Category Archives: travel

In the Pen

penitentiary

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…

Holland… Michigan, that is

Windmill in Holland, Michigan

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.

Revisiting Greece

mykonos steps

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.

Hot stuff

neon sign

Between a busy schedule and a weird bug that I’m having with Photoshop (any file with a text layer seems to crash it), I haven’t posted much lately. Here’s one more from Albuquerque — a neon sign in the Nob Hill area. More when things cool down…

Land of Enchantment

sandia peak

I’m back from New Mexico and once again wading through images. This was a great trip with a little of everything including snow that — while almost totally missing Albuquerque — managed to close highways to the north, east and south. This shot shows some of the remaining snow later in the day at the top of Sandia Peak on Albuquerque’s east side. Some of the warmth is coming from the setting sun and some from the oddly tinted glass of the tram windows.

Cadillac Ranch

cadillac ranch

After a long day of battling the wind on various interstate highways, we arrived in Amarillo, Texas, just in time to catch the last rays of sun on Cadillac Ranch. I’ve wanted to see this for years and now… well… I have. So there you go.

Now in Albuquerque, it’s looking like opportunities to connect to the internet are going to be few and far between. Luckily the iPhone is keeping me current with emails and calls but I’ll likely have to wait and post any New Mexico photos to the blog until I get back to the office.

Tea break

egyptian potter

Another portrait from Egypt — this time a potter taking a break to have some tea. I had a print order to run last week and sent this and my Chinese kite flyer along for a couple of 11x14s. I don’t often get prints made for myself but these two look really nice.

As usually happens, I’m having some technical issues just when I have the least time to deal with them. One of my terabyte drives is acting up so I’ve been shuffling the data off to other drives so that I still have two copies should it go down altogether. I’m on the road for the next week so I’ll have to finish dealing with it when I get back but at least my images are safe in the meantime. I think it may just need to be reformatted but it’s not going to happen today.

As usual, I’ll do my best to post from the road.

Temple of Seti I, Abydos, Egypt

abydos, temple of seti I

Photographing people in Egypt is not always easy. Many want “baksheesh” — typically a dollar unless they see you have more (on a side note, on this recent trip I heard at least one person refer to American dollars as “Obamas”). I don’t have a problem with compensating someone for taking their photo but in cases like this I find that it wrecks the moment. I saw a man in a turban at one temple standing in beautiful light until he saw a photographer lining up for a photo. He then stepped back into the shadows and held out his hand. Sure, the photographer could have paid the dollar and the man would have stepped back into the light but I doubt that posed shot would have been as good as a real, found moment.

Thus I was especially pleased with this man I found at the Temple of Seti I in Abydos. He was standing inside with strong sidelight coming in through the main temple door. I made eye contact with him and raised my camera as if to ask “may I take your photo?” He responded with a slight nod and didn’t change his stance or expression in the least. It was just what I wanted. I fired off a couple of frames and someone caught his eye as they came through the door. He turned his head toward them and I got this wonderful profile that I like even better than the original shot.

Ballooning in Luxor, Egypt

balloons in luxor, egypt

When I heard that there would be 23 of us riding in the same balloon basket for a sunrise shoot on the west bank of Luxor, I hesitated. That’s a lot of folks and I knew everyone would want to be on the edge for photos but I was assured that the basket would be large so I woke up pre-dawn on my Nile cruise boat, took a bus to another dock where a small open boat ferried us across the river to another bus, which took us past the Colossi of Memnon to our launch site just over the ridge from the Valley of the Kings.

The basket was just large enough. We were shoulder to shoulder but it worked. The only worry came when changing lenses as you pretty much had to do that over the side but I returned to the earth with all the lenses and caps that I had left with.

And the views erased any doubt over whether I should have gone. The pre-dawn lift-off, sunrise over the nile, the other 20 or so balloons in the air, temples and village life. Possibly my most productive hour of the trip.