Category Archives: photography

SATW CS Awards

I recently returned from the Central States Chapter meeting of the Society of American Travel Writers (SATW), where I’m proud to say that I was awarded the 2013 Photographer of the Year Award. The photo above of a group of Swedish festival dancers in Lindsborg, Kansas, sealed the deal. It won first place in the “Action or Motion” category and was then judged best of all of the first place category winners. I don’t enter a lot of competitions but the SATW ones mean a lot to me because of all the great shooters that belong to that organization. The fact that a Kansas shot won over images made all around the world also made me very happy. For those interested in getting into travel photography, it’s a lesson that you don’t have to go to distant, exotic destinations to make interesting photographs. There is often plenty of material right in your own backyard.

Here are a few other images of mine that placed in the SATW CS competition:

This shot from Quebec City took second place in the “Places/Scenery Featuring U.S./Canada” category.

Another Kansas shot from a rodeo in Phillipsburg took third place in the “Action or Motion” category.

And yet another Kansas shot of a steak dinner at the Grand Hotel restaurant in Cottonwood Falls took third place in “Food Reflecting Local Cultures.”

I also tried my hand at my first ever Photo Shootout at the Central States meeting, held in Little Rock, Arkansas. Basically, participating photographers have 24 hours to shoot images in five categories and then a few more hours to assemble a 10-image portfolio for submission. The following are a couple of my images that placed in that competition:

This shot of the interior of the Arkansas State Capitol took first place in “Architecture.”

This shot of the Clinton Library and the adjacent pedestrian bridge took first place in “Bridges” category.

My congratulations to everyone else who won awards at our Central States meeting. It was great seeing and traveling with you all and I look forward to doing so again soon.

Testing a new lens

Gear is a funny thing. You can become obsessed with it — always wanting the newest, the fastest, the most megapixels — but it’s a trap. At least I feel that it can be a distraction from paying attention to the things that really matter: composition, mood, light, message.

I don’t buy new gear all that often and I try and really think through and make purchases that will last. I’ve had a solid stable of bodies and lenses for a while now and have the whole range of focal lengths covered from 17mm to over 400mm (if you consider the 1.5x of my crop-sensor D7000).

So what more could I want or need?

I’ve thought about this a lot lately and have decided that what I’m looking for now are not necessarily the tools that test out as having the “best quality,” but rather tools that have a “unique quality.” It’s a fine distinction, but what I’m looking for are a few lenses, in particular, that have a uniqueness about them. They deliver something special. They may not be the most expensive, rugged or sharpest, but they will bring a capability to my kit that I didn’t have before.

My most recent addition arrived on Saturday: a Rokinon 85mm f/1.4. I took it out for a quick walk around the KU campus yesterday to see what it could do. I was drawn to this lens for the shallow depth of field and creamy bokeh (out of focus areas). It’s manual focus as well, which slows me down and makes me more thoughtful. So far, I’m not disappointed. See what you think of these initial test shots:

The Jayhawk shot above is actually stitched from 18 images in a pano-grid method I’ve written about before. It lends the shallow depth of field to a wider angle of view.

These last two shots are of mounts on display in the Natural History Museum — they’re not wildlife shots. I was just looking for some tighter settings to try the close focus and shallow depth of field:

So far, I’m impressed and happy with my purchase — and anxious to get this lens out in the field for some real travel work.

Fort Larned National Historic Site

I almost didn’t go. Memorial Day and Labor Day are the two times a year where Fort Larned National Historic Site formally features groups of re-enactors. I’ve shot the 1860s-70s era fort many times but not when it was populated by soldiers, wives and craftsmen in period dress. It’s been on my list for years, but it has just never come together. This year looked good, but weather became a worry as the weekend approached.

It’s a four hour drive for me, so I got up early (about 3:30) Sunday morning to check the weather radar. It didn’t look good. There was a large storm cell just west of the fort, moving east. A second line appeared to be forming behind it. The predicted 30 mile an hour winds didn’t look good either. I pretty much decided to skip the trip and try again on Labor Day but, while watching the weather breaks during the morning news, I saw the thunderstorm break up and dissolve. At 5:00, I made the decision to go after all. In the end, I was glad I did. Here’s a brief photo essay of my visit:

The doctor is in. A re-enactor portrays a post surgeon at Fort Larned National Historic Site near Larned, Kansas.

Barracks inspection at 10:00.

Mexican Rodeo at Rancho Ochoa

The folks at the family-owned Rancho Ochoa rodeo arena in West Phoenix were kind enough to allow myself and a few others to photograph them as they prepared for their upcoming competitions. Special thanks also to Jill Richards for providing the backdrop and light modifiers that made for some fun, impromptu portrait sessions with the individual charros and charras. I loved the gold rim on the hat in the shot above and decided to try doing a little black and white toning to the rest of the image, finishing it with an aged film texture.

Here are a few others from that evening:

Season Jumping in Phoenix

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Two weeks ago, I left a cold, pre-Spring Kansas for a few days of Spring-Summer-ish Arizona. While there, I picked up an assignment that would have me hopping back on a plane just a few hours after returning home, and flying to North Dakota for three days. While it was still decidedly wintery in ND, Arizona was a welcome hint of the Spring that will hopefully one day arrive back home in Kansas (it’s a month or more late this year by my reckoning). It’s odd, jumping seasons like this. But I wouldn’t have traded that week in sunny Phoenix. Great temps, great people and fantastic locations to shoot. I’ll share a few more images over the coming week, before I have to hop my next plane.

First stop in Phoenix was the Desert Botanical Garden, where the blooms were out and it was almost possible to forget Winter ever existed:

While I took plenty of wide shots of the gardens as well, it was the details and textures that caught my eye the most. My 60mm macro lens got a real work out on this particular morning.

And, at the top of this post, a lucky shot I caught as a Flicker and another bird fought over who would be nesting in this particular cactus. Speculation on my part, but they did seem to be in disagreement over something. I was just happy to grab the photo. Sometimes you just have to be in the right place at the right time.

Vicksburg, Mississippi

Just a quick note to say that I’m back from a short jaunt to Mississippi. It may give hope to others that live in my part of the country that Spring is only a day’s drive away. While in Jackson, Vicksburg and Natchez, I saw iris, daffodils and forsythia blooming and the tulip trees were actually already past their prime. Spring is on its way, folks. Take heart.

Oh… and the photo is from the Vicksburg National Military Park. More on that and other stops soon.

New book: China

I’m very happy to announce that my new book, “China: Six Days in Shanghai and the Water Towns of the Yangtze River Delta,” is now available through my Blurb.com bookstore.

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This is the first book in a series I’m calling “The Journals of a Travel Photographer.” There are several more planned in this series and a few of them are already well into production, so they should be joining this one in the bookstore soon. Each title in the series will document a particular photo gathering trip that I’ve taken and this first book covers a 6-day press tour to China that I joined in 2008. The photos appear more-or-less chronologically as they were taken throughout the trip. The images do not provide a complete, in-depth study of the region but, rather, document that particular trip and the things I experienced during that week. As the books will illustrate, there wasn’t always time to wait for the perfect weather or perfect light on most of these trips, but many magical moments still managed to occur and — hopefully — I captured a few of them.

This self-published series is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. The books will allow me to share images that otherwise may not ever appear in print. They will also allow me to show a broader collection of images from one destination than would typically be possible in a short magazine story or an individual stock placement. Having been on the design side of magazine and book production in the past, I understand that photo editors have their reasons for choosing to use one image over another for their specific purpose. The shot that I like most, might not be the shot that tells the story they need told, or that fits their particular layout. Here, I get to choose the images that are used and I get to tell my own story.

I’m using quite a few images, too. There are over 100 photos in this first 80-page book, and yet several of them are full page or even larger. Text is fairly minimal with a brief introduction about the trip and captions that tell about the location and perhaps a bit about how the photo came about.

I also see this series of books as being a way for me to say “thank you” to all of the people that have helped give me the opportunity to travel to these amazing places. Some of the trips covered in these books were press trips and I’ve not always had a way of sharing the images I made with the people who hosted me. If I get a clip or two from a stock image placement or a story that I’ve supplied photos for, I send them along, but I often never receive samples of my images in print. These books will give me a way to share more of my images with those people who helped make them possible.

The books in this series will be available in both softcover and hardcover editions, with slightly better paper used in the hardcover editions as well.

Here are a few sample spreads from the China book. You can find more information on my website or you can “flip through” a partial preview over on the Blurb site.

As I mentioned earlier in this post, this is just book one in a series. Stay tuned for additional titles, coming soon. And thanks for your interest!

The River

I evidently hibernate in winter (my last post being nearly a month old now), but my friend and fellow photographer, Doug Stremel, and I ventured out early Wednesday morning for a day filled with finding images in the winter Kansas landscape. It’s a season that I don’t shoot enough but am striving to photograph more often. Winter was the favorite season for my college painting instructor, Robert Sudlow. I remember him once telling me that he had difficulty painting Kansas landscapes in summer because it was just “too green”. He found more subtlety and variation on those grey, overcast days when the snow was melting away. I’m understanding the beauty of that subtlety more and more myself as I continue to update my Kansas image files.

A different destination drew Doug and I out on Wednesday (more on that in the next post) but it wasn’t in a place that would work well at sunrise so we looked for another, nearby spot to take advantage of first light. Since water effectively doubles your sunrise impact by reflecting the colors, we headed for the Kansas River. Hiking down to the water’s edge in near total darkness provided its own challenge, but it was worth it when the light came up to reveal the melting ice flows. We heard them before we could see them, crashing into one another as they drifted downstream.

The shot at the top of this post is, I believe, the second frame I’ve shot in 2013.

As the sun rose, the colors shifted dramatically and offered a fantastic range of photo options. The following photo was taken about 35 minutes after the first and both are fairly true to the actual colors we were seeing.

This is also an HDR shot (High Dynamic Range) assembled from three separate bracketed captures spanning six stops. The process allowed me to get a much wider range of contrast into one image, something that was more and more necessary as the sun rose higher — getting brighter — while the foreground shadows remained very dark. I don’t like to push HDR as far as some do to get that other-wordly effect that so many relate to the process but, instead, I like to use it to get closer to what the scene actually looked like to my eye at the time of capture.

There were also plenty of options for detail shots of the melting ice along the river bank. All-in-all, a good start to the day, and a great start to 2013. I’ll continue with more of Wednesday’s locations in the following post.

Hotel Carpet

I announced this on Facebook earlier but neglected to do so here. I’ve launched a new site, Hotel Carpet, to showcase photos of rug patterns I encounter while traveling. It’s an idea I’ve had for a while and I wish I’d started documenting these carpets earlier but I haven’t always traveled with my iPhone and that has proven to be the most efficient way of recording these floor coverings. At any rate, I’m doing it now and you can find the results at: http://michaelcsnell.com/hotelcarpet/

There’s not much here in the way of serious intention, more just observation. It seems that – especially among chains in the U.S. – hotels are gravitating toward really wild, bold patterns in their carpets. It’s a trend that I’ve decided to document and share. You’re welcome. 😉

I’ve had questions about whether I’ll accept submissions and, for now, I’m just testing the water with a couple of people. Down the road, I may add a way for more people to participate by uploading their own images but, for now, I’m keeping this simple and manageable. If things change, I’ll announce it on the “about” page of the Hotel Carpet site.

Updates will be sporadic, just like my travels. Enjoy.

The image I launched the site with, from a hotel in Indianapolis, Indiana. See more at Hotel Carpet.

Fort Scott Candlelight Tour

I paid a quick visit to the Fort Scott National Historic Site in Fort Scott, Kansas, last night to photograph their annual candlelight tour. The shot above is something I’ve been playing with lately — creating shallow depth of field images by stitching together multiple frames from a fast normal, to short-telephoto, lens. This one is 13 frames shot on a 50mm lens at f/1.8 and stitched together using Photoshop CS6. It’s an interesting look and reminds me a bit of the old large-format images that might have been made in the late nineteenth century. It seemed appropriate for an evening devoted to recreating the year 1862 on a frontier fort in what had then just become the state of Kansas.

More (single frame) images from last night: