I had a long day, waking up at 5:00 AM to take a series of subways and trains up to Shenzen for some meetings. I had a Chinese VISA, which you don’t need to get into Hong Kong, but I had to use it to cross the official Chinese border after getting off the train. I failed to realize that it was a one-time use VISA, and I was scheduled to go to Shanghai the next day. This caused a lot of problems with the Chinese officials, a body of government with which I do not enjoy causing problems.

After returning to Hong Kong from a day in Shenzen, I was hot and sweaty and in the sort of meeting clothes that aren’t great for being hot and sweaty. But everything about Hong Kong was awesome, and I had to look hard for something to complain about. The sun was setting, and I made it up to The Peak just in time for a shot.

This is a 5-exposure HDR shot taken at 100 ISO with a sturdy tripod to get all the lights as steady as possible. Don’t fret if you don’t know what “5-exposure HDR” means. All will be revealed in the tutorial in Chapter 5, which I suggest you read after you go through the first part of the book to get a good idea of why and when to use HDR.

There were a few people milling around nearby, which always makes me nervous because I fear they might kick one of the tripod legs. So I sometimes spread out my biped legs like a dork to provide a human shield while the shutters go about their merry way.

Now that we’re getting to know one another, I might as well show you a family picture, eh? Here are my three kids in our home on a recent Christmas.

When dad is a photographer, there is a major degree of pressure to deliver photos on all the requisite holidays and celebrations! So, I decided to try and reinvent the family Christmas photo with HDR. Note that many of my inventions go down in flames, but as Winston Churchill said, “Success is the ability to go from one failure to the next with no loss of enthusiasm.”

Christmas scenes have many light levels—the lights on the tree, the deep greens within the branches, a roaring fire, lights in the room, reflections off the ornaments, and so on. It’s wild! I’m pretty sure this is why people like Christmas scenes so much—a wonderful treat for the eyes that is rich in texture and light. Traditionally, it’s been very difficult to capture so much richness in a single photo, save for a lucky and heroic combination of shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and lenses.

The tree lights made the faces of my three stunt children (who are also my real children) glow perfectly. No flash could have achieved this unless you are the kind of Rambo-flash guy who would bury one inside the tree to light their faces from the left. But let’s face it; that’s hard.

This is also a 5-exposure HDR. You will notice that I often use 5 exposures, but I could have done it with three exposures at −2, 0, and +2. Some silly Nikon cameras, like the D3X I use, will not let you step by twos, so I had to take five at −2, −1, 0, +1, and +2. The middle exposure, from which the kids’ faces were masked in and perfectly lit, was shot at f/4 aperture, a shutter speed of 1/250, 100 ISO, and at 28mm.

India is a beautiful and magical place. I wish I could say my journey getting to this exact vantage point was just as beautiful and magical, but it wasn’t.

I really wanted a unique viewing angle, and I was reticent to set up inside the complex with the teeming crowds. So, I talked my driver into taking me to the back side of the Taj Mahal because I had noticed a river running behind the complex on Google Maps. We started circumnavigating the place and came to an old trestle bridge. It was quite a long stretch to get across the river. The bridge was just barely standing, and everything about the dilapidated structure was sketchy. We were the only car on it, and it was hard to get around all the ox carts, donkeys, and bicycles.

Looking out the window at the rusting girders, I asked our driver, “When was this built?” He wobbled his head and said, “Eighty-three.” Well, I thought for a moment. That doesn’t sound so old. Then he turned back to me and said, “Eighteen eighty-three.”

When shooting something epic, why not make it double-epic with a reflection? Reflections are always romantic, and good composition can double the punch of whatever aspect you are trying to grab. When shooting a reflection, it’s sometimes best to get as close to water level as possible. In this case, even my tripod was too high. The mud bank was soft. I asked my camera for forgiveness before I buried it bracket deep in the mud to keep it steady for the exposures.

While driving from one side of Iceland to the other in what was supposed to be winter, I spent a fair amount of time in the grassy inlands where some sort of heat inversion kept the ground green and fertile. I came across a few homes with thick, peat, grassy rooftops on the edge of a farm.

I’ve always wanted to live in a house with a grass roof. I don’t know where this desire has come from, but it remains unsated.

This is a 5-exposure HDR shot at f/5.6 and 100 ISO at 14mm. During the HDR process, you may find that it overamplifies the grass and makes it look a bit radioactive. I always reduce the saturation in the grass to bring it back to its original color. Something that is counterintuitive here is that the electric color actually comes from the yellow in the grass, not the green. Most of the color you see in vibrant grass is actually yellow. I realize you might find this unbelievable, so next time you take a photo of a grassy area, jump into Photoshop, open the Hue/Saturation dialog, change the drop-down menu to Yellow, and drag down the saturation. The grass will turn almost all gray with very little green remaining.

Also, notice what it is like to process grass when the sun is hitting it versus during cloudy or dusky conditions. Grass is translucent and reflective, so it can bleed a yellow glow. Depending on the time of day, you may find yourself doing slightly different maneuvers with the HDR adjustments.

After a four-hour plane ride deep into the Andes, we started to get farther into the wilds of Patagonia. Perhaps I should explain that I was on this trip with a very good Russian friend named Dima, who is also a photographer. He brought four other Russian friends with him. Despite our friendship, he paired me with a non-English-speaking roommate named Yuri who never ceased to amaze. Within five minutes of dropping him off in my room, Yuri was in his underwear and I noticed his approximate overall size was that of a smallish beluga whale. This ended up propagating many other problems. For example, on the flight to El Calafate, our small plane had a bit of a hard landing because I was not sure the pilot was fully informed of Yuri’s weight.

After setting up camp in El Calafate, we went out to the edge of Lago Argentino that night to shoot the sunset and the Perito Moreno Glacier. Every few minutes you could hear giant shards of ice calve and drop into the lake below.

The photo shows dark bits of ice floating in the water. Those are actually the clear bottoms that were once underwater but recently flipped over. In the midst of all this, and from out of nowhere, Yuri produced a giant bottle of cognac, which seemed to keep the Russians happy in the freezing cold. When I posted this photo on the blog and across the various social networks, many of my Facebook and Twitter friends requested a photo of Yuri. That night, while he slumbered, I endeavored to take a panorama of him. I considered the glacier as practice since it was also big, white, and cracked.

This image was shot with the Nikon 14–24mm 2.8 lens. The second of the five exposures (the −1 EV shot) was at f/8.0 with a shutter speed of 0.033 secs and a 250 ISO. As for the focal length, I think I had it cranked all the way to 14mm to take this shot. I’m always flummoxed as to whether or not I should take a panorama of these places, which essentially means I’d have to map out an invisible grid and then take a photo in each cell for later stitching using postprocessing software. For this photo, I did use a Nikon D3X, which already has a 24-megapixel sensor, making the final product a fairly detailed 6000 pixels across or so. There is some invisible point when enough is enough, and I never quite know what it is. One limiting factor is time of processing. Panos take a long time to shoot and postprocess, so that comes into the decision-making tree fairly early on.

Dare I give composition advice? I never know what to say in these cases because I am frankly confused about whether or not composition can be taught or it just comes naturally to some people. Since this book will attract people who have a native understanding and appreciation for art and composition, there is probably no need. However, on occasion I do run into people who are confounded on how best to compose a scene. I have extreme empathy for teachers who are forced to teach composition all day long. My three best pieces of advice are as follows:

• Make the interesting bit off center. Did you know Hitler was also a painter? His work was constantly criticized because he always put the subject of his painting in the exact center. Don’t be like Hitler.

• If you want to really nail the scene, make the interesting bit 1.61:1 from an edge. This is a magical number, and it comes from phi, the golden ratio. You can Google this and watch videos, and everything will become clear over time.

• Be prepared to break the previous two rules and center the subject in cases where the symmetry of the subject is perhaps more interesting than the actual subject. You can see this for example in a few other photos in this book like Humayun’s Tomb and The Open Road. But even in those cases, points of interest should either gravitate to the 1.61:1 spot vertically, or the shapes of interest and contrast should conform compositionally to a Fibonacci spiral.

The day running around Milan never seemed to end. So much to shoot and so little daylight! It turned out that my best shot of the day had absolutely no daylight at all.

I was tired and just wanted to go back to the hotel to have a cappuccino in the bar and edit photography on my laptop. But I remembered the really pretty train station and how I wanted to get a shot with nobody around.

I went in around midnight, found the perfect spot, and then shot away.

The HDR process always takes that slick concrete and makes it extra reflective. Reflective ground is great for photography. People often think that I “colored” the lights at the top, but there is none of that going on. In fact, I never “paint” on my photos. Colors that you see in them are actually there except in the cases when I apply a texture treatment.

In Texas, we get quite spoiled by the sunsets.

I grew up here, so I’ve been able to see thousands of them. This has inadvertently resulted in the ability to predict a good sunset a few hours before it happens. Then I have no excuse not to gather my rig and go set up for some shots. In fact, I have seen so many sunsets, I have a whole secret vocabulary to describe them, so I feel like the Eskimos who have 100 types of snow, the French who have 365 kinds of cheese, or the Seattleites who have 100 curse terms for rain. I’d love to combine these into a perfect storm and be at a sunset with a light snow, sitting beside an Eskimo, talking with a Frenchman who has brought the perfect cheese for the occasion, and drinking a coffee.

This is a 5-exposure HDR shot at f/16. This setup kept everything in focus and kept the shutter open long enough to let the clouds drag across the sensor. In these conditions, you don’t have a lot of time to fool around with settings because the sun is bookin’ it toward the horizon.

This is Gulfoss, the frozen waterfall in Iceland. Dark Age theologians used to believe this was the entrance to hell, which was originally a cold place; the innermost circle of Dante’s version was frozen. True believers would come here and cast themselves down into the chasm to try to rescue souls they were told had gone to hell.

It’s hard to describe how slippery this place is. I guess I could say it’s slippery as hell. The ground is already solid ice, and then there is a fine mist from the waterfall that forms tiny little perfect spheres on top that somehow take friction into a negative physics impossibility.

My advice to other photographers in such a situation is simply to be very careful. No shot is worth dying for, and getting a few steps closer for a shot that would only be 2 percent better does not fall within the margins of error inside our bang-for-the-buck actuarial tables.

I was captivated by this scene for some reason, and I spent a good deal of time thinking of how best to shoot it. On the final day of my trip to Glacier National Park, I decided on this treatment. There are many interesting details in this scene, and you can probably be thankful you were not beside me to hear me go off on a theoretic (a new Neal Stephenson word).

We enjoy beauty and puzzle over beauty at the same time. In a world of entropy, it is calming to take beauty, break it apart into what makes it so, and then piece it back together to bring order to the chaos. But I could not bring myself to work on the puzzle at all. I just drank in everything I was there to be with for the moment. I thought a little about the nature of wanting to create a puzzle, just to solve it, a notion that is meta-puzzling in itself. Other guests who come into this view no doubt sit down and work on the puzzle, possibly thinking they might finish it but with a sneaking suspicion that they are just putting a few pieces together for the next guest who comes to visit. It seemed to be sort of an altruistic long-term battle against entropy. So I chose not to mess with the puzzle and simply to focus on the beauty aspects as I held them in my mind’s eye. Puzzles tend to work themselves out on their own, which is a comforting thought, I suppose.

Shooting this photo is an exercise in frustration for traditional photography. There is just no good way to get the brilliant bright light from outside and all the warm light and textures from the inside at once. Even if you were to set up artificial flashes and lighting inside, it would be tough to get the reflections to “look” natural. See how the light streaming in casts appropriate shadows on the table, how the warm lights of the inn reflect on the column, and how other small details of light and shadows appear. Think about all we go through with fake lighting to get things to appear natural: It’s kind of crazy. The light is already there, so use it.

Let the HDR process accomplish what your eye does on the scene. First, your rods and cones capture a lot more data than the best camera sensors on the market. Second, your autonomic reflexes can adjust the amount of light getting into your eye by flexing the pupil and contracting your eye muscles. Next time you go from looking at something dark to light, think about how your eye muscles flex to adjust for the new light. The HDR process does all of this for you, albeit in a series of software steps that you’ve taken for granted all your life.

This is the first shot I took with my Nikon D2X. I’ve since upgraded, but I’ll never forget that camera. I was already a serious photographer, but that beast made it official.

As you can plainly see, this effect delivers a “painterly” style. I often have my work printed on canvas, which accentuates this effect even more. If you are reading this book, you are probably somewhere within the delightful sphere of “photographer,” so you understand a bit about what is going on here. This is one of the photos that hangs at galleries and always draws a lot of attention from people who have never seen HDR. They continually come over to it and start scratching the surface to figure out what the heck it is. The general public still has no idea what HDR is, and when people first see a printed canvas, they are always wonderfully perplexed as to how such a thing can exist on this mortal coil.

This was shot from the top of the John Hancock around sunset on a summer night. I had to catch a flight to Malaysia the next morning, and I was anxious to get the shot back to the hotel, processed, and uploaded before I left. I remember that the D2X let me take 9 bracketed exposures, so I decided to really blow out this HDR. I did all 9 exposures from −4 to +4 with 1 step betwixt. Honestly, that was pretty much overkill and the HDR processing just about melted my CPU, but it did turn out nice.

I consider myself very lucky to have a network of great photographers worldwide. I met most of them through the Intertubes where we are constantly commenting and giving feedback on one another’s photos. This has enabled me to meet up with master photographers wherever I travel. They are wonderful people to hang out with because they already know the prettiest places and the best shots around where they live!

One of the people I was lucky to have a photo adventure with was Rebekka in Iceland. If you are not familiar with her, Google “Rebekka.” We met at a coffee shop in Reykjavik and talked about where to shoot. We jumped in her car and drove a while until we reached a fjord. Nearby were horses running around like wild beasts. They have no fear of humans, so we were able to get close to them. The horses have long hair that reminds me of the shag carpets in our house when I was growing up. I’m sure the thick layers of hair evolved from the hypercold winds whipping around the edges of the sea.

I don’t shoot (take photos of) many animals, because I find it hard to improve upon what other great animal photographers have done in the past. However, here is a tip for shooting animals. It’s kind of a lame trick, but it always works. Use a wide-angle lens and get in close. It makes the animal’s head look really big and cute. Humans love big-headed animals; they always make people smile. Why this is, I have no idea. Note that this trick also kinda works with babies.

This was taken in the evening at MGM Studios in Disney World before we went to the big fireworks show. The only problem with making your family and 6-year-old son (he is now 8) stand around while you set up your tripod and take a bunch of shots is that it gives them ample opportunity to find little toys they cannot live without. I took so long to nail this shot that we ended up buying two toys that lit up in garish colors and made a lot of racket.

This is another great example of an image that was impossible to create before the evolution of HDR. I suppose the argumentative, know-it-all photographer (you know the ones at photo clubs who like to stand up and make pedantic points) could say that there was always something called “compositing” in which you take several photographs and frankenstein them together. That’s fine, but that is quite different than HDR because it does not get down to the pixel-by-pixel level of image adjustment. As you can see in this photo, a variety of light levels are under the hat, on the hat, and above the hat. Each of those areas would need hundreds of mini-compositions to look right. That would have been a near impossibility with traditional film, and it’s even still painstaking with digital. But the HDR process makes it all a heck of a lot easier.

This is a 5-exposure HDR shot at 100 ISO. Whenever there is anything like streaming lights, sun rays, search lights, and the like, the HDR process always makes them pop a bit. If you don’t want the meandering masses of Mickey ears to get in the way of your shot, be sure to use a high f stop, like f/10 or higher, to ensure that the shutter stays open long enough so that the photons they reflect are inconsequential.

One of the most common questions asked online about my photos is: “How do you take an HDR of a moving subject?” While it is true that most HDRs are taken with multiple exposures, that need not always be the case. The single RAW photo method of HDR is described in detail in Chapter 5. One important point I can add here, however, is to make sure that if you take a single RAW, keep the ISO as low as possible. A lot of noise can turn into a real problem when you’re trying to convert a single RAW file to an HDR.

This shot was taken one morning in Stanley Park in Vancouver, BC. Vancouver always seems to be somewhat cloudy, so the colorful trees around the park stand out nicely. A giant swan was floating nearby while I was walking around, so I took this single RAW and converted it to HDR to ensure that I’d get all the numerous colors in the trees and the various shades in the sky and water.

This has always been a special photo in my portfolio for a variety of reasons.

It’s the first HDR photo ever to hang in the Smithsonian. This made my mom very proud of course, and it resulted in her sending off more emails than the average Nigerian. It also helped to bring much notoriety to StuckInCustoms.com and did quite a bit to establish HDR as a mainstream art form.

As for the process, it was a tough night because I was up on the edge of a bridge that was rumbling as cars crossed it. I was on the edge of the bridge because I wanted to get the full vertical reflection while still capturing the scope of the lake. The evening was very windy, and there was a light driving rain flying into my lens. I had to wipe it down after every few exposures and try to cup my hands over the top during the shot.

This was shot at f/4 with a 28–70mm lens. There were 3 exposures at +2, 0, and −2 in aperture priority mode. I was happy the fireworks were shot off when there was still some ambient light from the sunset illuminating the storm clouds.

This is the Tomb of Humayun in Delhi. I arrived during Diwali, the biggest annual festival that involves burning lots of flammable religious memorabilia. Most of the tombs, mausoleums, temples, and the like were surprisingly empty, giving me clean access to cool places like this without tourists getting in the way of sweet photography. I know, I know, we are all tourists, but we don’t really like other tourists, right? It’s a strange phenomenon. However, I can say with ontological certainty that I don’t like tourists in my photos unless it is absolutely unavoidable.

The TV news broadcasts were filled with families celebrating Diwali along with nonstop, live, on-the-scene action reporting from the grand opening of Om Shanti Om, the Bollywood film of the year starring the incomparable Shahrukh Khan. From the previews I saw, the movie seemed to involve a lot of Shahrukh with his shirt off in huge musical numbers and copious amounts of slow-mo water exploding off his coppered abs.

The air in Delhi during Diwali was covered with smoke from the festivities. There was an acrid smell of stale carbon that was not exactly like a trip to Sedona. Luckily, my hosts got me a private car so I could get out of the city and head north to clearer climates near Agra.

The setup here was vertical because I felt the height of the tomb was more interesting than the width. Also, and this is a bit of a strange reason, vertical shots often look better in a blog! Yes, this is actually part of my reasoning. I think a lot about the way 90 percent of the people in the world will consume the image. If it is vertical and 900 pixels across, I can get 1200 or more pixels high, which will give viewers a nearly full-screen display.

The French-powers-that-be erected a giant Christmas tree in front of Notre Dame. It seemed like a perfect place to be at dusk, so I made it so. This is one of those places I visit every time I am in Paris, because it always has a soothing feeling about it. I’ve always wanted to get up on the roof at sunset, but those same powers-that-be won’t let me do that. This ends up posing a bit of a problem (albeit only in my mind), because all I can think about are the shots I didn’t get.

This was shot at f/4 and 100 ISO on a tripod. I wanted a little bit of blur of the people moving but not too much. Recall that I just said I don’t like tourists in the photo. Well, forget I said that. Obviously, sometimes it’s cool to capture a little hive of activity around an exciting place. If I were to crank it up to f/16 or higher, all the people would have disappeared. The focus was set at infinity, so I didn’t have to worry about a thin focal plane obscuring the important bits of the photo.

I had a long lonely weekend in Iceland, so I took a jeep out into the wild. I drove all over the country from dawn till dusk to see what I could find. The sky and landscape were an ever-changing palette of colors and clouds. The sun is so low on the horizon during the winter that you experience almost a five-hour sunrise followed by a five-hour sunset. I drove up and down one of these highways to the next, listening to all kinds of strange and eclectic music on my iPod, occasionally jumping out to take a shot of something like this: In the distance, you can see the snowy mountains that always seem to be just a few songs away.

Speaking of a long and lonely time, I both enjoy it and I don’t at the same time. I expect your reaction to being alone might be similar, since photographers tend to independently think in the same patterns. At times I really love being alone because it gives me distraction-free thought and creativity. But then again, sometimes I need people around me in order to be thoughtful and creative. I can’t decide which is best, but I’m pretty sure a mix is important.

Road shots are always fun, and although I hate to offer this advice because it is dangerous, it is often best to be in the exact center of the road. If you are a little bit off to the side, the photo looks a little bit off. I don’t know why this is, because we normally don’t drive down the center of the road. So you would almost expect a shot from the right lane to look more satisfying and familiar, but it doesn’t. Anyway, if you are going to follow this advice, make sure you do this on a road like this one in Iceland, which sees one car every two hours.

This was a 3-exposure HDR at −2, 0, and +2. The shots had to come in quick succession, since this is one of those sunsets where you can actually see the orange disc of the sun moving.

This photo is of Wat Arun, a famous Buddhist temple in Thailand. It is surprisingly hard to get photos of these places because the city congestion blocks out all the good photo spots. I’m used to rivers having a little sidewalk on the edge that allows me to set up anywhere. But the edges of this river were packed with all kinds of warehouses and fisheries, none of which I could get into. I finally found an Italian restaurant with a second-floor balcony. I was able to sit there, order appetizers, eat, drink, and take shots every few minutes as the clouds changed. The weather was very unusual that day. You can even see the sun burning through the low-lying fog beneath the fortuitous cloud formation.

At the restaurant I met another traveler. She was from Syria and made all sorts of funny and quirky observations. While I was taking pictures, we were talking about random topics. The conversation turned to coffee, and she started analyzing why Americans are so in love with Starbucks. She said, “You Americans walk around with those Starbucks cups with tops on them. They look like sippy cups. It’s like you are a bunch of babies.”

Earlier that day, I had spent much time on the boats you can see in the water. I had the sort of boat driver who apparently had little reason to live as we flew through tiny canals at 50 mph. It was a hair-raising experience! We would pass under small bridges that were covered with dozens of Thai children. After we passed, they would all jump and cannonball into the river.

I think about all the sunsets I’ve missed. I always seem to be out and about somewhere noticing a great sunset and then realize that I am not even close to my camera and tripod. It’s just unacceptable! This day and evening I was in Yellowstone alone. I had just seen a grizzly bear and a black bear about 30 minutes before I took this shot, both of which are pretty rare to see. They went on their way, and I was left in the middle of this area with just a few elk meandering a few hundred feet from me. I tried to not get overly “sucked into” the sunset, keeping in mind that those bears were lurking about. The ground was pretty marshy, which is not the most optimal condition for running from a bear. I’m not sure there are ever optimal conditions for running from a bear, but this was certainly not it.

With sunsets, I suggest moving around a bit between each shot. Make a game of composing as many shots as you can with the foreground. Remember to make the bottom third of the photo interesting. It’s quite important.

We’ve all seen these glorious sun rays in certain sunset conditions. They are traditionally harder than heck to capture with a single exposure. The HDR process helps to make the sun rays pop. Consider that there is nothing brighter in our visible spectrum than the sun, so when you are aiming in that direction, HDR is about your only option if you are trying to grab some of the colors in the darker areas of the landscape.

Akbar the Great has an amazing temple. It doesn’t have a bad angle, texture, or light condition. I wish I could send him an email and thank him for all the photographic fore-thought he put into building this place.

This temple is called Fatehpur Sikri, and it’s in the northern part of India, not too far from Nepal. Many examples of Mughal architecture are all over India, but this is one of the best.

An interesting tidbit about Akbar is that he was extremely religiously tolerant and allowed all religions to flourish for a while under his rule. This is why I found this scene so appealing. Although the architecture is Mughal in artifact, much of the influence is Hindu. Hinduism is certainly the predominant flavor in the area currently. To see this Muslim woman in her black niqab walking slowly across the chamber seemed to capture the spirit of the place. I had set up to take a shot of an empty room. But when this woman entered and started looking around, I waited until the appropriate time to capture the moment.

This HDR was taken from a single RAW photo. I had to keep it fast to make the woman as sharp as possible. The camera was set to f/4 and the ISO at 200. The shutter speed was 1/80th of a second.

I suggest that you get to know your camera really well so you can make nearly instantaneous changes. You will find that when you set up for an HDR shot, the conditions are much different than taking a portrait or other types of quick shots. For example, if I was going to take a multi-exposure HDR, I would have made the f stop higher, the ISO lower, and the shutter speeds would have inevitably been longer. I was able to quickly change these settings when this woman entered the room. If you have to sit there and fumble with your camera for even five seconds, the moment can be lost forever.

This is a remote Hindu temple in the Indonesian jungle. It was a horribly stormy day, and I could have easily found myself quite miserable, but I had seen this before, seen these patterns, and I knew I’d have the chance to see the sun again. Just for a few moments the sun appeared, and it was timeless. I didn’t think about the future, I just sat there, unconsciously moving around the temple and taking it all in.

I was with my best friend Will. We were completely soaking wet and smelled like wet puppies. I had a small clear plastic bag to keep my camera dry, and I gave him my extra one, which he promptly lost. For the trip he had bought a new Nikon camera and was using this place to test it out, which is not a bad place to experiment. This gave him something else to do rather than the usual thankless job of carrying my tripod. I try to tell him how many emails I get from people asking to travel with me and carry my tripod, but this falls on deaf ears. The best thing about having Will there, besides his perfect memory of movie scripts that he can quote any time, is that he can attest to the colors in the sky. It was an amazing night.

I encourage you to not stay indoors during a storm, unless there is lightning of course, in which case you should probably stay inside. Otherwise, forget what your mom told you about rain. We are all smart enough to know that you can’t catch a cold by getting wet and cold, and it’s OK to track in a little bit of mud now and again. Get out there and catch the drama of the scene, and on occasion you can combine the storm with a moody sunset to really create an image that you and others will see only once in a lifetime.

It was just past 10:00 PM and I was purposely getting lost on the streets near Sacré-Coeur. I bobbed and weaved through various little alleys, streets, and tiny bakeries (where I would just have to stop for a moment) before finding my way to this little faire. A small carousel was spinning away with petite French children screaming wonderful expressions of joy. I took four years of French in school, and I can still recall one of my first little books that had a cartoon of kids on a carousel in it. One tiny French girl was telling another to hold on: “Ayeeee! Sylvie! Agrippe toi!” (Sylvie hold on!)

It’s hard to say exactly how I knew the right shutter speed for this one, other than experience. I love the way the Nikon shutter sounds. The Canon shutter always sounds a bit weak in comparison. If you are a Nikon shooter and you hang out with someone who owns a Canon, listen to the effete shutter sound. Then you can place your camera body near your friend’s ear, fire off a serious cli-click, and rock that person’s world with your mechanical-decibel power.

I realize this is meaningless, but it’s just more fodder for the always entertaining and draining Nikon versus Canon argument.

Back to the shot: This was a 5-exposure HDR at f/4 aperture, shutter speed 1/6, and ISO 100. I can put my head near the Nikon and listen to the cadence of the five shutters opening and closing. I’ve done this so many times that I can just feel when it’s right, and you will too over time. By looking at the light and listening to the amount of time the sensor gets the light based on the aperture, I can feel confident that all the needed light levels were captured across the exposures.

One evening I went downtown to do some shooting around Austin and caught the capitol just as the sun was going down. The Texas capitol possesses all kinds of interesting architectural elements, like this cool underground Illuminati chamber you see in the photo. The one fact that all Texans seem to know is that our capitol is 14 feet taller than the Capitol Building in D.C. This is a source of pride for Texans along with another cool and trivial fact that we maintain in our state constitution, which is the right to secede from the Union.

The capitol is made out of pink granite, which gets pinker at night as soon as the lights are turned on, especially against the blue sky.

At this point in the book, I’m sure you can tell that most any time is a great time to shoot HDRs. But the best time is just around sunset. If you can find objects or scenes that are lit up right around dusk and there is enough ambient light to complement that lighting, you can get some wonderful combinations of colors. Of course, in these situations you always need a tripod because your shutter is likely to be open for several seconds on one of the exposures.

A good photographer friend in Iceland named Asmundur took me to the southern part of the island for a bit of shooting. One of his favorite spots was this little church that sat by itself on a hill. A small cemetery nearby was the perfect place for me to set up to take this shot.

The skies in Iceland always seem to be idyllic. The icy cloud particles often stream out in impressionist formations, and the HDR technique really helps to bring back the colors I saw and the emotions I felt when I was actually at the scene.

This image speaks to a larger idea around the notion of traveling and finding cool sights to shoot. I will normally jump on Flickr, search for tags, sort by “interestingness,” and then pick out some amazing-looking locations. Often, the first few pages of the results will show images from the same photographers repeatedly. I then contact them and ask if they would like to go on a shoot together while I am at their location. This method usually works out swimmingly because the locals know the most beautiful places that are also off the beaten track.

My wife is always worried about this tactic and is convinced after watching decades of fear-inducing news reports about the murderous ways of strangers on the Internet. I find, however, that photographers are normally kind souls. After looking at their photographs, I think you can often intuit the sort of person they might be.

Shanghai looks huge and amazing no matter what side of the river you are visiting! I must have gone back and forth eight times or so to see it from one angle and then the next as the sun was setting. An electric train goes through a tube under the water, and it is surrounded with enough flashing neon to produce seizures in the average Japanese kid. It’s all fantastic and electrifying, and both banks were covered every night with people admiring the view.

Normally, I don’t wait until it is quite this dark. This is that short five-minute period between dusk and the black of night. You have no choice but to use a tripod in this situation. I also recommend using a wireless or wired trigger because pressing the button on the camera can cause a tiny amount of shake, which will affect the focus. And that’s not good. You’ll soon realize that the HDR process has enough complications without having to worry about lining up multiple exposures! Try to minimize the coefficients of error.

After a long hike through the mountains of Yellowstone, I came across over 40 horses sprinting from one meadow to the next. I stepped behind a tree to get out of the way and shot this scene. You can see the dead husks of the trees that still remain after the big Yellowstone fire.

This is an HDR shot from a single RAW file. People will tell you that it is impossible to make an HDR from a single RAW. Don’t listen to them. That RAW file contains a lot of light information. This was shot at f/4.5 at a shutter speed of 1/800, ISO 100, at 13mm.

I also recommend shooting most of your shots in aperture priority. Just get your focal length to the f stop where it feels good, and let your smart camera do the rest. You will need quick access to the ISO to adjust it based on the available light. Check the histogram after a few test shots. If there is not enough brightness, just dial up the ISO until the histogram looks like a bell curve.

This shot was taken about 20 km into our backpacking expedition in the Andes. Colorful life sprang up everywhere from the fertile soil deposited from recent glaciation, even as the valley was changing to its autumn colors. Little rivulets trickled here and there and flowed into larger streams. Fording some of these tributaries was a bit hairy when you’re carrying a bunch of expensive camera equipment, but it was always worth it. I can’t tell you how often I stopped to take photos along this hike! I’m sure the hike took about four times as long as needed, but after all, that was the point of the whole trip. If you look closely, you can spy a glowing blue glacier spilling out from between the edge of the Andes.

The best way to capture a landscape in a bold way, other than understanding the fundamentals of HDR, is to use a wide-angle lens. Now, all the professional photographers out there will scoff at this and say, “Of course!” But I’ve met hundreds of novice photographers using their first DSLR, and they are just using the “kit lens”—the one included with the camera. There are a variety of lenses that are wide-angle and are quite good.

North of Paris in Montmartre, in the 18 arrondissement, Basilique du Sacré-Coeur sits high on a hill and is beautifully lit in the evening. This hill is the birthplace of the Jesuits back in 1534. This fact is interesting to me because I was a Jesuit student back in the day. You would think that after attending that all-boy school, having to wear a tie every day, and taking four years of Latin and four years of theology that I would be allowed to venture inside to take all the photos I wanted using a special key that everyone gets upon graduation. But I had no such key, so I was forced to remain on the perimeter with all the other heathens.

Since the basilica sits high on a hill, I wanted to capture it in that light as best as possible. The third of the five exposures, or what I like to call the “anchor” was shot at 18mm. This made for a good crop, since a square frame seemed best for this subject. There’s no rule of thumb for cropping. The aperture was f/5.3 and the shutter was open for 1.1 seconds. This was the appropriate anchor setting to capture the full range of the lights from the church and the sky.

Is it appropriate to end a chapter on evolution with a photo of a religious destination? I don’t know. But I do know the Jesuits taught me from an early age to ask a lot of questions and never take anything for granted. The most important lesson they instilled in me was to continue questioning the world around you and to learn how to learn.