Burning Man: the facts, the fiction, the photography.

I get asked this a lot and it’s always difficult to answer. Most people think it’s sex, drugs and rock and roll and it is partially that, but it’s also the biggest art, music, creative, religion, science, ecological and photo festival you’ve ever seen. The next question is, how can you stand the heat and the dust? Well it’s no hotter than southern California, and the days with blowing white gypsum, are by far the most interesting and beautiful days for photography.

The biggest challenge, of course, is protecting your camera from the dust. So I wrapped my camera body and lens tightly except for the glass in Saran wrap, which actually worked pretty well. The light meter functioned fine through the clear wrap and the camera focus turned unrestricted. One thing you do not want to do is to change lenses on the Playa. Even on a still day or your sensor will be a mess if you expose it. As cautious as I was, my camera still has a white patina that is impossible to get rid of. So now I bring my beater camera and old Nikon D200, it works just fine for people photos in the dust, however on clear days I may still pull out the 5D… wrapped!

Black Rock City is also the mother of invention. As starkly beautiful as it can be, the bright blue skies can sometime use a little help. So I sat down with my friend and LayerCake partner Alan Mayer and we figured out a way to extract clouds from beautiful skies, in order to drag and drop them into ourboring ones. Follow me next week on Twitter from Burning Man, profile @Harry.Layercake. Let’s see what the white dust of the Playa brings this year. Reach me at Harry@LayerCakeElements.com

Mad Max Mohawk, LayerCake Drag & Drop Clouds

Headless Wonders, LayerCake Drag & Drop Clouds

Black Rock Taxi, LayerCake Drag & Drop Clouds

Could Vinny Have Been The First LayerCake Artist?

I’m asked a very often if enhancing your photos in Photoshop with masked or cut out images is in some way cheating. I quickly remind people that it’s a concept that great artists have been using for centuries. Artists like Van Gogh would trek to the countryside, sketchpad in hand. He would sketch a landscape, an unusual tree, a bale of hay, a turbulent sky or a horse grazing in a distant field, then back at his studio he would assemble his sketches into the masterpieces we know today.

Vinny didn’t have Photoshop, but his principal of not limiting himself to what was in front of him on any given day is the same today when we sit down in front of our computer, open Photoshop and start layering in masked images to enhance the basic photo. What your imagination sees most times cannot be captured in one photograph and you leave a lot on the table if you don’t use all of the amazing digital tools we have our disposal today.

So go forth into the field as Vinny did and visit us at www.layercakeelements.com to learn more about making better photographs!

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Vinny may have not created Starry Night this way, but great artists have practiced the principal of LayerCake for centuries.

Telling stories rather than shooting postcards.

Sedona Arizona is one of my favorite places; it’s also one of the most naturally beautiful and photogenic places on earth. However for some reason, I get camera block riding around trying to decide what to shoot in this feast of photography options.

Places like Sedona have been photographed to death and particularly here because everything is so accessible and easy to shoot. You could shoot an amazing panoramic from your seat at Starbucks or go on a Pink Jeep tour with 10 tourists each carrying 10k worth of Nikons and Canons! The problem with this for me is everyone shoots the same stunningly beautiful photos. You’ve seen them in hundreds of calendars, travel brochures and postcards. Just Google Sedona “Images” and you’ll see all the same locations and rock formations.

So what’s wrong with that? Really nothing, just my personal philosophy that photography is a communication and not a decorative art. I believe every picture should tell a story or at least show a different viewpoint than the rest of the world sees. I spent three days riding around trying to figure out what this place said to me that everyone else was missing.

We were out of milk, so about 9 pm I drove to a nearby Circle K convenience store to pick up milk for the morning. I personally feel that we allow this kind of ugly commercialism to pollute a lot of our country’s natural beauty and nowhere is it more evident than in Sedona. As I walked out of the store, I saw my story. Across the highway was the moonlit profile of two beautiful buttes. The juxtaposition of this ugly convenience store across from this amazing almost spiritual landscape to me was the essence of Sedona. But how could I tell that story they were on different sides of the highway?

I set up my camera in the parking lot and shot a time exposure for the sky. The buttes were underexposed and became silhouetted. I next went across the street and photographed a time exposure of the Circle K, with car lights streaking by and I exposed for the lights of the store so everything else went black. I removed the lit part of Circle K image and placed it over the dark bottom of the landscape photo. I now had the visual story I was looking for.

Was it cheating? No, the story was there but couldn’t be told with one shot. If you are an art photographer and participate in print competitions, you know there are a million beautiful photos that never win a thing and some may be yours. If you want to win or just become a better photographer, you need to have a point of view and tell a story with all of your photos otherwise they’re just postcards.

PS: Help me name this photo for a LayerCake Collection!

Time exposure for the sky creating a dark silhouette.

Time exposure for store lights and streaking car lights, then sandwiched with the image above

But I’m A Purist Like Ansel!

We all aspire to be like Ansel Adams. But no matter how hard we try, we’re never seem to be in right spot at the right time to get that perfectly cratered moon rising over a brightly illuminated landscape like he could. Truth be known, Ansel Adams was also a master of the darkroom. Many of his most striking photos are composites of sandwiched negatives and masterful dodging and burning.

If Ansel Adams were alive today, he’d be a master of Photoshop and a big fan of Layercake Elements. Ansel Adams understood that every tool he had in his bag of tricks was fair game to achieve his vision and most times his vision was not visible through his viewfinder just like you and me. Being a purist is admirable, but closing your eyes to the wonderful digital tools available today like Photoshop and Layercake Elements to enhance your photos is like tying one hand behind your back. We can all learn something from Ansel Adams. Today he’d say, “be a purist, but always be open to new ideas and techniques to achieve the brilliance of your full imagination".

Visit us at www.layercakeelements.com to learn more about making better photographs!

Original Color Image, adding a drag & drop cloud & full  moon

Converted to Ansel Adams look using Topaz High Contrast II B&W filter

Road to Heaven, LayerCake Sky replacement.

How The LayerCake Was Baked

When we started we never intended LayerCake to be a business. We were two average guys with cameras shooting portraits & weddings and taking road trips on weekends to shoot landscapes for fun.

Photography is a rather imperfect art. In most cases it’s impossible to expose for a perfect sky and a subject at the same time. Locations are not always perfect either; sometimes they’re dead and colorless, other times there’s an eyesores like an old car or a power line in the background…and who wants to spend hours cloning in Photoshop?

Thus we hatched this brilliant idea of picking up grab shots along the way. A mix of trees, flowers, plants, animals and skies that we could use to fix our pictures, by masking them out then dragging them into our photos – in order to add focus to the subject or to cover imperfections and to add color.

All we wanted was to make nicer wedding albums and enter some fun photos into local print competitions, never believing for one moment that we’d actually win anything or make a business out of this. In a rather short time we were fixing and selling more photos as wall canvases that were previously reject outtakes. Then we started winning local PPA print competitions, then regional, then national and then our images were added to the permanent international traveling collections. Soon friends asked to borrow our flowers, skies and flocks of birds. Our collection of what we called elements grew and the requests grew beyond our friends.

It was then we knew there were a lot of people who needed what we today call "layercake elements", but didn’t want to spend the hours it took to do all the Photoshop work then mask them. So the rest as they say is history. Visit us at www.layercakeelements.com to learn more about making better photographs!


Let's make Mom's front lawn look like a formal garden!









Adding a line of trees on the left and an overhang adds focus