Yellowstone 2008 slideshow

Here it is finally - some of my favorite shots from Montana/Wyoming. All of these started out in Lightroom, and I cannot tell you how much control the combination of that software along with final processing in Photoshop gave me over these images. I forced myself to use curves for adjustments, as I am trying to get better at that. I think i'll post some before and afters later on, as this was really all about shooting and pre-visualizing how the FINAL image was to appear. NO - most of these thing did NOT look this way in person & YES, I sure wish they HAD!!
I have a simple web gallery on my site as well if you're looking to examine any image (hopefully not for a stern critique!) You may actually want to watch the video there as well, since the size and quality are much better than here in Blogger.
HERE

Hope you enjoy and i'd love to hear any thoughts or suggestions anyone has!

desperate attempt

...me trying to look rugged in Montana.

Quality Vs. Value

This is an absolutely dead-on assessment of the perception of 'Value vs. Quality' in our business from the PhotoLovecat blog.
Read this photogs---it's a good bit of info to keep in mind!!!!

...just a different perspective

One interesting thing I observed during this recent workshop was how easy it is to slip into ONLY thinking about the one field that you work the most in. What I mean by that is that i have always felt it's very important to take in a little of everything in the arts to keep your perspective open and clean. Steve.Com is taking a painting class for example, and not that you have to be a painter, but the idea of keeping yourself open to other avenues in the arts I think can really help keep you rounded in whatever your main field may be. It's REAL easy to get wrapped up in 'wedding world', 'landscape world'...whatever it may be.
So during this workshop, it was just real interesting to see where their attention lied. It was more on specific light, time of day, lenses and a LOT about printing on the Epson afterwards. How to sharpen only specific areas for visual interest, color management...they are ALL about that stuff. There was a little about workflow, but it was really more about these other factors. This is neither good or bad, just a different perspective...and not at all what we who shoot weddings and events tend to concentrate on.


So get out to a museum. Pick up a magazine you wouldn't normally read about a type of photography you do not usually do. In the end, I think it will only enrich whatever you do!


There now- I'm down from my soapbox.

home heating horror

I just had an oil delivery of 190+ gallons at $3.34 a gallon ---which I believe comes out to something like $657.00 to fill my tank.

I'm movin' to L.A.

Double amputee walks again due to Bluetooth

This is absolutely fascinating to me---

VIDEO

good ol' Old Faithful

The obligatory stop in Yellowstone is of course Old Faithful. You go to NY , you go to the Empire State building, you go to yellowstone it's Mr. Faithful...it's like a requirement. Now in all honesty, if the light is bad or the wind blowing too much, it really doesn't look like all that much more than a steamy blowhole (as it did the first day) On this particular day we happened to actually get a bright blue sky which I was all excited about. After looking at the shots though, they seemed too pedestrian and postcardy---like I went 'click' with a point and shoot. These manipulated images give more of the feeling of what I HOPED things could or/should of looked like.

BISON!!!!

here are a few shots of the Bison i encountered on the trip. What was so cool, was that while we were snowmobiling they were walking just about 8 feet from us. We were checking them out, and they us---I was also told that they are NOT Buffalo, but technically 'Bison'---so don't make that mistake or they'll charge after you.
You know that there are so many of them, that after a few days you're like, "Oh look, some more Bison." as if you noticed a squirrel.

Is Photography Dead?

Taken from Newsweek - December 2007


Is Photography Dead?
By Peter Plagens
NEWSWEEK
Dec 1, 2007

How is that even remotely possible? The medium certainly looks alive, well and, if anything, overpopulated. There are hordes of photographers out there, working with back-to-basics pinhole cameras and pixeled images measured in gigabytes, with street photography taken by cell phones and massive photo "shoots" whose crews, complexity and expense resemble those of movie sets. Step into almost any serious art gallery in Chelsea, Santa Monica or Mayfair and you're likely to be greeted with breathtaking large-format color photographs, such as Andreas Gefeller's overhead views of parking lots digitally montaged from thousands of individual shots or Didier Massard's completely "fabricated photographs" of phantasmagoric landscapes. And the establishment's seal of approval for photography has been renewed in two current museum exhibitions. In "Depth of Field"— the first installation in the new contemporary-photography galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, on display through March 23—the fare includes Thomas Struth's hyperdetailed chromogenic print of the interior of San Zaccaria in Venice and Adam Fuss's exposure of a piece of photo paper floating in water to a simultaneous splash and strobe.

At the National Gallery of Art in Washington, "The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978" (up through Dec. 31) celebrates average Americans who wielded their Brownies and Instamatics to stunning effect.

Yet wandering the galleries of these two shows, you can't help but wonder if the entire medium hasn't fractured itself beyond all recognition. Sculpture did the same thing a while back, so that now "sculpture" can indicate a hole in the ground as readily as a bronze statue. Digitalization has made much of art photography's vast variety possible. But it's also a major reason that, 25 years after the technology exploded what photography could do and be, the medium seems to have lost its soul. Film photography's artistic cachet was always that no matter how much darkroom fiddling someone added to a photograph, the picture was, at its core, a record of something real that occurred in front of the camera. A digital photograph, on the other hand, can be a Photoshop fairy tale, containing only a tiny trace of a small fragment of reality. By now, we've witnessed all the magical morphing and seen all the clever tricks that have turned so many photographers—formerly bearers of truth—into conjurers of fiction. It's hard to say "gee whiz" anymore.

Art and truth used to be fast friends. Until the beginning of modernism, the most admired quality in Western art was mimesis—objects in painting and sculpture closely resembling things in real life. William Henry Fox Talbot, who produced the first photographic prints from a negative in 1839, immediately saw the mimetic new medium as an art form. Talbot wanted only to be able to "draw" more accurately than by hand. In fact, he called his first book of reproduced photographs "The Pencil of Nature." For at least a century thereafter, any photograph with a claim to being art had in its DNA at least a few chromosomes from Talbot's "The Open Door" (1844), a picture of a tree-branch broom leaning just-so-esthetically against a dark doorway. Of course, great photographers have never merely recorded visual facts indiscriminately, like a court stenographer taking down testimony. They've selected their subjects carefully and framed their views of them precisely, in order to give their pictures the look of "art." Later in the 19th century, "pictorialist" photographers used soft focus, toothy paper, sepia tones, multiple negatives and even scratching back into the image as ways of getting photographs to look more like paintings.

Soon, photography escaped the exclusive grasp of the professionals and moneyed hobbyists who could afford its cumbersome equipment, and the public began to take its own pictures. In the 1920s, small, inexpensive fast-shutter cameras like the Kodak Brownie appeared. By 1950, according to Kodak, nearly three quarters of American families owned cameras and took 2 billion photographs with them. By the 1970s, they were taking 9 billion pictures a year, most of them quick, informal snapshots. To be sure, some masterpieces did emerge—mostly accidentally—from this Everest-size heap of images. The person who pointed his Brownie at the woman in "Unknown [photographer], 1950s" in "The Art of the American Snapshot" probably didn't anticipate that she'd cover her face with her hands just as he clicked the shutter. And he (or she) couldn't predict that the result would be a great composition—long fingers and angular elbows set against the gentle downhill sweep of a field—and a wonderful metaphor for photography's tango with the truth. What the inadvertently great snapshot shared with the work of realist artist-photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans in the 1930s and '40s, and Diane Arbus and Robert Frank in the 1950s and '60s, was that the people in them were who they looked like they were—raw-boned farmers, gritty miners, harried housewives, burly bikers—really doing what they looked like they were doing.

In the late 1970s, however, the concept of fiction in photography reared its little postmodern head. "The big change in attitude from realist photography," says Lawrence Miller, who owns a prominent photography gallery in New York, "was when Metro Pictures [one of the hippest galleries in SoHo] showed Cindy Sherman in 1980." Sherman's fictional self-portraits—fake "film stills" with the artist posed as a negligeed blonde on a bed, or a dark-haired femme fatale in a chic apartment—weren't photography's first turn away from the straight, nonfiction reportage most people think of as great photography. But her pictures represented something new in the way that photography was considered as art. It wasn't just for reportage anymore. The Talbotian esthetic door was now fully opened for photographers to make photographs just as well as to take them. The advent of digital technology only exacerbated photography's flight into fable.

We live in a culture dominated by pixels, increasingly unmoored from corpor-eal reality. Movies are stuffed with CGI and, in such "performance animation" films as "Beowulf," overwhelmed by them. Some big pop-music hits are so cyberized the singer might as well be telling you to press 1 if you know your party's exten-sion. Even sculpture has adopted digital "rapid prototyping" technology that allows whatever a programmer can imagine to be translated into 3-D objects in plastic. Why should photography be any different? Why shouldn't it give in to the digital temptation to make every landscape shot look like the most absolutely beautiful scenery in the whole history of the universe, or turn every urban view into a high-rise fantasy?

Photography is finally escaping any dependence on what is in front of a lens, but it comes at the price of its special claim on a viewer's attention as "evidence" rooted in reality. As gallery material, photographs are now essentially no different from paintings concocted entirely from an artist's imagination, except that they lack painting's manual touch and surface variation. As the great modern photographer Lisette Model once said, "Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest." She had no idea how easy exotic effects would get, and just how hard that would make it to capture beauty and truth in the same photograph. The next great photographers—if there are to be any—will have to find a way to reclaim photography's special link to reality. And they'll have to do it in a brand-new way.

West Yellowstone

Not much going on in West Yellowstone, the town that basically exists simply because it is the West entrance to Yellowstone. They purposely do not plow the streets since there is so much snowmobile action. Of course, I went out hunting for old motels which were not too hard to find-----

Day 2-Dogsledding

So on the second day I headed out to Big Sky and Moonlight Basin to go dogsledding with Spirit Of The North Dogsled Adventures- which was SO COOL, because...I mean---when do you EVER go dogsledding?
When you arrive the dogs are really quite quiet---just kind of hanging out watching you. They are definitely WORK dogs and not pets. Not that they are not friendly, but all they want to do is run. They told us that the dogs you see in the movies are chosen for their visual appeal, and that REAL sled dogs are like these, a mix of several breeds really just bred for work and running.

Once the dogs get the sense that they are about to get hooked up, they go INSANE---it is a constant barrage of barking until they actually get to take off, at which point they are virtually silent. They let us help hook up the dogs, and on the trip back I got to drive the sled. You're standing on a single skinny sled rail with a 'slow down pad' and 'brake' in the center. So to stop or slow it down, you have to balance on one slippery rail and use you're other foot to hit The brake pad. The first time I did it I almost went flying off since we were going around a corner. But I got hold and then actually did well...the guy driving behind me said, "Wow, you really look look you know what you're doing!" It must have been my fuzzy hat.

One kind of gross point; if you've ever gone horseback riding and have had the horse in front of you take a bathroom break, you know what the experience is like. Well the dogs are the same, as they do NOT STOP when they have to go, so you are treated to both the visual as well as the odor. Kind of takes the charm out of the fresh pine tree smell....

DLWS group photo

they have a tradition at DLWS of taking group photo - so we did this the second day out ---it's small and hard to see, but I'm the unshaven one right under the "Y" in Yellowstone. I grabbed this off Moose Peterson's blog.

Day one - Bozeman, Montana

Day one of my Montana trip started in Bozeman - a great college town in Southern Montana. I decided to stroll around town and see what was going on - grabbed some lunch and the all-important bottle of wine to have in the room. The town seems to have a cool, eclectic mix of people - certainly much more so than most of the Montana towns i've been through. i was a little surprised to see large grain silos right in town---but this IS Montana!!! I was really diggin' the old signage and some cool stuff i found on some of the side streets.

Heath Ledger found dead

Holy crap!!!!!

the DLWS staff

Just a quick posting of the trusty staff from the DLWS workshop---Josh was my Nikon Loaner Gear Pal...like the gatekeeper to all the Nikon goodies!

"So, was it COLD?"

I'm in the process of working on photos to post from the trip and will probably have some up tomorrow. However in the meantime to answer a question I was asked, "So, was it cold?" I've attached the following photo. This day, it was about 27 below when we left the hotel at 7:00 am... That's frozen mist you see all over me. My D2X looked like I had stored it in the freezer by days end.

snowmobiling

well snowmobiling was GREAT - turns out that we went out for the whole day! I mean like, from 8:30 til 4:30! I really didn't know it was that long...now I want to buy a snowmobile. Think I could tool around Trumbull in that? We saw Elk, Bald Eagles and tons of Bison. In fact at one point they were walking down in the road, so we pulled over the 'mobiles, kind of creating a wall between them and us, and just stood there as about 25 of them slowly marched by...no more than 8 ft away! Really cool. Anyway, it was totally worth the money!

unbelieveable update

...unbelievable in not a good way either. As of Thursday night, my laptop screen died. This means not only no blogging (I'm on a hotel computer now) but I can't load my photos in and can't participate in all that part of this workshop.editing, critique etc) Can you believe THAT one? So I'm going to try to make the best of it and still go along and shoot and all, but guess I'll just lay low during those parts that this loser can't be part of. %$#!ing Apple computers.
On a lighter note, I'm going out snowmobiling today which ought to be icy fun!

arrival in Montana

Nothing exciting here and no photos yet, but I made it to Bozeman Montana in one piece, although when I got to the National rental car desk I discovered that I had stupidly reserved the car starting TOMORROW - but they hooked me up tonight anyway. I'm in a snazzy little blue RAV 4.

It seems my headphones crapped out so no iPod for me on the flight. I did the next best thing----doze off.

The plane out of Westchester Airport only held 50 people and was something akin to a large bus with wings. I couldn't even get my new Tenba Shootout backpack (which weighs about 100 pounds by the way) in the overhead. Travel is so luxurious.

Tomorrow i'll be toolin' around Bozeman to check it out---and I'm psyched cuz friday morning I am going dogsledding! Thats something i've always wanted to do. When i told my stepmom about this trip and my plans, she asked "Is this like your 'Bucket List'?" referring to the movie about terminally ill guys doing nutty crap before they drop dead. I said, "Gee, I don't know...maybe it IS.I'm not getting any younger, you know."

Anyhow, i'll have plenty of photos and stuff as this week progresses, including snowmobiling to Old Faithful in Yellowstone on Saturday, and of course the workshop which begins Sunday.

Keep checking back and it'll be like your here with me!