Used properly, High-Dyanmic Range (HDR) imaging can almost do magic. Scenes with huge contrast and uneven lighting can be turned into pristine almost studio quality images. Like many tools it can also be a great crutch. While I certainly don't take professional pride in using techniques that way sometimes it is the only option available. That's the situation I was in when visiting Niagra Falls recently. We arrived to a gray sky, mid-day, and traveling quickly. I didn't expect to get anything great, but I did want to capture some "snaps" of the falls, so here's what I did and how it worked out...

I really enjoyed shooting with the Nikon 14-24mm AF-S f/2.8G ED lens which was released as part of Nikon’s foray into full-frame cameras along with the D3. It takes incredible images and was a pleasure to use. But for most of us it has several drawbacks which make it a difficult acquisition. First is price. At $1800 for the US version it is a large investment for a lens that typically gets used a lot less than a mid-range zoom. Second, it is large and heavy. If you lug your gear with you the 2.2 lb. weight and 4”x5” size create quite an impact on your photo pack. Finally the “domed” front makes it difficult and expensive to use filters with it (an expensive add-on adapter is needed).

Grand Prismatic, Midway Geyser Basin, Yellowstone National Park
Nikon D700, Sigma 12-24mm Lens at 12mm, f/22@1/250s, ISO 800
Going ultra-wide is the only way to get the full scene, as the moving steam rules out a pano

Few questions from safari participants make me cringe as much as the one about using a Teleconverter with their consumer or prosumer lenses. Both Nikon and Canon have worked hard on excellent Teleconverters for their high-end pro Telephoto lenses, but for some good reasons have orphaned their other lenses in that regard. Solutions were all ugly, involving a loss of Auto-Focus and often physical modifications to lenses. But now all that has changed with the introduction of the …

After our very disappointing experience in Deadwood—former ghost town turned into the worst of Vegas—we were apprehensive about the final stop on our tour of the West—Bodie. Bodie is known as something of the grand-daddy of all ghost towns in the American West, with over 200 standing structures, many of them in excellent repair. But we saddled up and headed down the dirt road to the State Park, with the literature assuring us that the town had been kept in a stat of “arrested decay” since it became a California State Park in 1962. We were blown away…

Whatever you think of open-pit mining the sheer scale of turning a mountain into the world’s largest hole to provide millions of miles of telephone wire, countless feet of trendy house siding, and billions of feet of plumbing pipe is breathtaking. If it was a stadium Kennecott Copper’s (now RIo TInto’s) Bingham Canyon Mine could seat over 9 million people…