A Time To Play -- A Little

As the season begins to change, we all succumb to the urge to race to capture the last summer scene on the beach or the last flower blooming and then press on to capture the all too short color burst of autumn. Throw in a couple of portrait sessions, a wedding or two and this can become a lot like work. I believe that we all need to recall, from time to time, those moments of real joy that drew us to photography - a print emerging magically in the developer (yes, I know I am showing my age here), the wonder of MacPaint and being able to use a computer to finger paint, seeing a digital camera and discovering the joy of experimentation, and the iPhone and 75,000 (!) apps. Photography at any level is fun and magic and that is important to remember.

In that spirit, I stepped out the door this morning to a Passion Flower vine in full bloom ( no doubt because Washington today has weather as tropical as mid-summer) and took a few snaps and began to explore what I could do with them. Reflections and Pop Art came to mind and off I went. Serious--No, But definitely fun. And in these times, maybe we all need to find a way to enjoy the beauty around us. A little less shouting, a lot more smiling.

Return to the Potomac

I returned to the Potomac River on the Maryland side this last Saturday. The area coverd was between Lock 8 and 10 with good parking access off the Clara Barton Parkway. Although it had rained the previous days, the River was very low giving fantastic access to the shoreline. The leaves have not begun to change so it looks like it is - summer. I think if I say that often enough summer will continue! And, in fact, I do look forward to returning here in the next weeks as Autumn sets in.
On this day I set out to do a set of panoramas of the view. These were made by putting the camera on its vertical axis and taking in one case 25 exposures and for the other 12. The photo merge actions in PS were used to produce the final combined picture. I know that it seems strange to use a vertical format to produce a horizontal final picture, but trust me this is the best way to do it. The final image is hugh, but unfortunately the limitation of the blog format does not show the amazing detail in the final picture. There were a few leaves dropping that I could not resist and I included it here to demonstrate the range of interpretations that you can get off a single image. By far and away if I am going to do a non-color version of an image I reach for the Nik's Silver Efex Pro as there is no better way to explore the alternatives when you step away from color.
If you would like to see these photos and a few others from this shoot in a larger format, please go to: http://davidkay.zenfolio.com/.

What's Your Concept?

A significant amount of my photographic effort is put into shooting stock images. This is in many ways a very different part of the photographic world. It is certainly NOT the world of event or wedding photography, although both of these can produce interesting stock images as a spin-off. Nor is it the world of most art and nature photographers although each of these too can produce stock images. So what makes a good stock image? In my experience, the majority of stock images that are sold are sold on the basis of how they represent some concept. The final use can have a very wide range from being used on a blog, in a Sunday sermon, a student's paper, a corporate PowerPoint presentation, a newspaper article or on a book or magazine cover, or on a highway billboard - and these are only a few of the uses of stock images. Even as old media struggles to survive, new media is constantly being born, and we live in the most visually literate age in human history. The need for imagery is in constant demand.

But the one thing that most of the demand for imagery has in common is that a concept be represented with immediacy - love, fear, teamwork, trust, distrust, speed or more complex concepts ripped from our daily public dialogue. To make this more specific, I have included two photos that can be used to illustrate multiple concepts. Both resemble my retirement plan - lots of holes, but still held together by hope and determination, or maybe they represent the US health care system or our system of financial and corporate regulation. Autumn is a rich period for finding concept pictures in nature. Look in any garden and you will see some plants putting on a last burst of growth and bloom as if they can hold off the inevitable winter. Other plants are already in retreat and decay unwilling to waste any energy that might help them survive the inevitable winter. The same is true of the animal world.

Even if you never intend to shoot a stock image, it can be a great visual exercise to make a short list of concepts that interest you and go out and spend a day finding how you can illustrate them with photos.This will increase your own visual literacy and open your eyes to the world around you. And remember that when you flip through a magazine, look at a newspaper, read a blog, suffer through another PowerPoint presentation your eye generally does not linger on an image for more than 5 seconds, unless it really grabs you. Try to find those grabbers that illustrate your concept.

Both of these shots were made with a Nikon D-300, 105 mm f2.8 macro shot on manual mode at f22, with a RayFlash attached to a Nikon SB800 in full daylight.

Sometimes Lady Luck Shines on a Rainy Day

It's a rainy day in Leesburg, and I am feeling lazy. I have a long list of reflection and mood shots filed away for rainy days, but.....And in any case, I need to get up at 5AM tomorrow to do some more shooting along the Potomac. More mud!! So here I am sitting in front of my Mac editing some of this weeks shots. I stare ideally out the window and what do I see staring back at me?
A complete deer family, two fawns, a doe and a buck complete with a respectable rack for Eastern Whitetails! I grabbed my Nikon D-3 with a 300 mm, F4 lens and head for the slidding door to the patio. Now in real life, this noisy door should have sent the deer bolting, but then in real life you do not see a complete nuclear family of deer! Either because our foilage is so tasty or because the deer of suburban northern Virginia think they own the place this family barely moved. The buck stared at me, but that was it. Now this is not how it is suppose to work. I am suppose to go to Shenadoah National Park, get up at 5AM, hike over to Big Meadows and hope the deer arrive as the sun comes up. Usually this is not what happens, and certainly not with a complete deer family unit. Now I am energized and I need to run out and buy a MegaMillion ticket for tonight. This must be my lucky day.

Seduction

What does it take to cause my self restraint to take a serious dip? No, not redheads or green eyes, but old, rusty cars.There is something about coming upon a derelict vehicle from that great age of American automobiles that I find hard to resist. This is not always wise as there is a reason for the phrase "mean as a junkyard dog", and what I sometimes judge as abandoned is often someone else's project. How can you resist the paint that in part, even thought surrounded by rust eating away the body, remains bright, the chrome trim that is pitted but still shines and the curves that were clearly designed to be seductive. But the loss of restraint goes beyond snapping a few pictures. These are evocative objects that bring back a flood of memories of the cars you lusted for in your youth, and that, like that redhead, were never possessed. The perfect hotrod conversion. So when the images are uploaded how can you resist giving them the care and glamor they deserve? Oh, so many tools! Begin with Photoshop, but why stop there? HDR, Contrast Master, all the Nik filters, Lucis Pro, Topaz. How the hours slip away, just as they did for Detroit.

What does it take to be a good landscape photographer??

There are some obvious requirements beyond understanding how your camera works well enough to operate it in dim to no light. Having the right lenses and equipment - and having it with you. It is painful to hear "if I had only brought my ND Grad filter...."
Certainly you have to be willing to get up at 0 dark thirty! While we all love sunsets, I, however, reluctantly have come to the view that the hour before and after sunrise generally produces better images than the end of the day. I could bore everyone with the reasons that the modern digital sensor handles morning light better that the classic sunset lighting, but I won't. Patience would also be high on any list. Nature will do what it does whenever it wants to and if you relax, pack-up the tripod, roll over and hit the snooze button, etc. you can bet that is when nature will call out the perfect light. Repetition also helps. Ever heard "Oh I did that place last month." Remember history doesn't repeat itself....it rhymes! The conditions will be different, and so will the photographer. If you ever photograph a child, pet or lover, just look at how your images grow over time in depth and emotions. And the same is true with landscapes.
But I am convinced that the greatest requirement is the willingness to be uncomfortable - really uncomfortable. Weather extremes, difficult - and even hazardous - angles, mud and water, black flies and all the other varieties of biting creatures need to be endured. Oh yes, that barbed wire fence that is in the way of the perfect shot and must be crossed. Remember if it were easy it would already be on the Web.
The blog images were all taken Saturday on a day that began at 5AM with a temperature of 78 and a dew point of 72 after several days of rain storms. Mud was everywhere, all the angels seem to be low kissing the mud. The bugs were swarming. All and all a typical summer day on the Potomac. But it beats wedding photography, and I will be back out next week.

Disney pays $4 Billion for Marvel Comics

If Disney paid $4 Billion for Marvel comics, I wonder what my stacks of comic books would be worth today? An idle thought as they were all heaved into the trash within 24 hours of my leaving home for college. Back in what now must seem like the Dark Ages, it was assumed that if you left home to go to college you would not be returning home again. This was an assumption that not only parents and neighbors made, but also their children. I would have rather shipped out on a slow boat somewhere that to have returned home. But I should have taken those comic books with me.
The blog image reminds me of those hot summer afternoons in Texas when we took our comics to the shade of a tree, traded them with friends and generally wasted hours imagining our own adventures. This image started as a 5 image - hand held - HDR, then processed with Nik Filters' Tonal Contrast and finished with a dose of Topaz Adjust.