Mick Gow Photography

This time of year, catching sunrises like this on the OC coast is rare - June Gloom marine layer sets in each morning and doesn’t clear until mid morning or lunch... but in a rare occasion it breaks early and we can get this. #photographytips - two top tips for shooting reflections 1) get your camera as low as possible so the water or surface reflecting fills up as much of the frame as possible 2) using a circular polarizer filter on your lens gives you the ability to rotate the filter and adjust how much reflection vs how much you can see through the water. That extra level of creative control can make a shot.

Last light of the day, Sat May 22 Crystal Cove State Park Newport Beach, California - actual sound just sped up 10x.

#3 from my deliciously crispy mountain air glades plug-in photo trip #photographytips - whenever I approach my editing I start with one simple question: what story do I want to tell. From there it gives me a consistent north start for whatever comes next. For example, the story in my mind here was I want to share the stillness, the contrast of the bright sun as it softly gave the clouds life, and I want to show how there is so much detail in nature from every tiny pebble to every tee and mountain. That gave me a framework for how soft, how sharp, how contrasted, where I wanted elements to be subtle vs pop. What color temperate told the story best. Start with the story that lives in your memory when you took the photo.

A popular fishing spot in the Eastern Sierra because of how many delicious mosquitoes hover over the lakes. Bug repellent recommended. #photographytips - my @venuslaowa #laowa15mm has become one of my favorite ultra wide lenses. It’s tack sharp and is about as wide as you can get before there’s too much unnatural distortion (although I do love playing with distortion a lot). In this case 15mm was perfect because I had to point the lens downward to get the log in frame, but with wide lenses this will start to distort tall objects like trees. You can see by the tree on the left it’s getting pretty extremely angled, any more and I may have to do some distortion correction and lose a lot of detail in the frame.