Where The Hoodoos Have No Names By Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Website, Instagram, Facebook Where The

From a Watery Origin by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Website, Instagram, Facebook Tufas arising from their watery origins. These tufas are composed of calcium carbonate which precipitates out of the water from springs lying along the lake bed over millennia. Some are seen arising from the lake while others are now exposed on land after the shoreline has receded. Stacked image for the sky, long exposure for the foreground (3 minutes at ISO 1600).

The Two Legged Hoodoo by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Website Instagram Facebook Valley of Dreams, New Mexico. Nikon D810A camera, Nikon 14-24 mm lens, at f 2.8, 14 mm, 25 sec., and ISO 6400. There is lighting with Low Level Lighting. For a tutorial please look here: www.lowlevellighting.org For more images like this please take a look at my website here . Thanks for all the kind support! Hope you enjoy! A big thank you to the wonderful Flickr family. Cheers, Wayne

Canyon Country by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Canyon Country. This is the view from Muley Point atop Cedar Mesa in southern Utan. It is near the top of the Moki (Mokey) Dungway, a spectacular dirt road that drops 1,200 feet or 400 meters from the top of Cedar Mesa down into the valley below. The views are spectacular, looking from southern Utah all the way to Arizona and Monument Valley. This is canyon country, atop the vast Colorado Plateau, occupying parts of Utah,Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. The plateau is around 5,000 - 6,000 feet or 2,000 meters high, with innumerable deep canyons and gulches. You mostly travel on top of the plateau or mesas, and descend into the canyons. It is like an endless wonderland to explore. I love the night photos taken on mountain tops, but this is a bit different. You are atop the mesas looking down, but you are looking down into deep dark canyons. There is not much light down there!!! Hopefully I have captured some of the beauty. This is a composite image consisting of a 15 sec., ISO 6400 image for the sky, and a 5 minute ISO 1600 images of the foreground, taken back to back. Both taken at 24 mm, f/2.0 with a Rokinon 24 mm f/1.4 lens. Thanks for taking the time to look. Hope you enjoy! Big thanks to the wonderful Flickr family for all the support and encouragement! Cheers, Wayne Please join me at: Website Facebook Instagram Blog

A Big Thank You! by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: THIS ONE'S FOR YOU! This is a photo I have posted before, a nighttime panorama of Joshua Tree National Park. It was recently selected as one of the Top 25 Photos on Flickr for 2015, as seen on the Flickr Blog: blog.flickr.net/en/2015/12/01/flickrs-top-25-photos-in-2015/ If you read the method of choosing photos, it has to do with the number of interactions generated, including the number of views, the number favs, the number of comments, etc. This means I post the photo, and get the recognition, but it ONLY comes from all the work and interaction that you guys did. You guys did the heavy lifting, all the hard work. You guys are the ones that earned this award, not I, and I realize that. Thanks for all the view, favs, and comments. It's been a great year. 

 Cheers, Wayne Pinkston

Questions and Answers

About how to start a web site:

Question: My question is do you have any advice on website set up, online stock image banks, etc.? I see that someone can order one of your prints in a variety of sizes,etc.  Do you physically print them and mount them?  Maybe I don't know enough to even know what are the right  questions to ask.  regardless and advice would be appreciated 

Answer: I use SmugMug to host my personal website. I previously used Photium to host my website, but it was more trouble, and they did not promote the website in searches as well as Smugmug. SmugMug also makes it easier to upload or delete photos. 

https://www.smugmug.com https://www.smugmug.com/plans

I pay them about $150 USD a year to host my website, If I remember correctly. You can get a more robust Business site for about $300 a year. With that package they will design custom packages for mailing to your customers, etc., very fancy. With SmugMug, the setup is pretty easy.There are some You Tube Videos that show you how to do  it. You can customize your website quite a bit.There are other vendors that allow even more customization of your site, but the process gets more complex.I wanted a site that simple and clean, and not too distracting or difficult to navigate. I looked for a host that make selling photos simple, and most importantly, I wanted a host that did a good job of getting your web site noticed in searches on Google, etc. i did some reading, and it seemed that Smug Mug was one of the best at that.You pick a vendor to print your photos. I picked Bay Photo, which is the vendor I use to print my personal photos. There are excellent, one of the best. When someone buys a photo on the site, SmugMug sends the file to Bay Photo and Bay Photo prints it and sends it directly to the customer. It is “hands free” for you. You determine the price of your photos like this:  If Bay Photo charges $10 for a large print, then you determine the markup. For example you can chose 200% and the price of the photo would be $20, and you would get $10, or whatever after taxes. You could choose a 100% markup for a paper print and a 50% markup for a metal print, or whatever you want to do.Hope this helps, Cheers, Wayne

http://waynepinkstonphoto.com

Joshua Tree at Night by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Website Instagram Facebook Joshua Tree National Park, California. Canon 1Dx camera, Nikon 14-24 mm lens with an adaptor, f 2.8, ISO 6400. Lighting with Low Level Lighting (LLL). For more about this technique see lowlevellighting.org For more images like this please take a look at my website here . Thanks for all the kind support! Hope you enjoy! A big thank you to the wonderful Flickr family. It's a pleasure to post here. Cheers, Wayne

Tower House Ruin Panorama by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: This is a panorama of the Tower House Ruin near the Cedar Mesa region of Utah. It is an Ancestral Puebloan Ruin, or Anasazi - Cliff Dweller Ruin in the Four Corners region of the SW USA. This is a panorama of multiple vertical images combined in Lightroom, looking out from the alcove. There is low level constant light on the foreground. This is not classic light painting, but more similar to modified studio lighting or "outdoor" studio lighting. It consists of light panels on tripods left on the whole time, very dim, barely visible or not visible to the naked eye. This takes time to set up. The light is intended to match the intensity of starlight (it does not take much!). This different from traditional light painting where you briefly shine a brighter light on the subject or near a subject. I have encountered several photographers at night that just about had a nervous breakdown when you mentioned light painting, but then became very quiet and cooperative when they saw the lighting I set up. I think we need a different label for this kind of landscape lighting, different from "light painting". I have decided to personally call this Low Level Landscape Lighting, (LLLL for short), or LLL, Low Level Lighting. I hope some term other than light painting catches on, as it just does not describe the more recent methods of landscape lighting at night. I doubt that anyone in a studio would describe their lighting as "light painting;. We just need some new language to talk about these methods more accurately. Thanks for taking the time to look. Hope you enjoy! Big thanks to the wonderful Flickr family out there. Please join me at: Website Facebook Instagram Blog

The Organ by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Website Instagram Facebook This butte is called The Organ, located on the main road in Arches National Park, Utah, USA. This is a panorama of about 12 vertical images (some were cropped off the sides), taken with a Nikon 810A and Nikon 14-24 mm lens at 20 mm, f 2.8,20 sec., and ISO 12,800. Processed in PS and LR. This was taken from the path to "Park Avenue", a nearby area. The main challenge here was to get all the shots without car lights. Arches has become a very popular location for star gazing and night photography, and there is still a lot of traffic on the roads until midnight or so. The milky way was centered over The Organ shortly after twilight, and to get this composition you needed to shoot early. It took about 5 minutes to shoot the whole series, and 5 minutes without car lights was hard to come by. Due to the location near the road, car headlights can light up the formation from pretty far away. This was shot multiple times until I could get a series of photos with only a few interruptions. Anyway it worked out well. After midnight things get quieter in Arches, and most of the stargazers go home, but it's still a busy place for photographers. The butte is dimly lit with what I call "LLL", or Low Level Lighting. It is done with LED light panels (on tripods, and with warming filters) turned down very low to match starlight, and then left on the whole time. People passing by would not be able to see any light on the structure. Thanks for taking the time to look. Hope you enjoy! Big thanks to the wonderful Flickr family for all the support and encouragement! Cheers, Wayne

Utah’s Canyon Country by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Website, Instagram, Facebook Utah’s Canyon Country Panorama. Sometimes there are good surprises, especially at night. I shot another location first, so it was dark by the time I got to this location. The clouds were rolling in and I couldn’t see anything. Since this is a panorama I could only see fractions of the scene at one time on the camera LCD. I didn’t have much hope for a decent result, and I didn’t see the final results until months later when I finally had a chance to sit down and combine the images. I was pleasantly surprised and this turned out to be one of my favorites from the summer. Even the clouds worked out ok. The sky and foreground were shot separately. Rokinon 35 mm f/1.4 lens. The sky panorama was shot at 35 mm, f/1.8, 10 sec., and ISO 5000. The foreground panorama was shot with long exposures, 240 seconds, f/1.8, 35 mm, ISO 2500. _________________________________________Happy New Year and great shooting to everyone in the coming year! ________________________________________

Where a Civilization once Thrived... by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: This is the Anasazi or Ancient Puebloan Riun called the 16 Room Ruin. It has many other names but this one seems most common. It is located just south of Bluff, Utah adjacent to the San Jaun River. This is part of an experimental series to see if the Anasazi Ruins are amenable to photography at night. I would love to combine an interest in the Anasazi with nighttime photography. I spent several days in August in the SE corner of Utah photographing several ruins at night, to be processed over the next few weeks. One thing I did discover is this: Being in these ruins at night is fascinating. To see the starlit sky, and be surrounded by ancient habitations where people once thrived is magical. It's like going back in time. The alcoves just glow with the light. You can imagine the glow of fires illuminating the ceiling and walls centuries ago. This ruin is in one of a small minority of Alcoves or Caves that opens facing North, and faces a fertile plain overlooking the San Juan River. Because it opens to the North, the Milky Way is seen overhead to the South. Most of the Anasazi Ruins purposefully open facing South, providing shade in summer and sunlight and heat in winter. It seems they were more concerned with these mundane everyday matters than with the needs of photographers that would come 800 years later. On the other hand the Milky Way may be visible looking out of many alcoves at some point in the year. There are limited choices for photo ops. Sometimes the only decent choice is looking into the Alcove, sometimes the only choice is to look out. Most of the flat "bench" in the Alcoves was used as building sites, and there is not a lot of room to roam around. The maintained and easily accessed Anasazi tourist locations in parks are closed at night. You can get a permit to photograph these at night for hundreds of dollars. There are, however, numerous sites on Bureau of Land Management land that are not maintained. There are unmarked trails to many of these ruins, and if you can find them you can photography at night. Many require a hike of a mile or more through rough trails. They are open to visitation but the BLM does not make them easy to find, sometimes knocking down cairns that mark the way. This is a panorama of 10 vertical images combined in Lightroom. Taken with a Canon 6D camera and a Bower 24mm f 1.4 lens at f 1.4, 15 sec, and ISO 6400. There are 6 lights used. There are 4 very small lights shining up on he ruins from just in front, and there are 2 larger lights lighting the whole alcove. Warming filters were used on the lights. The ridge looks more domed than it really is because of looking upwards at a relatively close structure. Disclaimer: No ruins were harmed in the making of this photo! So what do you think? Is this kind of image interesting or worth pursuing? Thanks for taking the time to look. Hope you enjoy! Your time, faves, and comments are much appreciated! Please join me at: Website Facebook Blog