Category Archives: from the files

Decade in review: 2002

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Continuing my review of the the past decade…

In 2002 I made my last major trip with with film — to Ireland. By this time I was shooting with a Nikon F100 and was just dabbling in digital with a Coolpix 990 (I’d actually had an Apple Quicktake earlier but never really found a way to use it professionally). I took around 250 or 300 rolls of film on this trip and — in those early post-9/11 days — begged for handchecks in Kansas City and again in Chicago to avoid x-ray exposure. I had already removed all of the film from their boxes but they were still in their transparent plastic canisters and kept together in a giant transparent ziplock bag. The handchecks involved taking each roll of film out of its canister and swabbing it before moving on to the next one. Repeat this process a couple hundred times and you’ll nearly miss your connection.

This was also my first international press trip (although still as a “spouse” to my writer-wife) and it was a whirlwind. We had left our home around 4:00 in the morning to catch our flight from KC to Chicago, then had an overnight flight to Dublin but neither of us were able to get any sleep on the plane. If I’m not mistaken, we were in the last row, center section, where the seats won’t recline because of the bulkhead that separates the cabin from the bathrooms. We landed around 7:00 a.m. and were picked up at the airport for a full day of touring. We ended up in Belfast that night, finally checking into our hotel around 11:30 p.m.

Thirty minutes later (and you can bet I was already sleeping) the fire alarm went off and we had to evacuate the hotel. I’ve never felt so sick in my life. The next morning we found out that the alarm had been triggered by a member of our group smoking a cigar in their room. They never came forward to identify themselves so the rest of the trip became like one of those murder-mystery trips with everyone trying to figure out who was on floor 7 and who had been seen with a lighter, etc., etc.

It was a brutal schedule but we were rewarded with scenes like this:

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I shot this across the road from our hotel while everyone else was getting their luggage loaded on the bus. Or maybe we were getting off the bus and checking in — I don’t know. I just remember running across a pasture to stand on a fence and get this shot before the fire went out of the sky. One thing about press trips: you can always be certain that the best light will occur while you’re either on a bus or inside a restaurant. If you want to be out shooting in that light, you have to be quick. (I also learned on a later trip that you should always stay by the bus until you’ve seen your own suitcase get loaded… but that’s another story.)

I loved Ireland and we had pretty decent weather during the whole trip. We went into Northern Ireland, up the Antrim Coast to the Giant’s Causeway, and then cut across the island to the southwest to the Dingle Peninsula and the Ring of Kerry. I’ll leave you with a shot from the Dingle Peninsula. This is nice and saturated on it’s original Velvia but I thought I’d knock the color back a little this time and go for something a little more subtle. It’s nice to have that flexibility now, not only with digitally captured images but also with scans from old film shots.

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Decade in review: 2001

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Continuing my review of the the past decade…

2001 slipped past me with no international travel. I’d had another Canadian trip in late 2000 and would go to the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico in early 2002, but the 12 month period that was 2001 was all US travel. The shots on this page came from a fall trip to New Mexico. The one at the top of the post is from Acoma Pueblo and has long been a favorite of mine. I went back to Acoma last year and it was very different. A large interpretation center has been built and many of the buildings on the mesa had been spruced up. Most of these ladders had been freshly painted white and the timeless feeling that I had loved from my first visit had eroded away a little. I’m glad I’d had the opportunity to see “Sky City” in 2001 while it was still a little more rustic.

I also remember another fall shoot in 2001, in the Great Lakes area just after 9/11. It was during the time that all of the flights were grounded and it struck me as I photographed Lake Michigan from the beach near Charlevoix that there were no contrails crossing the sky from planes coming out of O’Hare. A noticeable difference from previous trips to that spot.

On my return home from that Michigan trip, I stopped and shot a little in Pella, Iowa. One image in particular that I remember making may have been the last 4×5 transparency that I shot. It was a twilight scene in a new mixed-use development that had just been built downtown. The buildings were all designed to reflect the Dutch style (Pella has a big tulip festival every year) with a canal flowing through the courtyard. I was using my Tachihara field 4×5, correcting for perspective distortion with its bellows.

The fact that I can’t come up with a digital version of that shot to post here goes to show how much has changed in the last 8 years. I have the transparency, but I no longer have a way of scanning large format film here in the office. I used to use a backlit flatbed scanner — which didn’t give very good results — or I would send images out for commercial scans. This particular image was never scanned for my stock files so it languishes in the “dead film” cabinet. The following year would pretty much see the end of my use of film and everything would change.

Petroglyphs, Santa Fe County, New Mexico, USA

Here’s another New Mexico shot — some petroglyphs near Santa Fe. The New Mexico light was always a great fit for film. I shot a lot of Velvia at that time, along with some Provia when I didn’t want the saturation to be quite so strong. It’s funny, I loved that super-saturated look that I would get with Velvia, but when I try and mimic the look using digital techniques, it looks artificial to me. Obviously, it was artificial on film, too. But somehow it was easier to accept film altering a scene than doing it purposefully in digital. The film choice was purposeful, too, but it seemed somehow more honest than cranking the saturation slider in Photoshop. As time moves forward, I’m becoming more adventurous with pushing reality digitally, though. Something we’ll probably see over the next few posts.

Looking through these images from 9 and 10 years ago is making me realize that, at that time, I was really more of a landscape photographer. My mentors at the time were landscape shooters and it was a gradual transition for me to go from landscape to what I now consider “travel” which is a broader description that can include architecture, interiors, action, people and even food. I’m now shooting fewer pristine landscapes and am incorporating a lot more of the man-made world. It’s a reflection of both what interests me and what is needed in the marketplace.

Decade in review: 2000

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Happy New Year everyone! This time of year always makes one reflect on the past and I’ve been doing my share. I’ve also realized that this year is a landmark of sorts for me — it marks my first decade as a travel photographer.

Well… that’s not entirely true. I’ve actually been shooting and selling to travel publications for much longer than that but it was more of a side business that I had outside of my full time job. I also shot mostly close to home. All through the ’90s I had been building a very complete library of Kansas stock and in the latter half of that decade (mostly after I quit my job in ’97 and went full-time freelance), I had been steadily expanding my coverage into Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri and the Great Lakes region. But the year 2000 marked a shift — Sally joined Midwest Travel Writers Association and we attended their conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. That organization didn’t allow photographer members but I could attend as the spouse of a writer-member.

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This wasn’t my first international trip, but it was the first international trip I took specifically to shoot travel. It was also my first experience with a travel writers conference which, in some ways, is similar to a press tour. A great first experience. And I ended up with a lot of useful stock as well as a bunch of contacts and new friends. Until this point, I only knew a couple of other stock shooters and they had fairly different areas of interest than mine. It was a huge help to begin to develop a network of other travel shooters and to share ideas and experiences with them. A couple of years later I would join the Society of American Travel Writers (which does have a photographer member category) to continue to broaden that network.

To commemorate the past 10 years, I thought I might share a shot or two from each year here over the next few weeks. Not necessarily my “best shot” from that year, but something showing where that year took me. It’s also a great opportunity for me to re-visit some of my older files and see if they can be re-interpreted a bit with more modern post-processing. These two photos from that trip in 2000 were taken with (I believe) my old Olympus OM-4 and I’m guessing it was on Velvia. I probably used my old work-horse Tamron 28-80 zoom although the dock could have been my Zuiko 24mm lens. The first shot is of Qualicum Falls on Vancouver Island and the second is Saturna Island in British Columbia’s Gulf Islands. The meeting had been held in the city of Vancouver with a post-tour option on Saturna Island. We had driven so we tagged on some exploration of Vancouver Island on our own afterward. A really amazing trip. Standing on the edge of the small car ferry to Saturna and watching the Orcas swimming along just feet away is something I’ll always remember (I still carry that ferry pass in my car for sentimental reasons).

It’s not always 5 star

A couple of weeks ago I posted about some of the luxurious accommodations that I occasionally find myself in. I also mentioned that there are times when they’re not so luxurious. My brother asked for photographic evidence. Here it is:

box by the river

This is a four foot by eight foot plywood box, four feet high, that is sitting on the bank of a river in Nebraska. It was late February or early March and it was cold. Very cold. My wife and I were there to photograph the Sand Hill Crane migration and had to be closed up inside this box a couple of hours before sunset so that we wouldn’t disturb the birds as they returned to the river for the night (Cranes “sleep” standing in the water). We couldn’t get out of the box until after the birds all left which is usually a couple of hours after sunrise.

I don’t think we were alone in that box, though. We could hear something in the straw at night but couldn’t turn on a flashlight to investigate (again — mustn’t disturb the birds) and some of our snacks were missing in the morning.

I’m not sure how many cranes were in that stretch of the river that night but I think it could have been in the tens of thousands. About half a million migrate through in a very short period of time. It was quite an experience hearing them all chattering in the night but I think once was enough for me. I’ve never had a greater appreciation for nature photographers than I did that night.

Kentucky elk herd

Kentucky elk herd

I’m finding that I actually have more time to post when I’m on the road these days. Now that I’m back from Kentucky, I’m divided between work, painting the new house and office, packing, and preparing the old house for sale. It will all be worth it in the end, though. I look forward to having home and office under one roof again.

So, as I prepare to spend the day painting ceilings at the new place, I’ll leave you with one more shot from the elk herd that has been reintroduced on reclaimed mining land in Kentucky. This was a little later in the morning than the last shot I posted and the light was warming up a little (aided a bit here by Photoshop). Still, the fog just wouldn’t burn off. While others complained about the “bad light” I was having a blast finding ways to make the muted colors and subdued contrast work to my favor. Hopefully I succeeded a little but I know I came away with more shots than the folks who thought it was too bad to even take their lens caps off.