coincided with new moon. Milky Way photography is best photographed during new moon, when the sky is dark…after doing some internet exploration I settle on a remote area in New Mexico, known as the Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah Wilderness Study Area. This area is very remote and requires travel over miles of dirt roads, and dirt tracks. I did as much research as possible and had a pretty good idea of how to get where I was going. The challenge would be not only finding the trailheads to the various locations I wanted to visit, but also being able to find my way back to my vehicle in the dark.

I have been thinking about switching to a mirrorless camera system in the near future. I have heard and read so many good things about them lately. There are many great reviews out there with glowing reports on the autofocus abilities of both the Canon and Sony systems. But nobody ever tests these cameras on their abilities to do long exposures in the heat.

As you may recall, I switched to Nikon a few years back because my Canon cameras produced horrible color noise in the shadows when I did long exposures. I like to use my 15 stop neutral density filter to take 4 min (or longer) exposures in the daytime, to record the streaking motion of the clouds. Whenever I did this with my Canon cameras and it was warm out, I had the problems….I borrowed a Canon R5 and two lenses, the RF 100-500mm (to test out the great wildlife uses) and the new RF 15-35 to test out the long exposures and night images.

I dabbled in night photography a bit in the film days, and I have been to three total solar eclipses and one annular solar eclipse in my lifetime. But digital cameras and new software techniques have raised astrophotography and astro landscape photography to new heights (pun intended)…

I started down river early, doing my morning Facebook Live session. If you don’t follow my private page on Facebook, Lewis Kemper, you may not get notices when I go live. Every morning I go out kayaking I start off with a 5-15 minutes ride down the river live on Facebook. There wasn’t a lot to share that morning, but near the end I observed a lone otter swimming upstream. I mentioned that I could not possibly follow it since I was paddling with one hand while holding the phone for the Facebook Live in my other hand. It seemed like it was going to be a low yield day…I noticed some movement on a log up ahead and saw it was the single otter hauling a salmon up on the log for breakfast…

As you are probably aware, Adobe updated both Photoshop and Lightroom with some new features.  I made a quick little tutorial “Real World Sky Replacement” to show you the good and the bad about the new feature and how to get the most out of it.

I am a big fan of Auto ISO when photographing from my kayak because there are many times I don’t have time to make in the camera changes I want. Between split second action, and the fact that I need to try and keep the kayak pointed in the correct location, Auto ISO usually can get me close enough to get a good picture without having to think too much about my exposures. But sometimes it fails…