Earlier this summer, my dad and I went to Cadillac Mountain to get some pictures of the sunrise. And frankly, we just lucked out with the sky that day. And there’s an important lesson there, sometimes you’ve just got to get lucky. But, to get lucky, you’ve gotta be out there shooting. The more you shoot, the luckier you get.
Happy shooting, everyone.
The processing, printing, and matting of images for the Bangor State Fair photo contest is finally done. Well, all I had to do was process and print them (easy), my dad had the more difficult and time-consuming task of matting them. So for the next week or so, I’m going to put some images up that I used for the fair contest.
First up are a couple of moose photos I took at the beginning of July in Baxter State Park. You know you’re gonna have a fun day when it starts at 3am. We actually struck out until about 10am in regards to moose pictures, when we spotted one on our final check at Stump Pond before packing up and heading home. It’s not a bull moose with full-grown antlers like I wanted (something that has eluded me for years now), but it’s still a moose and it was still an enjoyable day of shooting. If I can go out and get one picture that I think is pretty cool, then it was a good day.
And the final image for today is one that slipped under my radar for months and months. I only rediscovered the rather uninteresting colour version of this shot last week when I was scrambling around trying to find a night shot to use for the fair contest. I took this back in December in Montréal when my dad, brother, and I went up to Mont Royal before heading back home. If my memory serves me, I had one more final exam before heading home for Christmas, so I was pretty excited at the time. It was a very, very cold evening with a decent amount of wind, so the conditions weren’t fantastic, but I just didn’t care. Having grown up in a very small town, there’s something really special about a city’s skyline for me.
Well, that’s all I’ve got for now. Happy shooting, everyone.
Details for above images: All taken with Nikon D3. Moose pictures with Nikon 400mm f/2.8. Montréal picture with Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8. Basic adjustments to moose pictures in Photoshop using Nik software plug-ins. The Montréal picture was converted to black and white in Silver Efex Pro 2 and the moon was added in post-processing.
After writing my post up last night about how I was going to get this blog back on track in the coming weeks, I got pretty pumped up. As a result of getting pumped up, I’m getting the blog back on track today.
The photograph I’m putting into this post was taken back in October of 2010. I’d been living in Montreal for a few months and my parents were up from Maine visiting. My dad and I decided to get up before sunrise and walk up to the top of Mont Royal (not a fun walk). It was a wicked cold morning for October and the entire area was practically empty. After lugging my gear up the hill, I set up shop and did my best to make getting up early and enduring the cold worth it.
Montreal:
The image is an HDR. I used Nik HDR Efex to process the HDR, and then I finished it with Nik’s Viveza 2, Color Efex, Sharpener, and Dfine. This is actually the second edition of this image, because I managed to lose the original HDR file I made back in October. Although I like this rendition better than the first, I learned a valuable lesson about backing up images.
When actually capturing the image, I distinctly remember just standing there with my gear, measuring the situation and deciding what kind of final product I was looking for. When shooting landscapes, I have to know what my final product is going to be, is it going to be an HDR, or is it going to be a single exposure? In this situation, I knew I wanted a nicely-exposed city, and I wanted a nicely-exposed sky. Now whether or not either the sky or the buildings (foreground) are nicely exposed, I’m not too sure, but I knew that I was going to have to work with an HDR to get the image I wanted. Now that I knew what kind of image I wanted, I retrieved the appropriate lens (Nikon 24-70mm) and composed the image. The observation area up on Mont Royal has a lot of branches poking up over the railing, so you have to be aware of that and check the edges of your frame before taking the shot. So if you’re routinely finding little branches or distractions hanging out on the edges of your images, no matter what you’re trying to shoot, try and build the habit of checking the edges before every shot. If you really concentrate on that for a bit, it’ll become second nature and you’ll just do it before every capture. So now that I’ve decided on what I want my final image to look like, picked the correct lens for the shot, and checked the edges of the frame for distractions, it’s time to lock my tripod into place and finally set my camera to bracket five frames and fire off the five frames. Some people may scoff at HDR, “it’s not real photography,” they may say. But the truth is, you go through the same process when making HDR images as you do with other digital images. Ultimately, you’ve got to know what you want when you’re out in the field, and you’ve got to find the best way to get to that final image. Sometimes it’s with a traditional exposure, sometimes it’s with HDR, whatever technique works for you and your vision is what’s right.
I’ll be making a new post soon with some more current images, and I’ll be working on trying a new format out. Until then, happy shooting!
So, with the whole process of dealing with Canadian and Quebec immigration and moving to Montreal and going to university over the past year, my photography took a pretty big hit. And by pretty big hit, I mean I barely shot at all. I remember back at the closing dinner at The Workshops in the fall of 2009, Moose Peterson told me that it was going to be tough to do photography while attending university. To be honest, I didn’t totally buy it, I thought, “Oh, I’ll be fine, I’ll shoot three times a week at least.” Well, after year one of school, I buy every word of it now. It really is tough to go to school full-time, take care of my apartment, do all my day-to-day chores, and get out and shoot. I should have known better than to think that I wouldn’t fall victim to the trap that is school, I won’t have that same misplaced confidence again.
I’m trying to make up for lost time this summer. But, in reality there’s not enough time in the world to make up for the time I missed. However, that doesn’t mean I can’t shoot a lot this summer and shoot a lot this coming school year.
Anyways, these days I’m busy shooting, finishing, and printing images for an upcoming competition a local camera club holds at the State Fair every year. So with that being said, err, typed, it’s going to be a bit longer before I start putting images up on here again. I’m going to try out a fresh new design for the blog and a new presentation format, so keep an eye out for that in the coming weeks. I’m also going to be digging into my past and throwing images up now and again that are old, but pretty much unseen by anyone other than myself.
Hope you check out the upcoming updates.
Happy shooting!
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“Defer no time, delays have dangerous ends.” -William Shakespeare
I took these early morning back in April. All shot with the 400mm and 1.4TC.
I went out into the front garden in late evening, set up some off-camera flashes and shot away.
This is from April 2009 when I went with my family up to Montréal to check it out, and make sure it was the place I wanted to spend my college years. It is.
It certainly has been a while. I’ve had these images finished for a while now and haven’t managed to do anything with them. So, here they are. These are from shortly after Christmas. I went down to L.L. Bean to exchange some items I got for Christmas and make quick work of a gift card. On the way back, a sidetrip to the coast was in order. The weather was awful. I had to run back and forth to the car with my gear to clean it off and to warm up every few minutes. The wind was going against me, blowing snow and ice into my face and equipment. But, everything survived the ordeal. I got some shots I like and I broke in a new winter hat. Two birds, one snowball.
On November 28th, my father and I went down to Portland, ME for a University of Maine hockey game. UMaine only plays down in Portland once a year, so we figured we would make the trip. I suggested that we leave early so that I could shoot at Portland Head Light for the third time. My dad was on board with the idea so that’s exactly what we did. I think I ended up shooting for two hours or so there, trying different angles, moving all around, and keeping a very careful eye on the light.
The light started off somewhat poor (although I was able to capture black and white image A in this light.)
But, after a while, things started to look up. As the sun was going down it threw some brilliant light at the lighthouse itself for a solid fifteen minutes or so (there wasn’t much color in the sky at this point, but I do have some color images in my Color Gallery from this time) and I thought it would make some great black and white images. This is when I captured image B.
Later on, when the sun had all but dipped below the horizon and the colors in the sky were brilliant I captured this black and white. Just because there is amazing color doesn’t mean there isn’t a black and white image somewhere in there, right? This is when I captured image C.
If you enjoyed my black and white images, please scroll down and check out my Color Gallery and Experimental Gallery from the same day at Portland Head!
Here’s a gallery of color images from my recent trip to Portland Head Lighthouse in Cape Elizabeth, ME.
I tried to approach each image a little bit differently during capture and during post. There are certainly some variations which are only subtle. But, subtleties can sometimes make all the difference. Now it is just a matter of me figuring out which subtleties work and which subtleties don’t; that’s the fun part!
Please do check out my ‘Black and White’ and ‘Experimental’ galleries from the day if you haven’t already!
