Photo Highlight 2010

A reflection of twelve photos, one from each month, taken over the last year.

January

While I was in school at Regis I always offered to take other photographers in class with me on my hikes, Chris was the first one to accept in my last semester.  None of them were ever interested in shooting landscapes but mostly shot street or portraits.  So here we are, first or second time out together up in Rocky Mountain National Park and a blizzard (as usual) blows in on the higher lake set.  To his credit, he stuck it out with me as we hiked up higher.  When we got out onto Dream Lake I stopped to try to work with edge of ice formed from melting and freezing in the wind.  Sure enough Chris walks right out into my frame and it's so windy he can't here me yell.  On impulse I take a few with him in it and when I get home it made the shot.  Without him in the frame the shot is mediocre at best.  What makes the shot even better is when you find that Chris is Hawaiian native

.

February

This shot is from what was going to be bromeet of photographers who had met on-line, but two of the other photographers bailed on

Alex Burke

and me so again it was just two us.  I love Great Sand Dunes National Park, I really do, and on this day it was in particularly good form.  Frozen ice and snow under wind driven sand really gave it a deepness of color and texture that worked and the clouds decided to be heavenly for us.  I took this shot using Alex's 3 stop hard edge GND (first time using a gnd) and knew I had gold one even before I checked the lcd for the exposure.  Luckily I realized before taking this shot that I had left my 30D up at 3200iso from the last time I went shooting at night but not before I had already taken 70 or so shots.  There's some great shots lost to image noise from this trip.

March

Shot mostly for school otherwise I probably would've been playing WoW or something at the time.  I always seem to have trouble shooting this location  (El Dorado Canyon) and this isn't quite the best one I have gotten from the place, but it is the best non-blizzard shot of the area.  It's so narrow that it's hard to work with the light that it gets.

April

This is from another trip out with Alex Burke, this time out to the Pawnee Buttes.  It was shot from south of the parking lot for the trail out the buttes.  When you're standing there the beauty of the place is somewhat marred by these stupid windmills.  All the way up to the mountains nearly and then as far as the eye can see to the east is a wall of them that loops around the park jarring the landscape.  I've never really cared for these things and they worry me a little.  I fear they'll end up doing what other things like this has.  They always said that rivers were too big to be effected by the dams all that much, that the fisheries of the ocean too numerous to be depleted, and atmosphere to large to be effected (ozone layer) but each time it hasn't been the case.  I worry that with enough of these things out there we'll end up taking too much energy out of the wind systems and screw something up.  I actually talked to a pair of scientists at Creighton U that are working on renewable energy and they gave me a rather dismaying answer, that the wind systems were too vast and powerful to be really effected by these things.

May

I have a lot of photos from May.  I went out for the third time with a camera to my ancestral home of Long Island Maine.  My Grandmother rents out a house she owns from her parents there and each spring she goes out to open it up,  I went with this time worried about her in her age.  Each time I go out I am struck by the amount of death I find on the beaches.  The first time out I found a striking set of wings washed up a beach, a dead and eyeless seal, the skin of a cat, and other macabre findings and this last time was no different.  This round I found dead dear parts, this striking snail, and strange vertebrae washed onto the beach.  I found this snail in a cove I struggled with to get a good landscape from (a struggle that was ultimately in vain) and I was delighted with it.  It was the snail that produced the delightful and hard to find shells that I loved to find on the beach.  It's foot was still intact and the flies had already found it, how could I not shoot it?  I've got this one printed off my room now.

June

This is from the second time I was up in a plane flown by long time friend Ted Manos.  Over last summer he frantically built up hours to get his next level of flight license and often I went along to keep him company.  He was flying some tiny Cessna of one kind or another but more importantly you could open the windows.  There really isn't anything like shooting a sunset over the Platte River with your head stuck out a plane.

July

Originally Ted and I were going to go flying again but an incoming storm prevented us.  Camera in hand along with the car wheel I dragged Ted around rural Nebraska outside of Fremont to work with the scattering clouds from the storm.

Since then, for whatever reason, Ted has started accompanying me outings, sometimes bringing an old Canon a-1 to take shots of his own.

August

From a cross country with instructor flight with Ted.  We flew across half of Nebraska or so, away from a developing storm in Iowa.  It was fascinating to watch from a plane, the clouds just rise and billow growing mysteriously and continuously in mass.  As they grew they were hit by the striking colors of the setting sun from west.

September

Found this guy out the front of my house while doing yard work.  He's a swallowtail butterfly larva.  I identified him by realizing he looked like the poke'mon Caterpie and then looked up what it was based on. The strange orange horn would emerge when threatened and stank like sulfur, it was very strange.  

October 

Taken north of Omaha near what would be 72nd street.  First time my friend Ted brought a camera along.

November

This is from day 2 of a three day shoot at Hitchcock Nature in Iowa.  The strange mist and color are a result of smoke from the fires they lit.  As part of a prescribed burn they lit the whole place fire which let me tell you is a photographers paradise.  Ignoring the incredible color from the smoke and setting sun, the setting is just so much fun.  Small fires appear and burn out in the grass while trees (not these ones mind you) would glow with burning embers.  Crackling and crashes could be heard as you stood still as burning trees fell.  I had to cut this trip short unfortunately, the smoke eventually started to become too much for me.

December

This a farmers field from a trip out to Hitchcock during a particularly nasty blizzard.  I don't know why I always feel compelled to go out these stupid things but I do.  It was bitterly cold with a strong gusty wind making it impossible to do anything towards it.  It was bad enough the I had to leave Hitchcock early.  The wind blow ice encrusted my tripod, camera controls, and glasses making taking photos mostly impossible.  Such are blizzards.

Nature Tips #5 Trespassing and Public Access Land

Trespassing in Maine

All the photos in this blog are from times when I was trespassing or on public access land.

Trespassing comes up every so often when I'm out photographing with someone.  Often times they find it astounding that when I am out in the middle of nowhere I just wander out onto some guys land to make photos or I slip into some abandoned building to take photos.  While trespassing is indeed illegal and I can't recommend that you do it, there are some basic rules that can help you stay out of trouble when doing it.

1) Don't take anything from the area and don't leave anything behind.

2) Don't break or destroy anything, keep your presence low impact.

3) Anything you open, like windows, doors, gates, etc you should close as you go.

4) When possible, just ask them if they care you're out there.  More times than not they won't care in the slightest and often enough they're delighted someone is out photographing their land.

5) If you get caught, don't act like an ass.  You're just a photographer doing your trade.  Hand them off a business card if they want one and tell them straight up that you liked the lay of their land and so you went out to shoot it.  If you didn't ask them hopefully it was because it wasn't obvious who owned the land or that your light was fading fast, just explain yourself.

6) Stay away from livestock.  Regardless of anything just don't go near them, like stay a few miles away at least.  Even if you've told them you're going to be out there just stay clear of them.  

Following these rules you should be able get access to what you want without getting in trouble.  Landowners get burned by people (usually weekend warrior hunters) not following just basic ettique rules like these.  If they can't tell you've been there, there's no harm in it.

Now if you're just not comfortable with trespassing or talking to landowners but state and federal parks are just not working for you, you have another option.  For those of us in the USA each state should have a handy dandy Public Access Atlas (

Nebraska's

) that will list and show on maps every single piece of land that you can legally wander aimlessly around in.  You can find them on the state's Park and Rec page or you can find them in some sporting good stores like Cabella's here in Omaha tends to have them.  These are put out each year for hunters to find areas in which to practice their sport.  Keep this in mind when you go to these places and mind the seasons (listed in the front of the atlas).  I would stay away from most of these places during deer season for example and I would wear hunter's orange near those seasons as well.  Unfortunately the best hunting times are often the best times for photography so there are chances you will overlap.  Regardless, the atlas is an excellent and detailed resource.

 

Nature Tips #4 Vignetting

Vignetting is a dirty but useful tool.  It allows you to place emphasis where you want after the photo has been taken, but using it is frowned upon.  The trick is to get away with it.  You tend see three versions, one in which it happens on its own, hipsters just blocking out the corners, and people using more discrete but still noticeable methods in photoshop.  Lens vignetting happens when the image circle created by the lens does not quite cover the sensor, causing fall off on the corners.  Usually these days you see it with older film cameras especially with the cheaper super wide zooms.  It can still happen with the new lenses, especially when filters are stacked.  Holgas and other such garbage by purposeful bad design tend vignette.  Hipsters love to recreate that effect in photoshop with sloppy black mask and gradient.  With more careful adjustments, the same emphasis on your subject can be achieved with more taste and discretion.

The intent on creating a vignette should be to change areas of contrast or to create a new contrast between the subject and the rest of the image.  The most basic way to do this is to create a level adjustment and then to mask out the subjected with a simple graduated mask.  By creating this mask, you create a contrast between subject and the rest of the image by placing the majority of the brighter tones in the subject.  Using a curve layer you can fully remove true whites from the rest of the image again drawing the viewer's eye by placing the stronger contrast in the center of the image.  The adjustments do not have to be entirely tone based, but can be based on color as well.  Look at the image of the ants, using the movie poster popular blue/orange contrast the image becomes stronger because it feels more dynamic because of the contrast.  The ants to begin with were already red orange and yellow dominant, so it was easy to create the contrast by making the area surrounding them green blue and purple dominant.  Further since the center of the subject is warm while the outside is cool the ants again become the focus.  As teh view's eyes are drawn to the warmer tones first.