By spring I should have a whole stack of things lined up for camera club competitions, but somehow that never seems to happen. So, as usual, I spent the week before the salon entries were due (in mid-March) trying to figure out what I should enter. Prints: Open color Heading into Winter at Wind Cave Read More …
I showed up at the March salon hoping that some of my good fortune from February would continue. No such luck. Prints: Open monochrome In the Race to Win Last fall I printed black and white versions of several images from last summer’s bike race. This seemed like one of the better ones, so I Read More …
I was around for the February salon too, which was nice. Prints: Open color Blue Bug in San German, Puerto Rico I considered saving my highly stylized blue bug image for the upcoming Creative digital competition. However, the print turned out so well that it didn’t make sense to submit it as a digital image. Read More …
For once I was in town for the salon and I liked the digital topic, so I was hoping it would be a good night! Prints: Open monochrome I always struggle with monochrome. Most of it is an inability to “see” in black and white, but I also have some technical challenges getting the tones Read More …
Last May I participated (without being there physically, since I was in France during the show), in Northeast Minneapolis Art Association’s spring Art-a-Whirl as a member of the Twin Cities Photography Group. Apparently continual downpours and road construction outside the venue kept most people away. With little traffic, it wasn’t a very successful show for Read More …
I’ve never been a sports photographer. I’m not particularly interested in sports, so there has never been an incentive to learn how to photograph sports. Sure, I shot a few basketball and football games when I was in high school and college, but mostly because I was there anyway to chat with friends. But sometimes Read More …
I was out shooting bridge pictures one evening and found myself across the river from a heron rookery. A straight shoot of it was fine, but kind of boring, so I played with it bit to get a scene reminiscent of an old-fashioned horror movie. Too strange? Or did I need to go farther? I Read More …
April brought another competition for the Saint Paul Camera Club. Print Competition: Monochrome I had a horrible time choosing prints for this month’s monochrome competition. Well, that’s not exactly true. I had no trouble choosing prints; it was the printing that gave me problems. Both of the prints I wanted to use looked best with Read More …
After having a break from competition in December, the Saint Paul Camera Club held its next salon in January. Digital competition: Animals With “animals” as the theme for the month’s competition, I went back to my 2005 safari in Botswana. The judge liked my cheetah family, but didn’t think I had sharpened it enough, so Read More …
Somehow the new year has rolled around without my actually publishing anything here. Time to change that. First up: October’s Saint Paul Camera Club salon. This year started off with a change. Last year, each monthly salon had both an open print (rotating between mono and color) and a themed digital component. with members allowed Read More …
As is probably obvious, I tend to be very literal and way too serious, traits that carry over into my photography. Generally my goal as a photographer is to recreate exactly what I saw. That’s a necessity for a photojournalist, but not exactly the recipe for inspired art. This doesn’t mean I don’t edit my Read More …
I was out of town when the deadline came around for submitting images for the April Salon, so I only competed in the digital competition. (Unlike prints, you can submit digital images without actually being present.) I was pretty excited about this competition because the theme for the month was Minnesota and Wisconsin Architecture. I Read More …
In February I joined the St. Paul Camera Club. It’s something I’ve thought about on and off over the years, but had never taken the time to look into. A photography event earlier in the winter made me realize that this was something I really needed to do . . . so I went to Read More …
Intense backlighting from the late afternoon sun made shooting a challenge at the Seven Mile Bridges (there are two bridges, a modern highway bridge and the remains of a historic bridge) in the Florida Keys, but I also loved the way the light both illuminated and obscured the bridges. I think black and white enhances Read More …
Modified a bit in Lightroom and Paintshop Pro.
One of my on-going conundrums is cropping. Often cropping comes down to a matter of taste. Cropping can dramatically change the balance, feel, and even the meaning of an image. Sure, sometimes it’s obvious, but sometimes it’s not. And sometimes it probably doesn’t matter, but I just can’t make up my mind. For example, here Read More …
In my last couple posts on my zoom burst experiments , I was focused on what I could do in the field to create interesting effects. But once I started editing my shots in Lightroom, I realized how much of a difference post-processing could make. Even simple, relatively minor changes, have an impact. For example, Read More …
When processing my zoom burst shots from Banning State Park, I found one set of images that made me feel a bit nauseous from motion sickness. And, no, I wasn’t editing in the car! Most of the images I shot were taken at a good distance not only from the subject, but from everything in Read More …