Now that I have some time back in the office, I’m hitting the files hard — trying to get caught up on post-processing. I’m not too far behind but it can get out of hand quickly. The last couple of days I’ve been working on images from my trip to New Mexico earlier this year. The one above was taken during a hike at Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument. I’m using Lightroom for my initial post-processing work now — moving to Photoshop for more detailed work. Even though I know the tools in Lightroom and ACR are pretty much identical, I find that there is a luminous quality to the images I get out of Lightroom. Maybe it’s just psychological due to the darker interface in LR but I like it. This image displays that characteristic in the bounced light coming through the slot canyon at the top.

Well… it was a pretty grey trip to the Black Hills. It was either raining or about to rain for four straight days. I still hold to my previous statement that the area is beautiful even in bad weather but, when you’re selling stock to travel publishers, most people like to see sunshine. Oh well. I did get some shots that I like that I’ll post here soon but I’m starting off with the dino sculpture that I ran across on Saturday while driving the length of South Dakota — just as the skies were beginning to break.

Wouldn’t you know it. Blue skies for the drive home.

Sorry for my recent absence… I’ve been in the penitentiary.

Don’t worry — just touring. After a few days in St. Louis last week, we stopped in Jefferson City, Missouri, to tour the recently decommissioned Missouri State Penitentiary with our guide Mark Schreiber (above). Mark was the Deputy Warden when the site closed and has tons of great stories. Tons. The tours are definitely worth checking out but be sure to get reservations as they are sold out weeks in advance.

I’m now in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The weather is currently toying with us but this is one of those places that I think is just as beautiful in the rain. Still, I’d take a little sunshine. Fingers crossed…

I finished up the first week of shoots with JNA Advertising and Gizmo on Friday with Lori and Ryan in their wheat field in central Kansas. The next four days will bring ten more subjects in as many towns with lots of road hours in between. Everyone has been great to work with so far and I thank all of these folks for being such great sports.

I’m working on a project with JNA Advertising and the great guys over at Gizmo for the next couple of weeks that involves a bunch of quick-turn environmental portraits. Last night Tavio and his biking buddies made great subjects and I decided to try the Nikkor 10.5 fisheye with a little off-camera flash. I used the Nikon D300’s pop-up flash in commander mode and dialed it down 3 stops so that it wouldn’t influence the shot. It remotely triggered the SB-600 in my left hand that was cranked up 2 stops. I dialed the camera down 1 stop.

I wanted to overpower the ambient light with the flash to highlight Tavio in the foreground. It all took about as much time as it did to just explain it. The result here has had just a bit of vignetting added but is not too far from being straight out of the camera.

Just back from a few days shooting in the Holland, Michigan area. What a beautiful place! The tulip festival was the previous week but the blooms were still holding up. Clouds would roll in and out but clear skies were always there when needed. This is Holland’s Windmill Island complete with an authentic Dutch windmill, moved here in the 1960s.

I’m heading into one of the busiest shooting seasons that I can remember and I probably won’t have another full day in the office until sometime in the latter half of June. Fun stuff ahead — I’ll post whenever possible.

I’ve been slacking on my posting duties lately due to… well… my slacking. It’s been busy, too. Not going to complain about that.

So, tomorrow morning I’m off for a week of shooting in Michigan. Should be a blast. I’ll post if I can reform my slacking ways.

Oh, and an update on my Alamy goal for May 1st? Yeah. I didn’t meet it. What are ya gonna do. Still… I made progress and that’s something. Sales have been up, my click through rate has been around twice the Alamy average. Again… I’m not going to complain.

Nose to the grindstone. You do what you can do. And the client work always comes first.

Off to the lake!

Just for grins — another version of the photo from Greece. This time, with one of the textures from the furniture restorationist’s shop and a sepia tone.

I thought I’d try something a little different tonight and revisit an old file — one that I didn’t really consider a keeper before — and see what I could do with it. I went back to the first international trip I made after switching to digital. It was a trip to Greece in 2003.

It’s not that I hadn’t shot digital at all before this, but Greece was the first trip I made with only a DSLR and no film body. I was shooting RAW with a Nikon D100 and this particular image was made with a Nikkor 17-35 at 17mm.

I’d never made a serious attempt to post-process this shot because it had a huge contrast range that made keeping the church tower from blowing out while holding the detail in the shadows very difficult. This evening I made two versions in ACR, one exposed for the highlights and one for the shadows. I put the highlight image on a layer above the shadow image and painted in a mask using a Wacom tablet to let the shadow detail come through. Throw in a few smart filters and there you go. Not perfect but not bad for a few minutes work.

Could I have done this with the software that was available back in 2003? Probably. But I’m pretty sure it would have taken me a lot longer. It’s pretty great having old RAW files around knowing that, as the software progresses (and hopefully my skill level as well) I can go back and reinterpret images to get better or at least different results.

This could be a long one but I’ll do my best to be brief.

My wife has an incredible collection of family furniture. Originally Scottish, some of the family wound up in Montreal where they were prominent engineers involved in, among other things, the building of the earliest canals along the St. Lawrence. Wealth followed and a mansion was built somewhere around the year 1800. The family had furniture built specifically for this home, sourcing the wood from as far as South America.

I’ll pause here to say that I’ve yet to entirely read the massive volume of family history that is somewhere among our packed belongings and I haven’t done any real research on this information. But, family lore has been passed down and I’m repeating it here. Hopefully I’ll get at least some of it right.

Not long after the construction of the mansion in Montreal, it burned. To the ground. But not before the servants were sent inside to save a few pieces of furniture including a large gentleman’s press (like a combination wardrobe and dresser), a gaming table, a foot stool and an enormous gilded mirror. In the following years, the family’s fortune disappeared but these few pieces of furniture survived and were dutifully passed from generation to generation. For the last 20 or so years, they’ve been in our possession.

The 200-plus years haven’t been entirely kind. We had the table restored a few years ago and, when it came time to move last year, we decided to deliver the gentleman’s press to the restorationists for its turn. It’s big — really big — and we figured that we could move it fewer times this way.

To make a long story short, it’s been there for a few months now and we’ve visited from time to time to consult on the details of the work. We made another stop yesterday and I decided to bring the camera along to record the progress. The piece had become nearly black with age and this trip would be the first where we would see a few of the parts with the build-up removed and the original glow restored.

Suffice it to say that they are doing an incredible job. I was photographing a few of the resurrected parts like this door bracket, marveling at the glow and depth of the wood grain when…

I got distracted.

Did you notice the texture of the table that the woodwork is sitting on? I’ve been a semi-obsessed collector of textures for decades. They are part of an ongoing project of mine and this work surface was a gold mine. The restorationist probably thought I was nuts as I began to photograph the table top instead of the fruits of his restoration efforts. In the end I had over a dozen textures with a wide variety of tones and color like this:

It may not look like much but — trust me — this kind of layered surface isn’t easy to find. What do I intend to do with them? Well, I’ve long been working on a series of artificially aged images that involve textures like these overlaid on other images to create the look of a worn and aged photo. I’ll post more of these later and plan an entire gallery on my site but here’s an example from last Fall’s trip to China:

The original of this image can be seen here.

See? There was a photography-related aspect to this story after all. I’ll post more of my texture experiments later and, when the gentleman’s press finally arrives, I’ll post a before and after of it as well.

Just goes to show you — always take your camera.