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Readers' Showcase: Christopher Michel

Published Jan 31, 2016 | Allison Johnson

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Readers' Showcase: Christopher Michel

Sunrise over Bagan, 2012. Photo by Christopher Michel

It's telling that DPR regular Christopher Michel corresponded with me about this piece while he was en route to Antarctica. He considers freelance photography his third career, one that has taken him to the proverbial ends of the earth and beyond. From a U-2 spy plane to the North Pole, he's searched all over for stories and images that inspire. See some of his work here and find out more about him in our Q&A.

You can see more of Michel's work on his website and follow along with his adventures on Twitter. Would you like to be featured in an upcoming Readers' Showcase? Let us know! Be sure to include your DPR user name and a link to your online portfolio.

Tags: photography, readers-showcase

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Comments

Total comments: 70

Amazing Lifestyle, Beautiful Pictures....

1 upvote

Love the last shot of Spike Lee.

1 upvote

Love that shot from the U2. Who said the Earth was flat?

1 upvote

Stunning work Christopher. Love the balloon image. Take no notice of the few negative comments....they appear to be based on jealousy of your exceptional talent.

Comment edited 27 seconds after posting

1 upvote

thank you so much, tony!

0 upvotes

One of my favorite Q and A's. Thanks!

1 upvote

Michel tells us he was a USN navigator - precise term is Naval Flight Officer, a non-pilot rating.

Please clarify then how he could be flying a USAF U-2, the only two-seat version of which is used for pilot transition and re-currency training.

0 upvotes

Yes, I was a P-3 NFO. This assignment in the U-2 was well after my Navy time. Here is the full story: http://www.usni.org/u-2s-still-flying-high

0 upvotes

Beautiful images from interesting places, to say the least!
Thank you for sharing

1 upvote

The first one is just pushed too far and looks too unnatural. You can go pretty far with HDR and still look good if you're careful but those balloons are just too bright for the lighting conditions. The rest are fantastic though, miles away from number 1.

2 upvotes

I don't disagree - it's not my most favorite image...just one of the ones selected. It was either this post or the shot would have been too dark.

0 upvotes

I know what you're saying. In isolation while not realistic it's still a nice photo and is striking but it just stands out from the others as being obviously processed I feel. You can only work with the light you're given of course, not much you can do short of an enormous flashgun.

The others are just on another level though, way better than 99.9% of the stuff I've ever taken.

0 upvotes

A very nice set of photos. I am not fond of #1 though.

I really like the processing for #3.

Thanks for sharing your photos!

0 upvotes

An interesting career span. Enjoyable article; thanks Allison.
Quite the adventurer, Christopher.
Lucky man to have been to all of these places (although I don't think it's pure luck).

I admire the tenacity, but, as a former army officer myself, I think your military and aviation background have a lot to do with shaping your tenacity and adventurous persona.
Not many would ever get the chance to see all of these places in person.
Best wishes, and safe travel, and thanks for sharing your images.

2 upvotes

thanks!

1 upvote

I can't be the only one guilty of wanting not only Christopher Michel's life, but his talent.

1 upvote

No, but I won't be the only one either who is not that jealous. I hope he enjoys his life as much as I do mine and that goes for all.

1 upvote

Did anybody see that the screws in the U2 cockpit were all rusted? At 70000 feet that is scary!

1 upvote

I really liked all the photos. Excellent work and consistently so. Very well done.

3 upvotes

thank you!

0 upvotes

And once again: a readers showcase featuring a Sony a7 camera. I think easily more than half of these articles mention a Sony a7.
At the same time not even one of pictures shown were made with the a7RII...

What is the point? :/

2 upvotes

Good point! But those photos were taken over the last 15 years! Wish I had the A7RII back then!

0 upvotes

Nothing against you. I'm just wondering how DPR chooses people that are featured on the main page...
BTW: I've checked your flickr and a7RII is not exactly dominating even the last weeks...
But don't worry... I'd also prefer the Leica Q. :P

Comment edited 1 minute after posting

0 upvotes

I MAY HAVE SLOW NET. PHOTO NOT LOADING. SERVER MAY BE SLOW. PICTURES SLOW SPEED NET VERSION MAY BE GOOD.

1 upvote

All CAPS ?

0 upvotes

Good, imaginative, professional stuff. No boasting about gear, fortunately.

2 upvotes

Bagan, like Cappadocia (more balloons), is completely overphotographed, and the shot presented here offers nothing original.

2 upvotes

Meh...go take your negativity somewhere else. Your negative comment😱😱😱 like the rest of trolls on the Internet...provided nothing constructive or positive.

2 upvotes

...and yours does?

2 upvotes

Leandros - here's my constructive criticism. Your comments are not constructive, they provide no benefit for the photographer. To simply say "more balloons" could be extrapolated to include every landscape photograph take in the last 20 years. There are just a precious few things that haven't been photographed. So, what's left - for a photographer to show his interpretation of a scene. If you line up 20 photographers at Half Dome, you will get twenty different photos.

What would be more useful would be for you to comment about the photographers interpretation of the scene rather than "more balloons"

1 upvote

There is nothing particularly original about this scene or composition, sorry.

1 upvote

Is there anything original about this scene? http://www.dpreview.com/galleries/0379104206/photos/2700901/

0 upvotes

don't disagree - it was taken years ago.

0 upvotes

I like 2, 5, 8 (and perhaps 11) best.

0 upvotes

Amazing lifestyle, amazing pictures

1 upvote

amazing range of photos...from edge of space to the last corner of the earth....beautiful shots.

3 upvotes

Great photos and I enjoyed reading the article.

4 upvotes

The first photo hurts my eyes and brain - such a bad example of HDR.

17 upvotes

Agreed, very artificial looking. Shame, tone down the editing and it could be a very good shot.
The rest of the photographs are really good.

Comment edited 1 minute after posting

2 upvotes

One of the problems I have with HDR is that sometimes shadows are presented in an unnatural way. I think #1 is an example of this as in real time the side of the balloons nearest us would be in deep shadow given the position of the sun on the horizon, same for the trees below. My brain struggles a little to deal with the unreal way the lighting is but then again my brain struggles with a lot of things these days :)

1 upvote

Another issue that I frequently have with HDR is that during editing, I don't see that I'm overdoing it. It looks perfectly reasonable if I've been staring at it for a while, but if I look at it later, it's exaggerated.

The rest of the images I find exilerating!

3 upvotes

...I mean exhilarating. Sorry, not my native language & no edit button ;-)

0 upvotes

That's not an overcooked HDR. To me, it looks like what the eyes would have seen if you were there. It looks great.

0 upvotes

Mario, look at the right portion of the sky, then the left. No sky has such a deep blue around sunrise.

For natural HDRs Lightroom's and Photoshop's built-in functions are great tools - they increase the dynamic range of the image without giving it a weird look. You essentially get a RAW file that looks like any other RAW file from your camera, just that you can bring down the highlights and raise the shadows with close to no noise.

1 upvote

Oh Mario, that's not how your eyes would have seen it if you were there ;) Look at the lack of definite shadows. Shadow areas look brighter than the lit ones.
Something like that :)

0 upvotes

Thanks for originals available for download on your website, Christopher! I like many of your photos.

1 upvote

I did not know that he's offering originals for download. That's incredibly generous.

1 upvote

Wow, wonderful story and photos. Thanks for sharing! I'm totally jealous now though.

1 upvote

And another good photographer gets to be the piñata for a peanut gallery of snap shooters who don't even know what they're looking at.

25 upvotes

All I know is im green with envy of his photographs.

2 upvotes

I'm wondering who it is that don't know what they're looking at - the ones critiquing or the ones who can't even follow the critique.

1 upvote

Let's start with the ones who think a sun dog is a nuclear explosion. And the photos in your gallery merely confirm my original comment.

Comment edited 7 minutes after posting

0 upvotes

He took it back. Looks to me like you're the one hitting the pinata now.

0 upvotes

He hadn't when I wrote my initial post. Now you don't even get how forums work.

Comment edited 2 times, last edit 5 minutes after posting

0 upvotes

*Initial post* - thank you, you've made my point for me.

0 upvotes

Which was?

0 upvotes

That you're still banging on about it 18 hours (now 19) after he rescinded his earlier statement. Over and out.

0 upvotes

No, I'm not. I hadn't posted a thing about this until you showed up. Now I'm just laughing about a terrible snapshooter like yourself attempting to critique this guy.

Comment edited 50 seconds after posting

0 upvotes

Excellent images

The Torres del Paine shot looks like a great spot to wait for the sunrise/sunset, i like alot the picture but i would love to see a more tight composition... I mean less sky and ground, and more of the mountains and reflexión on the water.
Anyway thats my taste

Great work

2 upvotes

Ok, I admit it, I'm envious. Some dudes just have cooler lives than others.

7 upvotes

Some really nice images from exclusive locations (#4, #5, #8). I like 2, 3, 8 as well. But #1 & #9 are pretty bad. Especially #1, it's way over cooked. In fact, I think it's a mistake to have #1 as the feature photo of this showcase - at first I wasn't even going to look the article because I am not a fan of an overly processed HDR highly saturated look. I'm glad that I looked through the images though.

Comment edited 2 times, last edit 44 seconds after posting

10 upvotes

I'd love to hear you're critique of #9.

0 upvotes

I like #9 better than #1. The subject in itself is already visually stunning (mountain range), the orange light and the reflections just added that extra magic to it. My problem with it is, I got the impression that the photographer was trying a different take on the subject. Perhaps he was trying to achieve a "discovering a majestic mountain range in the distance" look, he decided to include too many things in the frame, which complicates the image a bit too much. The multi-layered foreground (the hill where he's shooting from, the first & second layers of reflection, and the uneven tree lines) makes the image too busy to my preference. The uneven treeline that cut into the layer of reflection closer to the photographer is particularly distracting. I'd be extremely eager to frame that out of the image - though I suspect it's one of those "I wish I can saw down those trees" moment ;)

2 upvotes

Great pics, however some are badly over cooked, especially #1 and 9

10 upvotes

#9 "overcooked"??? It's barely 'cooked' at all!

1 upvote

A mixture of some great and unique images, like 4, 7, 8, and 11 and some overdone ones, like 1, 9 and 2 (is that a nuclear explosion in #2?).

3 upvotes

#2 is a sun-dog. I've seen (and shot) a ton of them from airplanes, but to see them from the ground you need to be someplace with ice in the air, not water... like Antarctica.

And as to the "overcooked" comments - I find most great sunrises to be overcooked in reality. I'm synasthetic with colors (when they get intense I can hear them) and I've seen and heard many sunrises that are exactly like 9 as it's shown.

Although, I suspect in sampling down in color spaces for the web, the image got that overcooked look. I've seen it a lot when shooting raw, processing in ProPhoto, then converting to sRGB for the web, the crushing down of gamut creates that over-cooked look, particularly if the clarity slider (mid-tone contrast) was used. For highly saturated images like sunrises or sunsets, even Adobe RGB downsampled to sRGB gets that over-cooked look. I have to re-process for the web all the time.

6 upvotes

As Ednaz said: #2 shows a sundog. I've seen them that pronounced as well. There's nothing overdone or "nuclear" about it.

0 upvotes

Thanks, never heard of it and it seems that it is a sundog, indeed. I take my words about #2 back.

0 upvotes

Great images !

2 upvotes

Total comments: 70

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