Yesterday I was writing about "mud season" and today I've been enjoying sudden spring. Well, enjoying might be stretching things a little, though I am happy to have been able spend the day doing some necessary yard work. That meant that as I was just about down to my last drop of energy, my tractors was back in the shed. Leaves, weeds and other debris that had accumulated over the winter, hidden in the woods behind my house where they'll compost nicely and I was limping back to the house, ready for a shower and a couple of hours on the deck, for the first time this year
As it happened though,...
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When you visit the Adirondacks this time of year, you shouldn't be surprised it you hear the locals refer to the season (that time between really winter a really spring) as "mud season." It's a pretty descriptive couple of words. Typically, what you see is brown, making the challenge of capturing an interesting image that much more challenging. Still, if you're in the Adirondacks you have to try. Mud season or not, it was time to take some photos.
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On our way up to Old Forge, NY, in the Adirondack Mountains, this past Sunday, my wife and I were enjoying the first really spring-like day in quite a while . . . but from inside our car, with the windows rolled up. So we were missing a lot.
Tooling along the South Shore Road, along the side of First, Second, Third and Fourth Lakes, heading north of Old Forge, I was enjoying the thickets of forest along each side of the road, and I couldn't take it any longer when I announced to my wife that I had to stop and take a picture.
I love the Adirondack forest and I wanted to try to capture some...
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That's a big part of the challenge of photography . . . in my case, maybe in our cases, nature photography . . . or landscape photography. For some of my friends it might be wildlife photography or bird photography or flower photography. I don't think it makes much difference what our subjects are. We all try to discover how to come home with images that satisfy us. The funny thing is what satisfies one day might not on another. Is that because our tastes change, our knowledge of what we're doing changes, or understanding of what we like changes? I'd guess probably a bit of all three.
Of...
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It's easy to take time to learn from others. Often we find ourselves learning from the stars at conferences like the recent NANPA (North American Nature Photography Association) Summit in Jacksonville, FL. It's among the reasons that many of us, perhaps even most, attend them. As a matter of fact, we are likely to learn a lot from our peers as well, but that's another subject for another post. Today, let's focus on learning from the stars at conferences as well as learning from ourselves. To start, let's visit one of the stars from the NANPA Summit – Tony Sweet, (TonySweet.com).
Already...
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What can we learn at a conference. Well, if it's a conference as well put together as this year's North American Nature Photography Association (NANPA) Summit was, quite a lot. I had intended to begin writing about my days at the summit, late last month and earlier this month, even while I was still there. Even though I had been to a previous summit two years go, I wasn't prepared for the intensity and pace of this one. It was truly an all day and then some experience. And what an opportunity to learn, with so many of the top nature photographers in the world on hand.
People like Clyde Butcher,...
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In my workshops and presentations, it's common for me to encourage students to focus on what caught their eye in the first place. Was it a color? A texture? Repeated patterns? Contrast? What? Then, I suggest, keeping that vision in mind, eliminate everything that doesn't contribute to its presentation to the viewer. If that sounds easy, try it. It's not.
A while back, a good friend and I decided we needed to take our cameras someplace unfamiliar … to get our juices flowing. He suggested the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania, near Wellsboro, PA, also officially known as Colton and Leonard...
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That's a question we always should be asking when we're out shooting. I was talking with a friend while we were out shooting over the weekend, trying to find a specific image we had in mind. We all do that. But, it occurs to me that we can hurt ourselves if we stick too closely a pre-conceived composition.
We ought to always be on the lookout because, well let's admit it, it would almost be criminal to just prance by a special composition because we didn't take time to see it.
That doesn't mean that those serendipitous shots are necessarily going to be great or even good. But, at the very...
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I don't usually train my camera on subjects like lighthouses, but Saturday was a special case. A good friend and I only had the morning to get out and shoot and we'd be unable to spend time on a wintry trail somewhere. We needed to be able to pretty much drive up to whatever venue we chose. At the same time we wanted to capture winter images. For some reason we pretty quickly settled on a short drive to the Great Lakes Harbor city of Oswego, NY. My friend had seen some interesting photos of the harbor's lighthouse and even though we did not know where we need to get to in order to have a good...
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As we begin a new year, many of us make the resolution to "to do better than last year." One of the ways we can keep this resolution is by looking back over the previous year's efforts. As it turns our, one of my favorite photographers, I often benefit from his example, is William Neill. Bill has made it practice to share his selection of favorite images and to seek input about them from his blog readers. So, I'm unabashedly taking a page out of his book.
Why would we do that? Well, the whole process of taking time to review what we've done in past year can tell us a lot. Has our photography...
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