Jun 19, 2014 | Landscape Photography
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What an amazing city, what an amazing trip! Sharon and I love our visits to New York City, we walk and walk the manmade canyons watching all the people and looking up and the gorgeous architecture. This trip we added a weekend Click2Click (thanks you guys for coming, great weekend!) and it was held in the building used as Treadstone in the Bourne Ultimatum. The view 360 fomr the building was killer which is what you see here. I shot simply using the Df / 24f1.4 & 58f1.4 on what you can see were gorgeous days. Why is there not much tilt in some of the images? I wasn’t shooting up but across. Finishing was done simply in ACR 8.5. We’ll be back this fall and we can’t wait, more to see and folks to spend time with.
May 23, 2014 | Landscape Photography
If there’s one favorite subject worldwide, it’s the rising or setting sun. But just them colors isn’t enough to make it a great shot. It is enough to record your memory of that moment and that is VERY important! But to take the photo to the next level, making it worth sharing and grabbing other’s heart, you have to have a photo that at the very least, equals the memories of the viewer’s relationship with sunsets. Everyone on the planet has had at least one great moment with the sun as it rises or sets. Ours has to at least be that good in our photo. This is not an example of this, this is just a pretty moment in the Black Hills. It means something to me because of who introduced me to this spot for sunrise. Shooting D4s / 80-400VR3, underexposing -2/3, Cloudy WB, it took no more than getting up early and stopping to make the photo. But it takes more than pretty colors to reach out and grab your heart.
May 22, 2014 | Landscape Photography
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There we were with the prairie winds gusting making it hard to even open the car door. But it was creating the magic we were witnessing. But it was changing it so fast that no sooner you saw the magic and it was gone. It’s time when even 11FPS isn’t enough to capture that special moment that reaches out and tugs at the heartstrings. It was one of those afternoons when I grabbed the Df / 18-35AFS and went cloud chasing in the Black Hills. The ground winds tossing us around weren’t as strong above but still fast enough so the original scene I saw that made me stop was gone by the time I was out. Being a veteran of this kind of scenario, I made a mental snap of the three important elements that made me stop, the main little puffy over the saddle, the shadow on the peak on the left and the light on the foreground. What you see in the three are samples of this moment. It’s the last image, the one on the right that captures the best combination of those three elements that first made me stop. It’s the shadow on the peak on the left in combination with the amount of lit foreground that I like in the arranging of all the elements. The clouds blowing constantly changed that shadow as you can see but by retaining those three elements, I waited until it seemed to return. That shadow changed everything.
May 13, 2014 | Landscape Photography
One of the real challenges of photography is knowing when to say, when. That’s to say, the best photo has come and gone and it’s time to move on. Let me share this sunset from the other night in Custer State Park as an example of what I’m talking about. The top photo is why I stopped the car. At one of my favorite locales for sunrise, this night is was perfect for sunset. So with Df /18-35AFS in hand, I made the click you see above. The clouds I stopped for has already changed slightly in the fast moving storm, but I still made this first click. And having already seen “the” shot I liked slip away, I stayed watching the heavens. Pretty natural reaction to beauty.
As you see, the uniqueness in the texture in the clouds slowly got jammed up, it became a mass. Now if you look really, really closely right above the trees, the bottom photo has a better “sunset” compared to above, but it is so small it makes no impact. But when you’re standing there, you mind’s eye sees that so you go click. When you get back to the computer though, that giant sky is now only as big as you computer screen and that detail is now truly small. When it comes to photography and in this case landscapes, you have to know when is when at the time of going click and then also when it comes time to sharing. You wanna put your best foot forward and knowing when to say when is a big part of that!
Apr 21, 2014 | Landscape Photography
He made clocks by carving all their parts out of wood, he solved the mystery how Yosemite Valley was created, self taught and inspired, influenced presidents and the common folks, John Muir preserved much of the wild heritage we treasure today! He coined so many poignant phrases describing our natural world in his writings. One of our favorite describes our home to a T, “The Range of Light” as he went about talking romantically about the science he was unraveling. Many have asked who has influenced my landscape photography the most, it has to be John Muir. In ’98 when I was honored with the John Muir Conservation Award, it meant more to me than I think anyone could have imagined because of the influence Muir has had on me.
My favorite book of his is The Wilderness World of John Muir, writings that bring out the romantic in anyone gazing over the Sierra. My first copy was given to me by my future mother-in law (no, didn’t know that at the time, I was still in high school) and got so dog eared carrying it in my backpack walking the John Muir trail with my dad in the years to come, I had to buy another copy. An amazing storyteller, Muir used is words carefully to describe the wonders he was often the first to describe, so each word goes straight for the heart. One of my favorite quotes though is about Muir I would like to share with you.
If John Muir didn’t have the foresight to preserve Yosemite Valley, we wouldn’t have it today to enjoy. The question is, do we have the foresight to preserve what we have today for future generations to enjoy?
Happy Birthday John, thanks for all the gifts you left us!
