Hi. My name is gill vanderlip
Do you do composite photography edits and use filters.
Thsnks. Really love your work. 
Wonderful, moody images Huibo.
Do you have any issues with hot pixels with your longer exposures, and if so how do you deal with them in post?
I currently use the scratches and dust filter with a mask in PS. It can be quite tedious process for my longer exposures.
Hi Sarah, great to see you here. Have been following and admiring your work for a long time! Great question. I think the inspiration for my photography can come from many places. When I look at my portfolio, while many photos that I love are from my travel, many others are from beaches not far away from my home in San Diego.
I have to say my earliest biggest inspiration (location wise) was my 2006 month-long travel in the breathtaking Himalayan region in China, during which I really fell in love with landscape photography. In the following years though, with my very demanding day-job and especially after my son was born, travelling for photography became increasingly hard and nearly impossible. When I started photographing again in 2015, I focused on places where my family and I both can enjoy. Yellowstone and Alaska are the two favorite places for my family. My son loves watching wildlife, and I get to sneak out in the morning to photograph. I’d also say my winter trip to Yellowstone in 2017 and 2018 are quite inspiring to my photography, during which I think my photography took a turn towards a style with more simplicity. During pandemic I started going to Death Valley a lot. And I will go back there again and again (and maybe one of those days will run into you guys there 
). It is such a wonderful place to train one’s vision. As my son grows older, I started doing international travel again but they are few and far in between. I have an agreement with my husband that I get to do a longer trip with my photography friends (i.e. no family) once a year :-).
Back to your question - similar as many photographers, Yellowstone and Death Valley are among my favorite places to photograph. I would like to go back there again and again. On the other hand, I also get excited to visit new places. This summer I visited Iceland for the first time (other than the one-day layover in 2019) and it certainly was an exciting trip. I plan to go back again at least a few times in order to do proper photography - one visit is barely enough to scratch some surface.
Comparing to many, I haven’t visited a lot of popular photography hotspots, but I also don’t feel in a big rush. One thing I would like to share is that I really like what Bruce Percy says about selecting location, I quote him: “The landscapes you work with are very vital, in terms of your own development. I’ve found certain landscapes can be great teachers. If you meet the right one at the right time of your journey, it will work ‘with’ you. However, if you work with the wrong landscapes, they will often work ‘against’ you.” I guess what I am saying is that I also became a bit selective for where I want to do serious photography work instead of just enjoy going to new places.
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Hi Max, great to see you here as well! Love your work. Thanks for the very in-depth question. I actually don’t know how to answer this question very well so let me try. Looking at my own portfolio, indeed most of my photos have darker tones. First of all, I love a good, deep black with just sufficient details. To me, it is able to anchor an image with proper weight. Secondly, a lot of the scenes that catch my eyes and touch me already have certain mood (or has a good potential to bring out that mood) that I think suits the darker, more mysterious tones better. In these cases, I think the answer to your question is yes to both - I probably do unconsciously apply a “darker filter” in my mind’s eye, but that also (at least partly) comes from my practices of working with B&W and sort of know what tone can help me to communicate what I want to convey. I have a lot of trials and errors, I experiment with different tones. And these experiments in turn help me to do better in the field.
With that said, dark is not always good. How dark an image should depend entirely on the mood I experience and want to convey. I also have high key images to convey airy lightness and softness; a snowy scene also naturally calls for more high key or less darker tones. I would say high key images are harder to do. Their visual impact is generally more subtle, not as direct as the low key high contrast ones. It’s just currently I find myself more gravitated towards the darker and mysterious mood, but when an image calls for high key I would not hesitate.
Hopefully this answers some of your question.
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Hi Hank, thank for your question. I shoot in color, then convert to B&W in postprocessing.
Many cameras nowadays enable people shoot in B&W without compromising raw data quality. I’ve heard very positive feedback from photographers that this approach greatly helped them to gain vision in seeing in B&W. I believe that. But for myself, I’ve only tried this approach a couple of times and I find it messes up with my own way of thinking 
I guess it is just a personal preference. Hope this answers your question
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Hi Gill, thanks for your question. My understanding of composite photography is to combine scenes (or elements) shot from different locations or in very different times then combine them together in one image. I don’t to this type of editing. A tasteful composite actually requires a lot of creativity and I don’t think it is for me 
I also don’t do perspective blending (i.e. shot with different focal lengths). I do, however, exposure blending, focus stacking. I enjoy doing tonal adjustment in postprocessing, sometimes subtle, sometimes drastic, depends on how I want the final image to appear. This is the fun of doing B&W, at least for me.
Filters - depends on what filters you are asking - when capturing images in the field, I often use ND filter when working with clouds and water. I still use my CPL polarizer sometimes. Then when editing the photo in postprocessing, depends on the definition of “filter” (some people may actually mean “preset”), I use both Silver Efex Pro and Color Efex Pro. In Silver Efex Pro, if any presets are very close to what I envisioned, I would use them as the starting point for the subsequent manual edits. I don’t use Color Efex Pro extensively. I normally just use it for some final touches (like Darken Edges/Brighten Center).
Let me know if this answers your questions?
Hi Andre, thanks for your question. Yes, sometimes I do see a few hot pixels in the image from the long exposure. But for me they usually are quite sparse and can be cleaned up with spot removal tool quite quickly. So they are not really big problems for me. I suspect you are talking about the hot pixels in nightscape photography? I think it is more prone to that in night photography but I don’t do much nightscape myself. If you would like to show me a specific regular long exposure image with many hot pixels, you can DM me in Instagram (huibohouphoto) or send me an email to huibohou@yahoo.com.
Yes. Thanks. Silver Efex pro is a filter or plug-in with photoshop is how I understand it. I’m not doing composites photography.
Just learning. I have some of my photography on Instagram if interested. My landscape photos are kinda busy. I’m trying to develop foreground/background photography. All photography is subjective. Anyway thanks.
I hope someday you will publish. Book. I do my books/journals for myself. To be the best photographer/composer I can be.
And I LOVE YOUR WORK.
. Peace to the Planet
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Huibo, Thanks for the feedback.
I think the hot climate and our proximity to sun here may have something to do with it.
I’ve taken a few LE’s in Scotland and has no real issues with them.
Most of my shots were taken around sunset.
I keep meaning to try wrapping a white T shirt around the camera to see if that will have any effect.
I’ll find something from my catalog and send it.
Thank you for the offer.
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Hi Huibo!
Thank you for your time to do this AMA.
I’ve seen in your portfolio some images that are shot in color. They are on par with your B&W photographs and I wanted to ask you, if (and how) your B&W mindset and process influenced your approach to color photography?
Thanks in advance!
That’s a great question Andrzej! Thanks. I am not an exclusive B&W photographer, about 25% of my work is in color. If an image relies on color to succeed, such as fall colors, or when the subtlety of color is very important to an image, then I will not hesitate to go with color.
There are many things in common for my approach between my B&W and color work. First of all, I only shoot in color, therefore composition is the key for both. Then many of my B&W editing is built on top of the color mode editing. I usually will first do all the necessary editing in color mode before I feel the image is ready to convert to BW. Therefore often my baseline color image before converting to B&W is a quite decent color work too. The criteria to decide whether I should go with BW or color depends on whether B&W is able to discover more potential of an image, accentuate the visual effect, or elevate the mood better than their color version. If the color neuance is lost in BW and starts hurting the image, then I know this is where I should stop and present the image in color.
On the other hand, because the vast majority photos are in color, I feel if I don’t bring something slightly new to the table, then I don’t really need to publish my color photos because then they are nothing special. Therefore I think I am much more selective when it comes to showing my color work.
I hope this answers your question.
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Hi Huibo! Thank you for all of these thoughtful responses. I will echo so many others by saying that I also greatly enjoy your work. I’m continually fascinated by the thought processes and practice of other artists. I’m curious, once you’ve done some in field work, how quick (or not) are you cull and edit images? If you’re like me then the two don’t often go together. I’d love to hear your thoughts behind your process.
Good evening Brie, great to see you here! Thanks for the kind words as always. When I come back from a trip, I usually would do a quick browsing and rate some of the photos in Lightroom, especially those that have good potentials. This is mostly done to satisfy the excitement fresh out of the trip. Then the actual selection and editing process would start some time later. Sometimes a few days later, sometimes weeks later. The longer I wait, the more objective I can be when I review the images technically. However, I also do not want to forget about the emotion and ideas that I felt and visualized at the scene when I compose and capture the images. If the scene truly moves me in the field, I find it’s not easy to forget even after some longer period of time. So the goal is to be able to evaluate the raw files objectively, in order to technically achieve the visual effect and convey the mood I felt in the field. I don’t finish selections for the whole trip in one shot. I usually go one group of images at a time.
Knowing you, I actually think you and me are quite like-minded and have similar process. Am I right?
You are correct! I wouldn’t even say I have any specific process or rules I follow for this. I’ve just been doing what feels “right” to me. I like looking through images with my fresh excitement and then giving them some breathing room to allow my mind to become more objective. Always working in small batches/groups. Maybe one day I will sort through my entire catalog;). Thank you for sharing Huibo!
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Thanks Huibo! I recently subscribed to LensWork and have been enjoying it. I have a number of websites bookmarked and Guy, Alex, and Bruce’s sites are all saved. I like visiting their sites for inspiration. Great choices!
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Thanks everyone for joining me in this AMA! I appreciate all the questions! I also want to thank Cody and David for giving me this wonderful opportunity. If you have further questions, feel free to contact me at huibohou@yahoo.com.
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