Photographic Assignment

Normally when I go out to shoot landscapes I'm just looking for something interesting with no specific use for the images in mind.  However, a bathroom remodeling project led to a need for images for an exact location that had to compliment some art that had already been installed.  Hence, the assignment...  My wife requested something abstract, and abstract in the sense of a blur rather than just a tight composition of something recognizable.  It's summer, so flowers came to mind and off we went to Schedel Garden www.schedel-gardens.org to find some subject matter. 

One of my photographer friends, Rick, always jokes that if you want abstract, just hit a camera on a tripod while the shutter is open, and Voila - abstract.  You can also use a long shutter speed and let the wind blow, or zoom in or out while shooting.  You can also change the focus.  These images were shot handheld with a long enough shutter speed to allow me to move the camera.  How fast, how far, what direction - well that's the fun part.

A Howling Good Shoot

    We recently went to New Jersey.  Why you ask?  We wanted to see governor mandated traffic jams.  How do you tell the difference between traffic jams from political spite and traffic jams that just happen?  Beats me.  They look just the same as the ones that occur from political stupidity like having road construction on every highway ringing the city simultaneously like we do back home. Anyway, we went to see wolves.  There are no wolves in NJ you say... just on Wall Street and that's in New York...  Well, in the the upper west portion of NJ bordering the Delaware Water Gap and the Pocono Mountains is the Lakota Wolf Preserve. www.lakotawolf.com   But you would be correct that the wolves were not originally from Jersey.  You can tell by their accents...

About an hour west of the Newark airport (and yes, Delta managed to lose our luggage on a direct flight) Jim and Becky are enthusiastic hosts for a preserve with several packs of wolves including a group of British Columbia wolves which are extinct in the wild.  These are not pets.  You can arrange an escorted photography shoot during times the preserve is not open to the public.  There are ports in the fencing allowing good camera views of the enclosures and Jim and Becky are able to keep the wolves in photographic range for you as well as provide information about wolves for your edification.  Although I'm not a crazy nuts wildlife photographer these animals are magnificent and their howling invokes a kind of primordial spiritual response.

Although when you were done with the wolves you would have the option to photograph in the Poconos and Delaware Water Gap we headed into Manhattan to photograph a different kind of wildlife.  Street photography is a discipline that requires the ability to anticipate how undirected people might work with an urban scenic backdrop and the ability to see a landscape made of buildings, streets, etc. I find that the most interesting shots occur when there is precipitation and especially at night.  This is really a topic that deserves its own blog post so I'll just end this one with another image.

A Cold Winter Photo Vacation is Best

Winter.  Thoughts of photographing palm trees, beaches, or bikini clad models.  Any excuse to get out of the frozen tundra of the northern states in January and February will do - especially given the vortex crazed climate this year.  It's clear that Sports Illustrated has even given up worrying about whether both pieces of their models' bikinis arrived on time for the shoot this year just to make sure they weren't trapped in the cold, waiting for a delivery from some snarky designer...

Back on topic, I think a winter photo shoot is a better choice than some tropical getaway.  And it's not because I'm jealous of my friends who went to Hawaii, Costa Rica, or Bora Bora and missed some of the coldest, snowiest weather I've seen since my childhood in Cleveland. There are actual benefits to going somewhere cold to shoot.  And I mean cold - not 32F at night reaching 50F the next day.  I mean minus 32F as you stop at the entry to ... Yellowstone. On a snowmobile.  Ready to add your own personal windchill of whatever speed you crank that snowmobile up to.  (no more than 35 mph in the park, Mr. Ranger, I swear...)

At the end of January I had the pleasure of joining Barb and John Gerlach www.gerlachnaturephoto.com for a snowmobile based photo tour of Yellowstone.  Since there is a limit on the number of snowmobiles allowed in the park each day and all snowmobiles have to be with a guide, it's much less crowded in the winter than the when the hordes of unguided, minivan transported, wildlife harassing plodders descend on the park in the warm weather. Advantage number one.  The wildlife also has to hang around the lower elevations to find food, which of course is the elevation where the snowmobile trails are located, so it is plentiful. Advantage number two.  Because the animals are close to the trails, you don't need a 1200 mm lens costing as much as your house to photograph them. Advantage number three.  The animal coats are full and lush unlike the spring and summer when they shed and look like they've contracted some horrendous disease.  Advantage number four.  The park itself is coated in about 5 feet of snow, which covers up a lot of ground which in the summer is covered with ugly drought browned grass. If it's cold enough, there can be fog and hoar frost coated trees and animals.  The animals often hang out near the thermal areas, which can give the animals an extra frosty look and make the thermal areas more interesting because of the presence of the animals. Advantage number five. Another plus to a winter shoot is that most photographers hibernate in the winter so if you have any winter images you will have something special. Advantage number six.

But the biggest advantage to a real winter photo trip is that pretty much no matter where you live the weather back home will be milder.  After the minus 30 F morning I had in Yellowstone, I was just about ready for shorts and a tshirt when I got back to Toledo at a balmy 19 F.  That's a 49 degree swing in the right direction.  Not like when you go tropical and drop from 85 to 19F and swing 66 degrees the wrong way!

Level 3 Captivity

So it's the third day of the level 3 weather travel restriction where I live.  For those of you who don't have this system, the basic premise is the county sheriff (who? we don't live out west!) has the authority to restrict travel if he believes the weather has made the roads too dangerous.  It started Sunday when northwest Ohio got 8 inches of snow rather quickly but then continued now into the  third day because the temperatures dropped below zero and some of the roads are still icy.  Only those who have "vital" jobs are permitted to drive.  The rest have to stay home and of course the kids who hadn't gone back to school yet from Christmas break don't go to school and have been out so long that they've already forgotten everything they learned this year.  Mothers of school age children are so crazed that they've likely stress eaten themselves out of any hope for a January fitness regimen.  My day job has enough priority that I could surf an erupting volcano to get to work and the sheriff would just wave as I glided by but the rest of the populace is certainly going stir crazy. I don't recall any of this level stuff in year's past; growing up in Cleveland a level 3 storm probably meant we got 3 feet of snow so I'd be out shoveling three times as long (snowblowers hadn't been invented yet or more likely my father didn't think one was worth the expense when he had kids for shoveling.)  Ice on the roads was an occupational hazard - if you had an occupation you hazarded your way to work; usually in a rear wheel drive car with no traction control, 2 snow tires in back, and something heavy in the trunk - but not too heavy since back then road salt rusted out the cars so quickly many trunks looked like some kind of reddish swiss cheese.  The government seems to be so busy protecting us from ourselves that we're going to turn into a nation of wimps where survival of the unfit is the norm.  But I digress.

At work today someone asked me if I had been out photographing in the snow and cold.  I hadn't. Not because I'm a wimp; after all I had just photographed sunrise in the Badlands at -19 F a couple of weeks ago, but because the parks don't open if it's level 3 and because in general I try to be law abiding.  Level 3 days are great for image processing, maintaining those file backups, and working on websites.  The other reason is that I'd already been out shooting twice this year on days when we had what I call a photogenic snowfall: the kind that sticks to all the branches and edges of things and really makes the structure of the trees pop. The image above is from Side Cut Park along the Maumee River and I think it demonstrates the beauty of a photogenic snowfall.  My only other comment is - hand warmers!  And I'm referring to the chemical ones that heat up when exposed to air and last about 7 hours.  I put them in a thin pair of gloves so that I can work my camera controls without my fingers freezing.

So whenever the sheriff finally rides out of town and takes the level 3 restrictions with him, I'll be out there looking for another photographic delight - snow drifts!

A Fun Way to Learn Photography

Often people will ask how I learned photography.  While I certainly did my share of reading books and practicing with the camera in areas around my home, I believe I learned the most from attending photography workshops.  I know I've been to more than 15, and even though I'm fairly accomplished, I still attend them and still learn something new each time.

An ideal format for a workshop is for an established photographer to lead a group in a scenic area where the typical day consists of sunrise and sunset shoots, lecture or critique time, and time for participants to develop images from the workshop.  There has to be some scenery to photograph both for inspirational and practical purposes, so most workshops are somewhere especially beautiful and are timed to occur during a season where that location is even more photogenic.  The leader accompanies the group members into the field and shares his/her knowledge of optimal locations for shooting in that area.  The leader makes himself available for questions and assists the participants as they are composing and capturing images.  Most workshop leaders have either a set of lectures with photographic examples to present or will have Q&A sessions. It's very common towards the end of the trip to have a session where each participant presents several images taken during the workshop.  While this gives the leader the option to critique the images, it gives the other participants a chance to see how other people viewed the location and created images.  Since digital photography is very dependent on imaging software skills, participants often bring laptops and develop their images in a common workroom under the guidance of the lead photographer.

Workshops are beneficial for all levels of photographers.  Certainly beginners can learn all aspects of photography in this situation, but even advanced photographers benefit.  If the workshop is in an unfamiliar area, you won't waste time trying to figure out when and where to be during the best light of the day. Sometimes a workshop is the only way to access a sensitive area or private land.  There's safety in numbers for workshops that occur in wilder areas and there is the opportunity for camaraderie and creative synergy with people who share an interest but often have a different viewpoint.  One of my favorite aspects of a photo workshop is to see the compositions from people who were often shooting right next to me but saw something completely different.

The image of a bobcat is from a workshop I just returned from given by Rikk Flohr in the South Dakota Badlands.  I'm essentially a landscape photographer but was interested in the possibility of incorporating animals into my landscape images.  I've been to the badlands in the past, but until this workshop with Rikk and the other lead photographer Laurie Hernandez I didn't realize the variety of wildlife living in the park or where to find them.  One of my favorite photography workshop leaders is Andy Cook who melds the right balance of knowledge, personality, and energy into a workshop that's both educational and really fun.

For so many reasons, a photography workshop is a superb way to improve your skills.  They make great Christmas presents too!  (Chris, are you reading this?)

Photographic Things to be Thankful For

Being that it's the tail end of the Thanksgiving weekend I was musing about things that have to do with photography for which I am thankful. A big category is jets, rental cars, on line reservations and all of the services that make modern travel so much easier than in the past (the TSA is not one of these) and permits you to get to photographically interesting places.  The image above is from the Pacific coast of Costa Rica which took less than a day to reach from Toledo.   It was taken with a mirrorless camera - small enough to carry without needing a chiropractor afterwards, fairly inconspicuous, high quality, and yet not so expensive that if I'd have dropped it overboard I would have been heartbroken.  My Canon M is a great back up camera for trips that aren't designed as hard core dawn to dusk expeditions and is a reasonable primary camera when I'm accompanying the wife somewhere that's not supposed to be a photographic outing (Chris has already learned there's really no such thing!)  Digital itself is another blessing.  I've heard it said that a real photographer has to learn by shooting film first but I disagree.  The instant feedback showing your mistakes makes a digital camera a far better learning tool.  I do not miss the days of slide film when I would review my images from a photography workshop by placing a large trash can next to a light table, peering at slides through a viewing loop, and then pitching many of them into that trash can. It's been derided as  "chimping" when you look at your images on the camera monitor right after capturing them, but the best way to learn is to set the viewscreen to show the image along with the RGB histogram and review as you go.  HDR software is another plus.  When it works, it's sure better than trying to put together a series of exposures by hand.  However, I do often start with the HDR program but then blend that image by hand with one of the original images, usually the one with the best sky, because I find that HDR software often makes a mess out of the sky.  Panoramic software gives you the chance to widen your opportunities for compositions (bad pun intended.) Seriously though, panoramic technique gives one the freedom of composition far beyond the traditional 2x3, 4x5 or square formats.  My last thanks goes out to grocery stores everywhere as I don't have to spend time like the fisherman trying to capture food - I can capture images instead.

Time and patience

Currently I'm on vacation in central america so I have lots of free time.  Of course I do, I'm on vacation! But this is not my usual run and shoot til I drop vacation so the photograph on this blog is from home where I don't have much free time and especially not much time for photography. But since shooting images is one of my most favorite activities, how do I fit it in?
One of my techniques for maximizing my photographic opportunities in Toledo is that I have a list of images I would make if the weather and season (and my schedule) coincide.  As I've driven around the area I've noticed potential subjects and thought about when they might make an intriguing image.  Then if those circumstances arise and I can get to that spot I'm able to photograph quickly and efficiently. 
For years I've been fascinated by the crumbling interurban bridge.  I've photographed it numerous times but really hadn't gotten an image to my liking.  I thought a foggy day would work but it honestly took years until one morning the fog seemed perfect and first light was early enough that I could get there and then to work on time.  That's the image below.

Now I just need a lightening storm at sunset...