Sierra Club notecards

Posted by Mark on Jan 29, 2008 in nature photography | 18 comments

If you happen to be at your local REI store, or any other place that carries the individual Sierra Club notecards, take a look for these two images. I was fortunate to have these two selected to be in the Winter 2008 lineup, and finally got my complimentary photographer’s samples yesterday. I am quite happy with the reproduction quality, particularly on the Joshua Tree image because I was worried the dark tones might blend together too much. Both look good. These images are also symbolic of a few things;

1. The Joshua Tree image was made with a 4.1 MP DSLR (Nikon D2H) – in the great MP race, sometimes people forget that images made with older technology still have a lot of value. I continue to sell prints made from images from this camera. I am careful on enlargement sizes with detailed landscapes, but in general, the files are more resilient than a lot of people may give them credit for.
2. The images were sold based upon an editor’s review of a custom web lightbox created with Adobe Lightroom. I password protected the directory of the special web gallery, and sent the editor the link and login info. It is a time saver on both the photographer’s end (particularly in using a program like Lightroom to create it) as well as the editor as they can quickly scan through images they may be interested in. Higher resolution images were then provided based upon the picks. I see requests for submissions via lightbox on a more frequent basis – and it is certainly more efficient than zipping JPEGs together or submitting via CD. It certainly is a changing world from the days of sending sheets of slides.
3. I think I would have been downgraded in a ‘judging’ setting for the sandhill crane shot because I left the adult out of focus (intentionally). Perhaps it doesn’t fit some ‘rules.’ It was more important for me to have the adult as more symbolic figure instead of in sharp detail. I was more interested in the image showing a story. I am certainly happy to see such a shot published, and the same shot has also sold for prints. Of course it is now off the market for greeting cards for awhile because of the licensing agreement with the publisher.
4. It is still quite a guessing game on what may or may not be selected. This certainly wasn’t my first submission, and have had many returned in the past with no picks at all. I still watch the racks of notecards that I come across and try to submit what I think may be something different.

I would love to hear from anyone who happens to see these in their local shops. I still need to get to my local REI myself to see if they carry these two particular cards. If you are interested in either of these and don’t have a local shop to get them from, drop me an email, if I have samples, we may be able to work something out.

Inspired by stone

Posted by Mark on Jan 27, 2008 in nature photography | 18 comments

Arizona Rainbow Petrified Wood abstract stone photo

I finally got a chance to start one of my photo projects I have been wanting to do for a long time, and inspired recently by a couple of photo books I have been going through – most notably Bill Atkinson’s “Within the Stone.” Not only does it have some of the most mesmerizing images I have ever seen, but the print quality clearly sets a standard for all coffee table books to come.

I have always had a love for photographing rock walls and rock patterns, but wanted to go further with this into the wonderful patterns you find in sections of rocks, minerals, and gemstones. Put me on a cobblestone beach with my camera, and you can probably come back the next day and find me in pretty much the same spot. As a kid I used to sit for hours on a beach hammering rocks together searching for ‘dinosaur bones’ inside. Perhaps that is why my thumbs are kind of flat – sometimes I missed! Now the treasure hunting is in front of my camera.

Well, it is a little cold to be sitting on the beach right now, so I have settled for doing a bit of photography in my studio (aka. cluttered office) So it fits in perfectly with the cold weather, because it keeps me inside! I already have an assortment of rocks around the house, but wanted some patterns that are a bit more exotic – like Amethyst and petrified woods. So I did a bit of Ebay’ing for samples that caught my eye, even have a few nicely patterned rocks from China.

Lighting can get a little tricky, but my Nikon R1C1 dual macro flash kit worked pretty good. Since you are photographing highly reflective surfaces (either wet or polished), you get the best results through cross-polarization. This involves putting a sheet polarizer filter over your flashes, as well a standard circular polarizer on your camera lens. You rotate the camera polarizer to be opposite the polarized lighting from the flashes. This removes the glare and reflections just like it does in larger landscapes.

I have always been fascinated by nature’s paintings, and as a photographer it is very rewarding to seek these out and portray them in ways that I want them to be seen. My rock photographs are simply an extension of this curiosity and fascination. I am looking forward to continuing this series, and eventually making some large prints and canvas panels of these images.

The Mac Experience – part 1

Posted by Mark on Jan 25, 2008 in nature photography | 16 comments

Well, OK, this is kind of just a start off post since my Mac is ordered but I don’t have it yet. Hopefully you folks won’t get too tired of my babbling about this. The anticipation is building though for this Mac newbie. The new MacPro’s have an option for a fairly high end Nvidia graphics card, but that option is going to cost you in availability – they aren’t shipping yet. But I have patience since my PC is running for now, I have some orders to work on, and it gives me time to spend reading up on how things are going to change a bit.

Ordering it from the Apple store was pretty straight forward, and I was glad I remembered that NAPP offers discounts with Apple. The amount I saved by ordering with the NAPP discount paid for 4 years worth of membership fees! That’s right, I got about $400 bucks off the total package. The discounts applied to nearly every option available in the configuration. If you are considering buying a Mac, definitely look into joining the National Association of Photoshop Professionals. They publish one of the best Photoshop magazines, and offer discounts on all kinds of other stuff.

Since I also ordered an Apple Cinema Displays at the same time, it shipped the very next day. That was cool, but does me little good without the computer. Just a pretty box to drool over for now. Also ordered separately 4 GB RAM (to give me 6 GB total) and an additional hard drive since Apple charges quite a bit for these installed. Being new to the Mac world, I am looking for recommendations on the best sites for information about them, configuring hardware, forums, etc. I imagine some are better than others. I have been browsing MacRumors mostly. That’s it for now, I’ll try to refrain from posting about it until the machine actually arrives.

You can follow this adventure in these other posts:

The Mac Experience – Part 2

The Mac Experience – Part 3

The Mac Experience – Part 4

Ducks and backups

Posted by Mark on Jan 24, 2008 in nature photography | 6 comments

The ol’ saying of making sure your ducks are in a row couldn’t ring truer when it comes to backing up your computer. As I wrote about in my previous post, my PC decided it wasn’t going to boot on me a few weeks back. After messing around and not getting anywhere, I ultimately restored a disk image from the prior month and got it back in working order. But since my backup was a month old, a few other things saved my butt in losing a month’s worth of database information in Lightroom, website updates, etc. You may want to give these strategies some consideration to give yourself a little piece of mind. Of course the best practice is to not let a backup get a month old, but hey – nobody’s perfect.

For one, my primary hard drive is partitioned into 3 separate drives (C drive, E, F) The first partition contains Windows XP and my program files and settings. The other drives are for data. So when my computer crashed, and I had to restore a backup – I only had to restore the C: drive partition. Since it was a Windows blue screen issue and not my data being corrupted, my data files were all still up to date. Whew! Dodged a bullet on that one. How do you partition a hard drive? Well, there are lots of ways, but I prefer the simplest one in letting software like Partition Magic do it. It makes it rather easy.

Also, my Lightroom database and “My Documents” folder are both stored on the “E” drive. My images are mostly on external drives or Network drives – except for some unedited raw files that are on a separate internal drive that was safe from the crash. I guess the basic philosophy is to keep your data away from the operating system and programs, whether it is different partitions, external drives, networks, etc. I didn’t follow my own rule with my email however, and lost the months worth.

I have also praised the disk imaging program Acronis TrueImage in the past. It made the process very painless when I upgraded my main hard drive to a larger one, and it also made recovery from this last crash pretty easy as well. Acronis can create a “boot CD” for you – so if your hard drive completely goes wacko, or Windows, you can boot to the CD and it provides all the tools you need to restore one of your backups from another drive. I did learn it is a bit more complicated to restore from a Network drive than say a USB attached drive, so my backups have been moved to a USB drive now.

For my images, I tend to be a bit more religious about the backups. And even though they are already on a RAID5 network drive, they get backed up to another RAID5 network drive. I use Microsoft’s SyncToy to make sure those are ‘in-sync.’ It’s a great little free program that can be configured in a variety of ways, like only backing up new stuff, etc. So why not use SyncToy for everything instead of worrying about this ‘disk image’ (cloning) deal? Well, I think system boot drives are an entirely different animal than just data files. Even if I replace the old drive with a brand new one, it is nice knowing the new one should boot up with no issues.

I plan on using the same strategies when I get my Mac, but may have to look into other programs. If anyone has any recommendations for a good Mac disk image backup program, please let me know.

Wildlife closeups

Posted by Mark on Jan 20, 2008 in nature photography | 14 comments

I found this video from Art Wolfe quite entertaining because I think many wildlife photographers can relate to the wonderful experience it is to be so accepted into an animal’s space. (Although this probably shows acceptance more than he expected! ) Thanks to Jim Goldstein for pointing it out! I think it is quite obvious they are doing nothing here to threaten or stress the animals, which is always a topic that comes up it seems when photographers are approaching wildlife. Every situation has to be evaluated with common sense. It really bugs me when people try to mandate separation between humans and other animals. Clearly fun can be had by both species.