As much as I hate to admit it, yesterday was the first day I have been out photographing this year. Website redesign, processing older images, and filling orders has simply kept me indoors quite a bit. Still, I could not let January pass with not having been out at all.
Standing on "thin ice"?
I went out to one of my favorite spots on Lake St. Clair to see how the ice was forming up. We had an unusual patch of warm weather here, then some bitter cold. Some of the lake ice melted, sheets flowed, and froze over the top again creating some interesting layers. I updated my Facebook photos with some snapshots from my iPhone.
Unfortunately yesterday the light was pretty drab. Twilight was completely grey. The sun only poke through the cloud cover briefly. It did give me some time to scout around a little though. The ice close to shore was about 1.0 – 1.5 inches thick or so. It certainly seemed like plenty enough to support my weight. There were some fish swimming underneath. Although slippery as a wet walrus butt, I didn’t feel too threatened of going through. Worst case I would have sank only calf deep and froze in place there for someone to walk by and notice some tall statue with a tripod.
I did find a really cool ice sheet that had what appeared like frozen waves on top of it. It was a square sheet, and no other sheets around had the same frozen waves. I figured it must have been floating during the warm week we had, and froze again in this spot. This is just the kind of thing I look for in my compositions. With the light sort of ho-hum, it was worth trying another day. (more…)
Learn More
Apple iPad
Unless you have been comfortably tucked away yesterday reading one of those old fashioned, bound paper things or simply refused to listen to any one of 10,000 different media sources – you probably know that Apple unveiled their latest gizmo today called the iPad. The hype has been building for months and the rumors can finally be squashed.
For photographers, no doubt there will be interest in portfolio displays, book publishing, and access to more tools to share our work. As consumers, some will embrace, some will drool, and of course pundits will take their shots. What I find most amazing is the transformation digital media and tools are shaping the way we communicate and interact with the world around us. Apple presented this as the “gap filler” to fill what is between a device like the iPhone and a full blown computer. Our lives are pelleted with so many data streams, from so many different sources, do we need every little gap filled with yet another device?
The iPad looks like it can do a lot of very cool things – games and movies stand out to me, as well as possible new methods for distributing photographs, and possibly eliminating the piles of magazines I rarely have time to read anyway. I am certainly running out of space for them. I do wonder however, when does it become enough?
I love technology and gadgets, but lately I am finding myself just wanting to sit by a tree in my woods and listen to the birds sing, even if I may need my iPhone to identify them occasionally. 
How do you think this new gadget will fit in with photographers?
Learn More
Bear and river
Hard to believe months have already gone by and I am still digging out favorites from my trip to Katmai National Park in Alaska. Bears are such amazing animals, I still feel quite privileged to have had the experiences with them. Each time I move through my editing process, I encounter a gem or two, and this is one I particularly liked.
I liked the graphical interplay between the bear and river in this image. The curvature of the river in combination with the bear’s stride give a bit of a dynamic feel I think. You can see some remnants of salmon heads in the rocks, and I always dig a little rim light. These bears would quite frequently hunt along the sides of the river watching for salmon activity. Did I mention Bears rock?!
I learned about a new film in the works by PBS’s NATURE program while searching for some info about a show that was just on.
The film is intended to be a portrait of three bear species; brown bears, black bears, and polar bears – all filmed in Alaska, featuring bear biologist Chris Morgan. He will be exploring Alaska mostly by motorcycle supposedly, with the film due out in 2011. There is a pretty cool blog with videos following his journey that you can check out here: The Bear Blog with Chris Morgan . It looks like it could be pretty good from what I have read and watched so far. I don’t know much more than that, but will start following it more closely. Check it out if interested.
This bear photo was captured near a river feeding Kinak Bay in Katmai National Park, Alaska, using a Nikon D700 and 200-400 f4 VR lens at ISO 1250. It was post-processed in Adobe Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS3 on a Mac. More bear pictures from my trip can be found in my gallery here.
Learn More
Five Mile Point
Every time I work up an image for a client, I find I am going back into its depths and re-evaluating the processing I have already done on it. Depending on how long it has been since I prepared a particular image for print (or perhaps not even at all), I may have found a new tool or way of doing things that would make a particular shot better than before. More often than not I think the changes are quite subtle, but I still view it as “better.”
On many of my earlier landscapes, I never knew about luminosity masking. Most of the time it improves on what was done before with basic curves or levels adjustments. Over the past year I found the plugins Topaz Detail and Topaz Adjust that sometimes take the image in directions I had never considered. Each new skill or tool that I adopt has the potential of evolving an earlier image to something different at minimum, or an entirely new look at the other extreme. Sometimes it is simply my own internal vision has moved along a different path. There always seems to be data within a file we may have never known was there.
So I suppose all of the images in my archive could be considered in a state of flux. It is only a matter of time when the next image comes due for its next evolutionary stage.
This landscape photograph was captured using a Nikon D2X and Nikon 12-24 f4 lens at ISO 200 at Five Mile Point, a coastal sandstone area on the southern shores of Lake Superior. I just recently reprocessed it for a 36×48 inch print intended for a client using luminosity masks and Topaz Detail. The plugin particularly helped bring out more of the texture of the sandstone. (Hard to tell in a small JPEG, but quite obvious when viewing a 36×48 print size at 50%)
Learn More
Burning questions
One key aspect of my approach to my nature subjects usually originates from a question, or series of them. While one may wish to be all knowing, it is quite hard to accomplish in actual practice. Shocking I know.
This particularly applies to the interesting patterns I may find in the woods that I enjoy making abstract photographs from. Sometimes after I photograph something, the answers come later on, leading to a bit of education. More often (much more than I like to admit!), the photograph remains as a reminder of those questions.
In the case with this photograph, I came across a burnt pile of wood in the middle of the woods near my home. Aside from wondering how the wood was burned to begin with (kids? lightning? meteor? magic staff blast?), I was quite curious about the pattern formed. It was hardly uniform, and I really didn’t know what type of wood it was. For sure it has something to do with the thermal decomposition of the cellulose in the wood. So questions about this pattern lead me down the path of learning about cellular structures in wood and the interaction with temperature.
I don’t always get the specific answers I am looking for. The pursuit and appreciation of the unknown are part of the journey. I suppose once I no longer have any questions left, I can stop photographing.
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. – Albert Einstein
This macro photograph was made in the woods along the Clinton River, Sterling Heights, Michigan. The photograph was captured by a Nikon D700, 14 bit RAW file, Nikon 200mm f4 macro lens, and post processed using luminosity masks in Photoshop CS3, and the plugin Topaz Adjust on a Mac Pro.
Learn More
Follow Me on…