"My goal artistically, is to convey my surrealist perspectives on what I experience in remote wilderness. None of the people in my shots are models, and Im not interested in shooting popular landscapes sites, but for me the adventure comes before the photography." - Chris Van Loan
We are excited to share the thoughts of ViewBug member and adventure photographer chrisvanloan
My Name is Chris Van Loan. I own an adventure company based in San Francisco, California called Bay Area Expeditions. I started using a DSLR and teaching myself photography around 2008 to be able to photograph our expeditions in the American West. I believed that quality images convey most of a companies brand identity to its followers. This has lead to instructing expeditionary photography workshops and have done lifestyle photography for several outdoors companies.
My goal artistically, is to convey my surrealist perspectives on what I experience in remote wilderness. None of the people in my shots are models, and Im not interested in shooting popular landscapes sites, but for me the adventure comes before the photography. None of my photos are a staged photo shoot, or a trip where the primary purpose is photography over the experience of expeditionary travel so my technical goal while on an expedition, is to shoot candidly the best I can with limited time, less than ideal conditions, under time pressure and limited patience of my subjects. Not to say I won't set up lights, tripods, or ask people to stay still for a minute.
This was shot over an 20 second exposure with a 5D mkIII using a Nikon 14-24mm 2.8 with an adapter for manual aperture and focus on a Manfroto tripod. I used the back of the 5D screen zoomed in to the front of the truck or tipi to find focus.
The image has several light sources. The long exposure brought the milky way and more of the scene into the shot than a fast exposure assisted by a flash and light sources. Inside the brown tipi there is a incandescent color temperature LED lantern causing it to glow with a warm color. I was also using an on camera cannon 600EX flash with the diffuser flipped down for wide angle and set to the second curtain and turned to low manual power. The temperature of the flash worked will with the white paint on the truck, and cancelled some orange tones that would have come from the tipi. There are several clients using LED headlamps behind the truck lighting up the ground between the tipi and the truck, and finally, the light streak is caused by a client walking through the shot with a headlamp on over the duration of the long exposure, and adding highlights to the front of the truck. At first I disregarded the shot because of the headlamps causing it to have too much of a painted and haphazard look and the streak to be an error, but it's grown on e and the streak adds some life and motion illustration the human experience of camping in the shot, and not just a scene of a camp.
This image of the Mesquite tree under the Milky Way in the sand dunes has one a few VB photo contests, and is one of my personal favorites in my own portfolio.
I try not to light paint with flashlights when I can avoid it. I feel they can be hard to control in certain scenes, and you have to shop for one that looks right in terms of color and diffusion. I instead I signaled a friend in the truck parked about 100 yards away via headlamp to turn on the headlights for a brief time. I tried to keep the exposure as short as possible to keep the stars sharp and the milky way defined. Because there was no moon, post processing was difficult with noise and dodging and burning to control the effect of the headlights. I wish I had taken the shot lit how it was just a few minutes before so the galaxy would be more aligned with the tree in the 12 o'clock position, but thats the nature of photography, and learning from your mistakes to improve.
get inspired, follow Chris Van Loan and award your favorite shots!
