Photographic education

Photographic education never ends. The sources I utilize for continuing education are listed in the links section to the right. Most recently, Charles Cramer provided an update to his Photoshop handbook to his email subscribers for free! Charles is one of, if not the best, photographic instructors in the word today. I owe a great deal of my improvement to his instruction and photographic examples. The update covers a lot of the changes with PS CS4 and there were a lot of changes. I encourage you to visit his website and sign up for his newsletter and to certainly look into taking one of his workshops. I hope to attend one of his Yosemite workshops in the next couple of years myself. One additional note is that I have been working very diligently on the Smoky Mountain portfolio or "folio." This will be an entirely new presentation and one that I really find conducive to my artist vision. I will keep you updated as the folio nears completion. I am expecting the folio to be completed in the next couple of months. Take care and have a great Thanksgiving.

Smoky Mountain Rain

I was hoping for at least one day of rain for atmospheric enhancement on our Smoky Mountain photography trip and boy did we get one. I have more portfolio images from the rainy day than from all others, but I didn't need 1-2 inches of rain, just a mist or a sprinkle would have been just fine. I love the saturation that the rain provides. My gear selection for rain prevention included garbage bags and umbrellas. Many other photographers recommend the garbage bag option as a way to demonstrate frugality. I have now yielded to the more elegant option for rain protection which includes a Kata E-702 camera rain cover from Amazon. I received the unit a few days ago and while I haven't had it out in the elements, it appears to be just what I need. It can cover my 5DMKII with the 24-105 zoom and even the 70-200 f2.8 IS zoom. You can find more information at Amazon or by Googling Kata. This will now be a permanent part of my supplemental bag for those rainy/snowy days. Can't wait to use it on our return Smoky's trip in April!

What a treat!

I don't know why I took so long to take a photographic visit to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I can tell you that it won't take me long to visit the park again. I returned this past Thursday from 5 wonderful days of landscape photography in the park. The visit exceeded my expectations. There were many wonderful moments of exciting photography from changing lighting conditions, dramatic sunrises, wonderful streams, perfect fall leaves, and wildlife including elk and bear. I love the western U.S. locations, but GSMNP is second to none of these locations and I plan on it becoming a frequent location for me in the future. I have just completed my first work through on the images in Adobe Light Room. I will keep you updated on the progress of the images. My plan is to publish a PDF portfolio of the images within the next few months. Plans are underway for a spring visit in late April 2010.

Smoky Mountains Here I Come

Tomorrow morning I will be heading to the Smoky Mountains for 5 days of landscape photography. My trip will be based out of Cherokee and I hope to capture some of the wonderful beauty of the area at this gorgeous time of year. Many things are in the works behind the scenes; astrophotography work continues with a new portfolio and entirely new presentation evolving both in digital as well as printed formats. I am very excited about these presentations, but they are going to take a while to complete. I may produce a smaller portfolio with the same formats from the Smoky Mountains if the work merits such a presentation. I hope all is well and please drop me a line. See you next week.

Hello again!

My apologies for being absent. The past few weeks I have been training for a Multiple Sclerosis Bike Ride. Yes, I was new to biking as well, so it was a lot of effort to get ready for the 150 mile ride over two days. The ride went very well and I am getting very comfortable on the bike now. I am even a few pounds lighter now! There is a lot going on right now with photography and I will provide updates over the next few posts. Both astrophotography and landscape photography efforts are under way. I am also learning some new ways of presenting images and will be sharing my experiences here on the blog on that as well. So just wanted to touch base again and wish you well. See you soon with more info. Take care.

Leaves

Experimenting with interpretation is one of the most enjoyable aspects of photography today. I must confess that I don't always know at the time of capture how I want the image to appear in the final state. Brookgreen Gardens stood out to me as a place of structure. The complex entanglement of the Oak trees, the beautiful sculpture work on display, and the lines and form of leaves and plants. This plant has a very green color to the leaves, but I found that too distracting from the original motivation for the image and that was the structure and lines. I didn't really envision a black and white presentation so I played around with some of the Light Room default color schemes. The one that represented my original vision most clearly was the "aged" scheme. The leaves really seem to respond to this color presentation. I apologize for not having comparison images, but I also believe they may be more distracting than educational. My main point is to experiment with all of the tools we have available today. Knowing what tools are available can only make one more proficient in the field knowing how to apply those tools to the interpretation at the moment of capture. I will continue to share with you more images from Brookgreen over the coming weeks. Take care.

Oak Tree-Revisiting the image

While I enjoyed the "unreal" presentation of the original "Oak Tree Canopy", there were two items that continually gnawed at me. One was that the midtones were just too MIDTONED! So I applied another curve to the image to raise the mid and upper tones a bit on the scale. The second bother was that the image looked too "squatty." It simply looked compressed. So I elongated the image with the transform tool in PS and I like the aspect ratio much better now. Since I make no bones about manipulating images, this image is certainly no attempt at representing "reality." I will address the reality of photography off and on in this blog, but as you may have guessed, the camera is certainly not a truth-teller. I hope you enjoy the discussion of the revisit and have a great day.