Category Archives: photography

Billions of stars

I’ve been out shooting in Western Kansas with the Gizmo guys the last few days and we took advantage of a cool, clear night at Monument Rocks to try some night photography of the Milky Way. I’m just getting started on the post-processing and haven’t quite settled on what feels like the right white balance, but I thought I’d go ahead and share this one with you now. It’s amazing how much you can capture digitally in such dim light. I’ll share more later, with details on exposure, some light painting experiments, etc.

Route 66

I spent a few days on the road with my friends at Gizmo Pictures last week. That’s always a recipe for a great time and this was no different. The shots in this post are all from Kansas’ section of Route 66. We only have about 13 miles of the Mother Road in our state but you can get your kicks on them none-the-less.

Wichita’s Keeper of the Plains

I had a free evening in Wichita last week in between two assignments and decided to update some of my stock photography of that city. I’ve had twilight skyline shots that have done well over the years, especially one where the lights were reflected in the Arkansas River as it cuts through downtown. My initial thought was to update this shot in particular, but the great drought of 2012 caused me to change those plans slightly.

Wichita’s downtown has changed in recent years so I knew I’d need to change my angle of view from my old shooting location to a new one that would include more of the recent landmarks. Using Google Maps, I located downtown and the Exploration Place — which is built out into the river and has a very identifiable shape — and tracked back along a line that would allow me to get both in a shot with the river as a nice foreground. As it happened, it looked like another landmark would make an ideal foreground: The Keeper of the Plains by by Kiowa-Comanche artist Blackbear Bosin. First erected in 1974, it was raised onto a new stone outcropping at the confluence of the Arkansas and Little Arkansas Rivers in 2006. A pair of footbridges echo the sculpture’s shape and provide access to pedestrians and bikes.

Upon my arrival, it was clear that there was not enough water in the Arkansas to make my initially envisioned shot happen. Here’s the best I could do:

Tough to see at this size, but the river is so low that only about a quarter of the skyline is reflected as compared to what normally would be. Luckily there is a bit of a dam on the Little Arkansas at this point so I was able to salvage a shot by crossing on over to the north bank and shooting back at the sculpture and foot bridges as seen in the shot at the top of this post. I got several variations from this point with varying degrees of sunset and twilight and am happy with what I came away with. I’ll just need to keep this spot on my to-do list for next year when the water will hopefully be higher again.

Bavarian portfolio wins Silver

I’m happy to report that my 10-image portfolio of Bavaria was awarded the Silver in the Single Subject Portfolio category of the 2013 SATW Bill Muster Photo Competition yesterday at the SATW Annual Convention in Indianapolis. Congratulations to all of the other winning photographers — it’s an honor to be listed alongside such a talented bunch of shooters. All of the winning images can be seen here. Great work, everyone!

Some of these images have appeared on this blog before but here’s the rest of the Bavaria portfolio that brought me the Silver:

Fountain shoot, behind the scenes

On my last trip to Quebec City in 2007, I never had an opportunity to get a good shot of the Fontaine de Tourny, located in front of the Parliament Building. The fountain was brand new at that time — if you can call something new that was built in France in 1855, put in storage in 1960, and relocated to Quebec in 2007. You can find the whole story here.

Anyway, it’s one of those shots that I felt should be in my files because the fountain has such a great story and it is rapidly becoming yet another landmark of this already beautiful city. So… when I went back to Quebec last month, this fountain was high on my shot list.

I captured the above photo on my next-to-last day in town but it’s not the one I originally had in mind. I really wanted a shot that made the fountain the hero and included the Parliament Building as context. I also wanted to shoot at twilight to get the most impact from the color in the scene.

Early on my first free evening in Quebec I set out with my D700 and a tripod and began scouting out my angle. Things are rarely perfect and this day would be no different. It was cloudy, first of all. Not puffy, dramatic clouds but heavy, overall grey clouds that pretty much made for a dead sky. Grey sky, black fountain, stone building. Not a lot of color so far. Still, you never know what will happen and twilight can be magical in any weather. Secondly, I found that half of the Parliament Building was covered in scaffolding and there was a big, lime-green crane right in front. Scaffolding had been everywhere on this visit — even the most prominent element of the Quebec skyline, the Fairmont Le Chateau Frontenac, was getting a new copper roof. The Parliament Building I could work with, though. It just took a little finesse to hide of the bulk of the scaffolding behind trees and hopefully the green crane would disappear as night fell.

Here’s my initial exposure at 7:29 with the composition pretty much established:

A little grey overall but it was early yet and I knew from experience that even grey skies can go cobalt blue for a few, short minutes at twilight. Patience.

A couple of other details for you photographers: I wanted not only the fountain’s water to blur but also the clouds, which were moving fairly quickly. To achieve this before darkness, I stacked my ND filter and my polarizer to cut down as much light as possible. I stopped down mostly around f/11 or f/16 because I find this lens (my Nikkor 17-35mm) to be sharper in that range than it is all the way down to f/22. That first shot was 5 seconds at f/16.

Here’s a shot from a bit later in the evening around 7:48 — 30 seconds at f/22 (I accepted the loss of sharpness for more blur on this one):

You can start to see the cloud effect in this one. I kept firing a shot off every few minutes, whether it looked like anything had changed or not. I tried some shots with traffic blurring in the background, while on other shots I tried to avoid any cars at all by taking advantage of the nearby traffic signals.

Right around the time of that last shot, this guy shows up:

I have no explanation. A group of guys had wandered up with “protest” signs in French, so I had no idea what they said. Then this guy then strips down to his… bikini (mankini?)… and proceeds to strut around in the fountain while all of his buddies video-taped him. Okay, to be honest, I shot some video on my iPhone as well. What are you supposed to do when something like this happens?!? His friends seem thrilled with his performance and were shouting and cheering and egging him on.

Huh. Luckily he didn’t stay around long enough to ruin any of my long exposures during the fleeting prime light.

This is the kind of thing that could easily distract the amateur photographer. But, as a consummate professional (ahem!), I took it all in stride. I shot my little video to share with friends later, and returned my thoughts to the task at hand. There would be time to ponder this moment later. Strange as it may seem, this isn’t the craziest thing I’ve encountered on a shoot.

I’m starting to get a little color in the sky at this point and there are even occasional cloud breaks and patches of blue. Happily most of the breaks occurred right about sunset time, giving some really nice color for just a brief period of time:

That’s about 8:03, 13 seconds at f/11. The fountain lights were coming on just as the sky was getting nice. I’m liking the balance here. But there’s still more to come. Little by little more lights come on. I notice the floodlights on the front of the parliament building come on extremely green at first but, after they “warm up” a bit, they gradually become a more pleasing tungsten-like color. A good reminder to not pack up too early but to wait and see what happens with time.

During all of this time I played with different apertures and color balances. The latter is mostly just to experiment in-camera. I can easily change the white balance later in Lightroom but it’s interesting to see the changes it makes in such a mixed bag of color temperatures while on location. I tend to like a fluorescent balance on the camera’s screen but I do still tweak it considerably later in Lightroom. Here’s where I was at by 8:24 (30 seconds at f/8):

This is closest to the shot that I had pre-imagined, but I now actually like some of the earlier shots better. Even with the cloudy sky, I knew I had a good shot at getting that cobalt blue color after sunset (which contrasts nicely with the warm artificial light on the building), but the earlier pinks and purples in the sky were an unexpected treat.

In the end, that’s about an hour of actual shoot-time but it yielded quite an array of looks. Some of the early, grey shots might make really dramatic black and whites, while I have three or four pretty different twilight looks that might each appeal to different buyers when these get into the stock libraries.

Not bad for an evening’s work.

Cirque du Soleil in Quebec

One of the highlights of this month’s trip to Quebec City was an evening spent shooting the Cirque du Soleil show, Les Chemins Invisibles. A couple of things about this show are remarkable (but then… aren’t all Cirque shows remarkable?): one, it’s free and, two, it’s staged under a highway overpass in the Saint-Roch district. The project began as a part of Quebec’s 400th birthday celebration and the show has been kept on for four years now. Let’s hope it continues for many more. If this is not the coolest way to use the space under a highway overpass, I don’t know what is.

Special thanks to my friends at Tourisme Quebec and the folks at Cirque du Soleil for assisting me with access and permissions for this shoot. What a great night!

Acadian celebrations

Our recent trip to eastern Canada and Maine coincided with National Acadian Day. The shot above and the two that follow are from the Tintamarre in Squatec, QC. (Think of a “Tintamarre” as a very loud parade. People march through the town banging on pots and pans, blowing horns, etc., creating an undeniably fun and festive atmosphere.)

A ployes-making demonstration made for a tasty break in Edmundston, NB. Ployes are made from buckwheat flour and are like light pancakes or crepes that can be sweet or savory, depending on their filling:

We dipped back into the USA for a couple of days as well, in part to catch the Acadian Festival parade in Madawaska, Maine:

Old Quebec

I’ve been back in the office for a week now after spending some time working on stories and generating stock images in eastern Canada and Maine. It’s a region that I can go back to again and again without ever tiring of photographing it. This time I went “old school” by leaving all of my images on the CF and SD cards until returning home. It was almost like shooting film again when you wouldn’t get your images back from the lab for days or even weeks after a shoot. Of course, I had the advantage this time of being able to check shots on the camera’s screen to make sure I was getting what I thought I was getting but, once the cards were swapped out for fresh ones, I didn’t see the images again until I was back in the office and had them imported into Lightroom.

I don’t want to continue to work this way. I much prefer backing up to multiple portable drives while on the road just in case something gets lost or corrupted. But this is the way we always worked with film, wasn’t it? You never had back-ups until you had dupes made at the lab much later. With all the worry about image back-up these days I marvel at how we would ship rolls and rolls of film to the lab, crossing our fingers that there would be no problems in development and wondering if the package would make it back home safely.

Anyway, I digress. This past week has been a little bit of a reminder of those wonderful days when the film would come back from the lab and I’d pour over everything with a loupe on the lightbox, finally seeing what I’d managed to capture. Not having downloaded any of these images onto the laptop while traveling, I didn’t know what I really had until the first pass reviewing them in Lightroom this week. And the images didn’t disappoint. I’ll share more as I continue to fit the post-processing in around other work but, for now, just this one from the Lower Town of Old Quebec City with the Fairmont Le Chateau Frontenac standing tall in the background.

More to come…

more from the rodeo

I’m sharing a few more shots from last saturday’s rodeo in Phillipsburg, Kansas. As the biggest rodeo in the state, it’s quiet a show and the grand opening alone is worth the price of admission. I got there early and tried to scope out a good vantage point and settled on this area at one end of the arena where I could shoot through a livestock gate and get views of both the chute and the stands with a nice long throw down to where these riders with their American flags would make their entrance.

I’d been shooting the beginnings of the grand opening when I turned around and realized I was no longer alone in my little shooting space. In fact, the spot I had chosen was the pen where a few dozen of these longhorn cattle were being prepared for their entrance during a later portion of the grand opening:

Happily, they seemed willing to share the area with me although they did seem to be extremely curious about my cameras. I was carrying two bodies and, as I would shoot with one, the braver of the longhorns would come up to give the other Nikon a good sniff. There was plenty of drooling going on as well (on their part, mostly) but I managed to get through the evening without it finding its way onto my gear.

It did end up being a very versatile location from which to shoot. One that I would be eager to make use of next time I find myself at the rodeo. Even if I do have to share it with these fellows again.

A few more from Saturday:

fast action and slow shutters

An assignment in Phillipsburg, Kansas over the weekend gave me a chance to catch the rodeo on Saturday night. Always a fun thing to shoot, this time I thought I’d experiment a little with slow shutter speeds to better capture the action. The image at the top of this post was made at 1/10th of a second. For comparison, here’s another shot made at 1/1000th of a second:

Each has it place but I really like the abstract nature of the blurred shot. To me it’s an image that is less about that particular rider and is more about the excitement and action of the overall event.