Stefan Leal is a passionate photographer driven by a love for nature and a desire to create meaningful art. Guided by lessons in perseverance, embracing imperfections, continual learning, and mastering lighting techniques, Stefan’s photography reflects a commitment to storytelling through minimalism and adept editing skills.
My passion for photography comes from a desire to create and a deep appreciation for nature and the natural world. Blending those two things gives me a sense of perception and purpose for the human experience and our role in the world.
Four lessons I have learned personally and professionally helped me figure out what I wanted to say with my art.
1. Never stop – even when I am tired and don’t want to create, I get up and take photos anyway and discover amazing happy accidents that wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t go.
2. Take photos, even if you think they’re bad. I have thousands upon thousands of bad images, some blurry, some with the wrong lens, but the gems happen in the moments I never force to happen.
3. Appreciate the craft and use the knowledge that’s out there. I often get inspired by the community and take the lessons they’ve learned and apply them to myself. I know I don’t know everything, and so I value the creativity of others often.
4. Never stop learning. This one is tied to the previous one, but I plan to be 100 years old – still learning about photography. That sense of curiosity becomes the fuel to who you are, and creating becomes second nature over time.
Two tricks I can share to help with lighting go hand in hand. Step one is to have patience during the hours of the day when the light becomes dramatic. Drama = art
Step two is to use your editing process to your advantage and exploit the lighting that’s there. Add additional gradients to light and dark areas to enhance the drama and adjust curves in post-production to dial in the details or fade away further information depending on your goal.
Minimalism is hard, and it’s a lesson I’ve learned the hard way. There are multiple ways I achieve certain aspects of minimalism, such as composition, the golden ratio to align my subjects into specific areas of the frame, and constant seeking angles.
Angles make a huge difference in minimalism, so you can often find me on the ground, up in a tree, or on a ridgeline, getting an angle that will enhance the perspective to present something that most people might not have seen before. While also removing any distracting backgrounds or foreground elements that take away from the story.
One of the key aspects that helped me dial in my color palette was exploiting the natural tones in the landscape, mixed with the fact that I am almost completely colorblind. I can only see yellow, so utilizing what I know to be blue through the numbers on the dials, I can achieve the look and essence of how I see nature around me. At the same time, attempting to present something pleasing for the viewer. Below you can find an example, and here are the main steps of the edit:
The original image was taken from a plane with a cell phone. I started by adding some color, as well as a foreground using some AI and Object Fill.
It was during a time when there were wildfires, so the atmosphere was doing things I hadn’t seen before; so, to adjust, I enhanced the darkness of the background’s layers and tweaked the shadows to make them pop and add drama.
The color was washed out slightly, so I adjusted the color grading to deep blues in the shadows, mid blues in the mid-tones, and light blues in the highlights while reducing the texture and clarity.
Ultimately, I wanted to bring attention to the landscape’s separation, depth, and scope to give the viewer the sense that it can be projected across long distances. In contrast, other minimalist images often flatten and draw attention to one subject.
The ocean is a different ball game, always moving and in motion. The light dances with the mountains, but the waves dance independently, so I get excited about capturing each wave.
To be able to stand in a specific spot in time and capture a wave in a particular way, knowing that it will never happen again, is special to me and makes me feel connected to the planet.
A special photo to me is one in which I came across a herd of Elk during a winter season by Mount Saint Helens. I had my drone with me and flew it high into the air, ensuring I didn’t disturb them, and so I followed them for a while, watching their movements.
Originally, I hoped to figure out where they would go so I could photograph them with a telephoto lens, but they ventured into a forest. Just as I was about to call my drone back, one of them wandered into a clearing and stopped to look around. The moment happened so quickly that I almost missed it, but I snapped this photo.
The Elk was having a moment of connection to the forest and wanted to soak in the peaceful stillness, and I was lucky enough to be there to capture it.
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