American Landscapes

Bree the Puppy

2014-02-04T14:39:00.001-08:00

On day before Christmas Eve I finally achieved a life long desire of mine, to get a puppy. It's been years coming and even with the few problems I've had there are no regrets. Jokingly I stated that I would name my dog Hubris, because that what would one be and so I did. Her name is Bree for short though, because who wants to constantly explain Hubris? Plus you can't call out to the dog with a name like, doesn't roll off the tongue well. Couldn't shorten it to Hue or Huey, that's terrible, and Bris? Well she almost bit the tip when I got out of the shower but still I can't call her that, so Bree it is. Anyway, here are some egregious puppy pictures and videos.

Goofus Goofing Goo from Reagan Pufall on Vimeo.

Bree the Puppy from Reagan Pufall on Vimeo.

Scenes from San Francisco 3

2014-02-04T14:26:00.003-08:00

Recently got a 40mm pancake lens for my canon which means I don't have to wait to borrow the fuji x100 I've been goofing around with. I admit I naysayed the lens when it came out but now that I have been using one I'm in love. It's by no means suitable for serious work but it makes having my camera on my a lot more convenient and enjoyable. It's been particularly JAWSOME for goofing with my puppy.

thoughts on different mantis species

2013-07-25T19:30:00.000-07:00

I have kept more than a few species of mantises now since I first started raising them back in 2009. Some species have been more satisfying to own and photograph than others.

European Praying Mantis


female European Mantis

This was the first species I came across and raised. While working at outdoors amusement park in Colorado I came across female one. After looking at it I left her alone but few a minutes later I came across male of the same species. I assumed they were the same species from the same black spot on inside of their arms and I knew that some insects were sexually dimorphic. So I decided to capture them. I cut the top off of two pop bottles, popped them inside them, and inverted the top back onto the base in the classic DYI wasp trap and took the home. They both had wings so I knew they were adults. I bred them and classically the male was eaten. This would be the genesis for the next set of mantises I photographed the following spring.

The species is fair sized and easy to raise. They have the classic mantis behaviors of cat-like cleaning, and ambush preying. They do have a habit of just hanging from the top of cage and do not really roam unless hungry or searching for a place to lay eggs.
They accept pretty much anything you put in their cage and will accept uncooked meat with the touch mouth method without difficulty. Best of all since they are wide spread in the US you can release them if you breed too many. They are also cheap available both from garden stores and breeders.

Photographically they are about the perfect size. Large enough to be able work with easily and not have to go beyond 1:1 while still being small enough to blur out the backgrounds. Their pseudo-pupils (black dots on their eyes) are almost always easily apparent in images. They still bend and the abdomen thorax joint after they've gotten their wings allowing them to 'pose' even at adult. They will pose for awhile but will start actively running about after 10-20 minutes of shooting.

Chinese Mantis

female Chinese Mantis

I also caught this species wild in Nebraska. They are common and easy to find due to their numbers, size, and appearance near lights at stores at dusk. One of the largest mantis species they can be little intimidating to work with, especially once they have their wings. Unlike other species I've had, it did not seem particularly prone to flying into your face. This was the easiest species to care for. You can feed them just about anything and they will take it with aggression. While they do the normal wait and ambush, with lively prey they will charge it. This means they will actively eat each other, more so than other species I've kept. Like the European they just kind hang out in the lid of the cage.

Photographically they are almost too big. 1:1 is not necessary for most shots and you will need larger shooting areas to hide edges and backgrounds. However, because of their size it can be easier to put whole mantis into focus compared when working with smaller mantises. Similar to European, they bend at the abdomen and thorax as adults and they will break and run after 10-20 minutes of shooting.

Ghost Mantis

adolescent Ghost Mantis

First mantis I ordered off the web. Best way to describe this mantis is ultra-chill. Pretty much wait and catch only, no charging down their food. Will stick pretty much to the roof of cage like most species. Takes crickets well and will eat insects that seem much too big for such a small mantis. It isn't food shy at all. After it outgrows fruit flies the mantis is pretty idiot proof. I did at times feed it meat but it was much harder to get it to eat than the previous two species. I've only kept one and I never bother to sex it. One huge plus for this species is that you can raise them as a group and can pretty safely put them in group shots, or at least so says the web.

This is one the easiest species of shot. It loves to pose and will hold poses for minutes at a time and will rarely break and run even when prodded into different positions. As an adult it never took flight when being worked with. It does have two draw backs, its psuedo-pupils are often not easily discerned from the rest of the eye and as adults don't like to bed. They will rear up at least, but not to the extent of the European or Chinese mantis. They are also much smaller than the previous species, prohibitively so when young. Expect to need a bellows or tubes if you want to work with the species beyond full body shots when young.

Budwing Mantis

adolescent male Budwing Mantis

This species was kind of lack luster to me. It lacked the exoticism of the ghost mantis and was not free like the European or Chinese mantis. Behavior wise it was pretty inactive. Sat on the roof cage, no roaming, wouldn't look at you. Just kind of generic without being free.

Photo wise it was okay until reaching adult. Pseudo-pupils easily apparent. Apealing face and very defined palps make for great up close portraits but otherwise much the same as European or Chinese mantis. Unlike them however once it has its wings it becomes mostly useless. Most of the time it will lay parallel to the surface in a perfect straight line making unsatisfying and difficult to photograph. Half the appeal of these insects is that they stand up something like we do. This issue might only be with the male of the species. Per the name the females have much smaller and less restrictive wings which may allow them to rear up for better posing. I did enjoy that eyes were a pale lavender which easily set them apart from the rest of the face.

Indian Flower Mantis

I will review the Cryptic Mantis, Dead Leaf Mantis, Orchid Mantis, Giant Asian Mantis once I have raised a set to adulthood.

Scenes from San Francisco 2

2013-05-16T20:15:00.000-07:00

Some of these were taken with a canon 5Dii, can you tell which ones? Been borrowing someone's fujifilm x100. I have to say the camera is a joy to use. I wish it had a faster start up when you use cheap memory cards but besides that no real complaints. I have noticed it handles color different from my 5Dii. The files come out cool and with hard to correct greeness to them. Not necessarily bad, just different.

Something they don't warn you about Macro

2013-04-24T18:27:00.000-07:00

Indian Flower Mantis (Creobroter pictipennis) eating a cricket

truly my camera hates me

So many of us are very familiar with sensor aids, those wonderfully awful spots and smudges in the smooth swathes of blue in our sky. The spots come from dust and other particles resting on our sensor. They show up at smaller apertures and easiest seen in areas of continuous tone (hence why they're commonly scene in the skies of landscapes). For macro, where we find ourselves descending to smallest of apertures to give us all the depth the lens can muster and even then suffer from the shallowest of dofs giving us creamy bokeh the problem becomes most acute.

In the example to the left is a particularly bad case. It was also cleaned with large printing in mind so fainter and smaller particles had to be removed then you would have to for web presentation. When you darken areas the dust becomes further apparent. There several tools available to us to expedite the process. Both in camera and in image processor are tools where you can record dust data which can automatically deal with the worst of it. The finer grains still need to be done manually and the processor can make poor healing choices (especially if it's cleaning up over a detail area). You can also clean your sensor. Using one of those hand-squeeze blowers you can knock the worst off and if you have the gumption you can could wet clean your sensor with the swabs available on the market. Regardless, if you shoot macro be ready to spend some time cleaning the image.

my camera aids

how bad is your camera aids?
Curious to know if you camera has it bad? Here's an easy way to check.
1) Pick a lens that you have with with smallest aperture (probably f22 or f32) and set it to that
2) Turn off auto focus and focus the lens to as a close a distance as you can (aka macro focus)
3) Pick an even white surface like a wall or sheet or paper and move a few feet away placing it well out of focus
4) Take a shot and pixel peep away on your computer

More Mantises!

2013-03-24T18:03:00.000-07:00

More Mantises

Sibylla pretiosa
Cryptic Mantis

My other two mantises finally arrived, another Indian Flower Mantis and my long desired Orchid Mantis. Both are now two molts into their life cycle and doing very well. I'm considering after this batch of mantises obtaining ootheca for orchid and ghost mantises and just raising those two species for awhile. I would be interested in breed and maintaining colonies of both.

The orchid mantis is exceedingly easy to photograph. Not really skiddish at all and will acknowledge and look at the camera without becoming defensive. It did become startled once while shooting which caused it to flatten itself as much as possible, laying it's thorax on ground with its arms splayed out and its abdomen folded up over its thorax. Then it stared most intently at me. It was shockingly adorable. Unfortunately about halfway through the shoot it started to defecate, which I didn't notice till later. You can see it in one of the pictures of him here.

Hymenopus coronatus
Malaysian Orchid Mantis

I also finally got a few good pictures of my Cryptic Mantis. For whatever is chose to hold still for 1-2 minute periods of time this go around. Got a few good face shots and some excellent full body shots. I had to redo his enclosure, he keeps picking the worst spots to shed and it makes it very dangerous for him. The orchid mantis had similar poor choices for shedding locations but also came out just fine. One of my classmates has requested the skins. I have no idea what she's doing with them but she had a delightful sideways mode of asking if she can have them. She also wants the corpses when they finally die. I would find this strange but art school in San Francisco, nothing is really all that odd here.

Now that I have two Indian Flower mantises I'm going to set up the colors in their enclosures differently and see how far they'll shift color wise. The first one has already shifted quite strongly towards green.

I've also got quite bit more work done on photoshoping mantises into paintings, but the corresponding portrait work is not ready yet. I printed a few of them and the heads separated themselves quite strongly in comparison to on the screen. That's always the problem is how they look when printed. The unrefined paintings are particularly hard because I have try to roughen up the photo in a fashion similar to the target painting. I'll make a post of them when more are ready.

Hymenopus coronatus
Malaysian Orchid Mantis

Creobroter pictipennis
Indian Flower Mantis

New Mantids

2013-02-12T22:06:00.001-08:00

Scandalous! The mantis is underage!

3 new mantis nymphs arrived, Sibylla pretiosa (cryptic mantis), Creobroter pictipennis (indian flower mantis), and a Deroplatys lobata (dead leaf mantis). Two more mantids should be shipping out to me tomorrow, another pictipennis and Hymenopus coronatus (orchid mantis). The first three I picked up from http://mantiskingdom.com/ while the second two are coming from http://www.mantidpets.com/ more on those two breeders later. The sibylla is being a little shit and refused to face the camera at all. It's quite active as well meaning I can't just move everything around him. [Added a picture of him, finally got a half decent one]

Besides the usual pictures I like to take of these guys I want to a series of mantis portraits that emulate Rembrandt. The species I chose to get this time around reflect the project. Once they hit L5-L6 they'll become rather showy in appearance. This I'm hoping will make them feel costumed or done up in their finest like many of Rembrandt's paintings. Mostly I will be relying on lighting, color/tone, and background. The trick will be to give it a classic painterly feel without losing detail of photography while avoiding the appearance of the modern backdrop portrait.

Sibylla pretiosa L3

Creobroter pictipennis L2?

Creobroter pictipennis L3?

Deroplatys lobata L2

Deroplatys lobata L3

Scenes from San Francisco

2012-10-24T22:58:00.000-07:00

I realized the other day that there wasn't a good reason not to take photos while on my frequent walks in San Francisco.

Canon MPE-65 1x-5x macro

2012-10-24T22:53:00.002-07:00


Ghost Mantis

The canon MPE-65 f2.8 1x-5x is a dedicated macro lens. Macro-photography was originally defined as when what you are photographing is the same size on the sensor or film plain is it actually is or larger. As a dedicated macro lens incapable of focusing to infinity the lens takes only photos that fall into that category. The MPE-65 takes images where the ratio of size is 1:1 to 5:1 in size (1x-5x). The lens has an f stop range of 2.8-16 but when the magnification is increase the effective f-stop becomes significantly smaller. According to the manual the effective f-stop can be calculated using the following equation:

Male Budwing Mantis

Effective Aperture = (Aperture Setting) + (Aperture Setting x Magnification)

So at x5 magnification at f16 you have an effective f stop of f96. As a result the lens becomes incredibly light hungry as you increase the magnification. Complicating use of this lens is the small depth of field. At these settings you depth of field of 0.269mm. You can see what this looks like in the last mantis portrait in this blog entry. A third problem when using this lens is the working distance. The lens achieves focus between ~100mm at x1 and ~40mm at x5. When shooting live subjects this can be quite problematic. Under the hot lights my ghost mantis livened up and would leap onto the front of the lens as i tried to achieve focus. This of course being in exactly the wrong spot for me was the only spot where he would calm down. This can also make lighting difficult unless you are utilizing a ring flash or canon's twin-lite flash. Further the lens does not perform well at all with flash directly hitting the front element. Canon does make a lens hood but must be purchased separately.

Ghost Mantis

Because of the shallow depth of field a focusing rail becomes essential to get clear image. Cheap older ones are available on ebay. I picked up an older Minolta rail for $25 and I have no regrets. Quite intelligently on canon's part they included a tripod mount the lens making for better balance (especially when the lens is fully extended) and allowing you to rotate sensor plain without shifting everything. Without the mount you would have to readjust tripod placement when shifting between orientations.

I come from working originally with an EOS mount bellows and then later added the canon 100 f2.8 macro (non-L). No regrets on that lens. It's fantastic for the price and for most macro work will be fine. Working with that lens and bellows in combination to get a similar magnification to the MPE-65 was nightmarish. Working at that magnification is always difficult with the added size and awkwardness of the bellows it was prohibitive. The MPE-65 is easier to use and provides better results.

TRULY THIS IS MY HOME

Edit
Having used the lens on a handful more shoots there are two other things that should be mentioned. The camera has a 6 bladed aperture that at times will show up. It's not the best look. The lens also has pretty serious flare issues when the flash hits the lens. All lenses suffer when this happens but this one is on the worse end of the spectrum.

THE PAIN

6 bladed aperture of sadness

Edit 2

Lens hood acquired! I am a firm believer lens hoods, they are almost a completely win-win item. The hood for this lens is a bit of an odd duck. Instead of the usual twist and click around the outside of rim of the lens, this hood screws into the filter mount. At x5 magnification the hood does cause problems because of how close it gets to the insects but otherwise it's effective. Unlike other lens hoods it appears to be metal.

Summer Trips

2012-05-09T15:19:00.000-07:00

Over this summer I will be traveling across the country for the purpose of photography. I will be applying for grad school at the summer

Photoshop 6 BETA

2012-04-03T19:30:00.000-07:00

Photoshop version 6 BETA is out for free download from Adobe. Much the same as what they did with Lightroom 4 it will be usable until the official release. The 3d tools will be usable in the beta version but will only be in the extended version upon release. LR and PS are two very different tools. If you haven't given both a good thorough test DO IT. I enjoy LR for more conservative edits while PS gives you the control (particularly in terms of selecting tones) that some images need.

Photoshop 6 Beta

and of course here are two test run images:

Lightroom 4

2012-01-11T15:10:00.000-08:00

Lightroom 4 beta is up for free download over on Adobe's site. The beta lasts until some time in March when the new version is officially released. I remember playing with LR1 and thinking it was fun but not worth the time to learn or the money to buy it in addition to photoshop. The latest version is amazing. You will need to make a free account with with Adobe to download the software.

Lightroom 4 Beta

Here are a few edits with the new software:

Eastern Nebraska

Toadstool Geologic Park

Photo Highlight 2011

2012-01-06T09:25:00.000-08:00

Near Schuyler

Last year was surprisingly unproductive for me. I am having trouble photographing Nebraska with the same enthusiasm and enjoyment I found in shooting Colorado. The sense of adventure is less and there is significantly more driving and less time spent out of the car on foot with the camera hand. Most of the locations are stop and hop it out for a few shots because the location is smaller and less dynamic. Further difficulties arise because much of the year Nebraska is dead and brown. The skies can do amazing things in the winter, but often the foreground just lacks the pull I find so charming of a green vista or a tall mountain. Still some fantastic images were made this year.

Bramble Wildlife Management Area

Platte River State Park

Near Fremont

Near Arlington

Toadstool Geologic Park

Metal Prints and Bay Photo

2012-01-06T09:10:00.000-08:00

I am a huge fan frameless options for presenting photography. Standouts, wood or aluminum mounts, and acrylic sandwiches are attractive and do away with mattes and frames. Often enough perspective buyers are more concerned with matching frames to their house than complimenting the image. To me the most appealing styling would be the aluminum floats. Either the image is printed normally and then dry-mounted onto aluminum or printed onto the metal itself. Then the image is then raised off the wall by recessed box or frame usually 1" in height.

Back in college I was first introduced to the idea by a gallerist at Metro Frameworks Gallery. There I mounted four images from Great Sand Dunes National Park for my senior thesis show. They were epson prints dry-mounted onto aluminum and then given a protective acrylic spray coat. They looked amazing. When they mounted them for me, they scratched one print, noticed it, and offered to redo it free of charge for me. The scratch would have been negligible except then when lit from overhead it showed strongly. They redid it for me and I offered to let them keep the damaged one as an example. To my knowledge they still have and use it. I thoroughly enjoyed process. The prints looked gorgeous when mounted and with a luster finish reflection was not an issue, especially when compared to what could have been done with glass at that price. I kept this set of prints in the family. Right now they're up at my father's place in San Francisco enjoying the bay air.

Lately I have been getting work done with Image Wizards and overall I am very satisfied. The images come out looking similar in dynamic range and color to the epson prints I used to make and have strong and appealing build quality. They use a small folded edge aluminum box to raise the print off the wall and place the usual rubber feet on the box. For the hanger they cut one sawtooth hole for either hanging orientation. I would prefer a way to get a wire on it but considering the size of the box on the back it makes sense. There have been a few hiccups in the finish but the customer service fast, polite, and effective so this is of no issue. Things are different with my experience with Bay Photo. Currently you can find some of the prints I have made through ImageWizard for sale or on public display at Nebraska At the Market or at the Great Sand Dunes National Park visitor center.

on display in the Great Sand Dunes Visitor Center


pin striping, white wedges and dirt

I have been shopping around for a good gallery and store host. While I like the website I have created, having an integrated store with an outsourced customer service would be amazing. SmugMug came recommended to me as well with their integrated printer Bay Photo. When I saw that Bay Photo did metal prints, I was sold. I started setting up a website through smugmug and ordered a set of 5 metal prints from BayPhoto for the Emerging Artist Show at the Artist's Cooperative Gallery here in downtown Omaha. The photos arrive and they're awful. Thin white edges adorn the corners of the images from where they didn't cut the images out of the boards strait. One is cut a full 1/4 shorter than the others. The prints that terrible pin striping that is the tell tale sign of a clogged nozzle on your printer. One print had a dirt smudge in the sky under the finish. Needless to say I wasn't happy. When I contacted Bay Photo they did offer redo the prints for free which is what I wanted but at no point did I feel that they knew how egregious it was for this to go out the door of their shop. Nor was there ever a real apology. When the new set of prints arrived I was similarly dismayed. Of the five, three came in okay. A different one came in 3/8" shorter than the others and the fifth came in just bad. I'm not entirely sure how or why this happened. Time wise I was out, so I ended up only have four photos for the show open (I used the short one) and just left a space for next week when the fifth arrived redone.

Left: what they sent Right: file

As a result I am never going to BayPhoto again for printing. Nor am I going to able to effectively use SmugMug's service (Which I ended my account as a result of this. They were very polite and fast about the whole thing, including refunding the money for the account.) Other photographers I have talked to are generally surprised about my experience in that it happened at all and that happened from BayPhoto. This isn't necessarily indictive of what kind of experience you would have but it was mine.

Theme Music

2011-10-04T20:11:00.001-07:00

If there was ever a song that would be the theme of photographing landscapes, this would be it.

Awesome Weather Tools

2011-04-26T12:57:00.000-07:00

Related to the last post on weather, there are some helpful tools for determining what is going on where. I like to use the following:
National Weather Service Storm Map
Weather Underground Satellite view (day)
Weather Underground Satellite view (day and night)

How you use them is up to you.

Nature Tips #6 Weather

2011-02-19T20:44:00.000-08:00

For landscapes weather is what really can set a photo apart from others, unfortunately it rarely cooperates. So what do we do when out we're energized to shoot, restless, filled with wanderlust? You make do. In this post I will provide suggestions of what do with different conditions we come across when we leave home in hubris shaking our fist at the overcast sky with the intent of making photos.

Fog

Fog is easy to shoot but it does lend itself to certain applications more than others. What I love fog for is that allows you to pull of those foregrounds that you've always loved but what is behind it is simply garbage. Here it's taking out these rather unaesthetic 1950's New England homes and power lines behind the trees. Fog and overcast skies also create a very distinctive light that is fantastic for showing deep greens in forests and fine detail.

Overcast

Overcast about detail and consequently I often find myself defaulting to black and white images. Strong foreground and often minimal to no skies are typical compositions. Anywhere you want a long exposure without a sky this is the time to shoot it. The soft light gives depth to whole image while preventing strong shadow and highlight contrast problems between the flowing water and ground. The soft light also provides you with an opportunity to really drag out those exposure times without having to stop down past f16 (the land of diffraction) or having to slap an ND on your camera (expensive, limited use, often vignettes when stacked with a CPL). It is important to have a CPL along for these days along with foggy days and some some rainy days. Often there is a lot of moisture on everything and you will need to pull of the reflections.

Partial Clouds

There is no real trick here other than what is normal. These days are your bread and butter, your staple diet of delicious days to get some serious work done. Don't forgot the usual rules and tips. The half before sunrise to 2-3 hours after and the reverse for sunset are still your golden hours. Keep in mind that if you can manage it, get those clouds to interact somehow with the ground bellow. Don't just do the usual of softness verses the harshness of the ground, but pay attention to shapes, lines, and positive/negative space in the sky and ground that you can use to give power to your image. Also do not always default to sky/ground, but look for times when you split it up further like sky/clouds/ground, sky and clouds/mountains/foreground and so forth.

Clear Skies

The bane of everything! Woe unto us who get so punished for driving hours upon hours to camp in the cold and then awake before dawn to setup somewhere wonderful and then become inflicted by boring clear blue skies. More than ever are sunrise and sunset important because you will need to find away to make the land itself particularly interesting. Watch for special shapes and colors that would be unusable to mesh with clouds and sky and use them on these days. The sky becomes one giant blob of negative space and balancing it with the ground or just removing all together is the trick.

Rain

The real trick with rain is of course is not to be in it but on the edge of it, but it rarely works out that way. Being successful in shooting in the rain really comes down to keeping your front element clean, for this there are a few tricks. I like to wear a poncho that I drape over myself and my setup with the lens poking out from the edge. Over my front I have placed a clear plastic bag. The bag allows you to compose your shot and set an auto focus point. Then you simply pop off the bag grab the focus and shoot. Lens hoods are help in keeping the element dry as well. It's also a good idea to keep a microfiber cloth on you to spot your lens as you go.

Snow

A lot of the same tricks that apply to fog and rain apply here as well. The trick to all three that's easy to forget is that they'll obscure what you actually want to be in focus and sharp. For rain and snow avoid dragging out the exposure times as more of the snow and rain will fall. Often it's good to include strong foreground elements or details that will provide a visual anchor of detail and interest while the rest fades into weather. Remember to keep your batteries warm and watch ice build up on your camera. Especially when you just come out of a warm car in blizzard the snow will melt on the camera and then freeze which can mess with your controls, especially your shutter, and delay you as you melt and dry your camera.

Nature Tips # Ascending and Opening Composition

2011-02-17T14:45:00.001-08:00

Photo Highlight 2010

2011-01-28T21:56:00.000-08:00

A reflection of twelve photos, one from each month, taken over the last year.

January

While I was in school at Regis I always offered to take other photographers in class with me on my hikes, Chris was the first one to accept in my last semester. None of them were ever interested in shooting landscapes but mostly shot street or portraits. So here we are, first or second time out together up in Rocky Mountain National Park and a blizzard (as usual) blows in on the higher lake set. To his credit, he stuck it out with me as we hiked up higher. When we got out onto Dream Lake I stopped to try to work with edge of ice formed from melting and freezing in the wind. Sure enough Chris walks right out into my frame and it's so windy he can't here me yell. On impulse I take a few with him in it and when I get home it made the shot. Without him in the frame the shot is mediocre at best. What makes the shot even better is when you find that Chris is Hawaiian native.

February
This shot is from what was going to be bromeet of photographers who had met on-line, but two of the other photographers bailed on Alex Burke and me so again it was just two us. I love Great Sand Dunes National Park, I really do, and on this day it was in particularly good form. Frozen ice and snow under wind driven sand really gave it a deepness of color and texture that worked and the clouds decided to be heavenly for us. I took this shot using Alex's 3 stop hard edge GND (first time using a gnd) and knew I had gold one even before I checked the lcd for the exposure. Luckily I realized before taking this shot that I had left my 30D up at 3200iso from the last time I went shooting at night but not before I had already taken 70 or so shots. There's some great shots lost to image noise from this trip.

March
Shot mostly for school otherwise I probably would've been playing WoW or something at the time. I always seem to have trouble shooting this location (El Dorado Canyon) and this isn't quite the best one I have gotten from the place, but it is the best non-blizzard shot of the area. It's so narrow that it's hard to work with the light that it gets.

April
This is from another trip out with Alex Burke, this time out to the Pawnee Buttes. It was shot from south of the parking lot for the trail out the buttes. When you're standing there the beauty of the place is somewhat marred by these stupid windmills. All the way up to the mountains nearly and then as far as the eye can see to the east is a wall of them that loops around the park jarring the landscape. I've never really cared for these things and they worry me a little. I fear they'll end up doing what other things like this has. They always said that rivers were too big to be effected by the dams all that much, that the fisheries of the ocean too numerous to be depleted, and atmosphere to large to be effected (ozone layer) but each time it hasn't been the case. I worry that with enough of these things out there we'll end up taking too much energy out of the wind systems and screw something up. I actually talked to a pair of scientists at Creighton U that are working on renewable energy and they gave me a rather dismaying answer, that the wind systems were too vast and powerful to be really effected by these things.

May
I have a lot of photos from May. I went out for the third time with a camera to my ancestral home of Long Island Maine. My Grandmother rents out a house she owns from her parents there and each spring she goes out to open it up, I went with this time worried about her in her age. Each time I go out I am struck by the amount of death I find on the beaches. The first time out I found a striking set of wings washed up a beach, a dead and eyeless seal, the skin of a cat, and other macabre findings and this last time was no different. This round I found dead dear parts, this striking snail, and strange vertebrae washed onto the beach. I found this snail in a cove I struggled with to get a good landscape from (a struggle that was ultimately in vain) and I was delighted with it. It was the snail that produced the delightful and hard to find shells that I loved to find on the beach. It's foot was still intact and the flies had already found it, how could I not shoot it? I've got this one printed off my room now.

June
This is from the second time I was up in a plane flown by long time friend Ted Manos. Over last summer he frantically built up hours to get his next level of flight license and often I went along to keep him company. He was flying some tiny Cessna of one kind or another but more importantly you could open the windows. There really isn't anything like shooting a sunset over the Platte River with your head stuck out a plane.

July
Originally Ted and I were going to go flying again but an incoming storm prevented us. Camera in hand along with the car wheel I dragged Ted around rural Nebraska outside of Fremont to work with the scattering clouds from the storm. Since then, for whatever reason, Ted has started accompanying me outings, sometimes bringing an old Canon a-1 to take shots of his own.

August
From a cross country with instructor flight with Ted. We flew across half of Nebraska or so, away from a developing storm in Iowa. It was fascinating to watch from a plane, the clouds just rise and billow growing mysteriously and continuously in mass. As they grew they were hit by the striking colors of the setting sun from west.

September
Found this guy out the front of my house while doing yard work. He's a swallowtail butterfly larva. I identified him by realizing he looked like the poke'mon Caterpie and then looked up what it was based on. The strange orange horn would emerge when threatened and stank like sulfur, it was very strange.

October
Taken north of Omaha near what would be 72nd street. First time my friend Ted brought a camera along.

November
This is from day 2 of a three day shoot at Hitchcock Nature in Iowa. The strange mist and color are a result of smoke from the fires they lit. As part of a prescribed burn they lit the whole place fire which let me tell you is a photographers paradise. Ignoring the incredible color from the smoke and setting sun, the setting is just so much fun. Small fires appear and burn out in the grass while trees (not these ones mind you) would glow with burning embers. Crackling and crashes could be heard as you stood still as burning trees fell. I had to cut this trip short unfortunately, the smoke eventually started to become too much for me.

December
This a farmers field from a trip out to Hitchcock during a particularly nasty blizzard. I don't know why I always feel compelled to go out these stupid things but I do. It was bitterly cold with a strong gusty wind making it impossible to do anything towards it. It was bad enough the I had to leave Hitchcock early. The wind blow ice encrusted my tripod, camera controls, and glasses making taking photos mostly impossible. Such are blizzards.

Editing Video

2010-11-21T17:07:00.000-08:00

Rather often I get asked what kind of editing I do images. This video shows what kind of editing I typically do. This isn't universal just typical. Video: Editing Landscapes

I got asked again what kind of editing do I do for low contrast shots in references to luminosity masking so here's a quicker and dirtier video: Low Contrast Landscapes

Nature Tips # Color Balance

2010-10-27T20:29:00.001-07:00

Photographers who've been around the block should have picked this up already, but a lot of beginners constantly miss this. Each type of lighting you photograph in has a different temperature(referring to cool or hot tones) and in most cases you need to correct for this.

Nature Tips #5 Trespassing and Public Access Land

2010-10-21T15:49:00.000-07:00

Trespassing in Maine

All the photos in this blog are from times when I was trespassing or on public access land.

Trespassing comes up every so often when I'm out photographing with someone. Often times they find it astounding that when I am out in the middle of nowhere I just wander out onto some guys land to make photos or I slip into some abandoned building to take photos. While trespassing is indeed illegal and I can't recommend that you do it, there are some basic rules that can help you stay out of trouble when doing it.

1) Don't take anything from the area and don't leave anything behind.
2) Don't break or destroy anything, keep your presence low impact.
3) Anything you open, like windows, doors, gates, etc you should close as you go.
4) When possible, just ask them if they care you're out there. More times than not they won't care in the slightest and often enough they're delighted someone is out photographing their land.
5) If you get caught, don't act like an ass. You're just a photographer doing your trade. Hand them off a business card if they want one and tell them straight up that you liked the lay of their land and so you went out to shoot it. If you didn't ask them hopefully it was because it wasn't obvious who owned the land or that your light was fading fast, just explain yourself.
6) Stay away from livestock. Regardless of anything just don't go near them, like stay a few miles away at least. Even if you've told them you're going to be out there just stay clear of them.

Following these rules you should be able get access to what you want without getting in trouble. Landowners get burned by people (usually weekend warrior hunters) not following just basic ettique rules like these. If they can't tell you've been there, there's no harm in it.

Now if you're just not comfortable with trespassing or talking to landowners but state and federal parks are just not working for you, you have another option. For those of us in the USA each state should have a handy dandy Public Access Atlas (Nebraska's) that will list and show on maps every single piece of land that you can legally wander aimlessly around in. You can find them on the state's Park and Rec page or you can find them in some sporting good stores like Cabella's here in Omaha tends to have them. These are put out each year for hunters to find areas in which to practice their sport. Keep this in mind when you go to these places and mind the seasons (listed in the front of the atlas). I would stay away from most of these places during deer season for example and I would wear hunter's orange near those seasons as well. Unfortunately the best hunting times are often the best times for photography so there are chances you will overlap. Regardless, the atlas is an excellent and detailed resource.

Next: ???

Nature Tips #4 Vignetting

2010-07-31T20:49:00.000-07:00

Vignetting is a dirty but useful tool. It allows you to place emphasis where you want after the photo has been taken, but using it is frowned upon. The trick is to get away with it. You tend see three versions, one in which it happens on its own, hipsters just blocking out the corners, and people using more discrete but still noticeable methods in photoshop. Lens vignetting happens when the image circle created by the lens does not quite cover the sensor, causing fall off on the corners. Usually these days you see it with older film cameras especially with the cheaper super wide zooms. It can still happen with the new lenses, especially when filters are stacked. Holgas and other such garbage by purposeful bad design tend vignette. Hipsters love to recreate that effect in photoshop with sloppy black mask and gradient. With more careful adjustments, the same emphasis on your subject can be achieved with more taste and discretion.

The intent on creating a vignette should be to change areas of contrast or to create a new contrast between the subject and the rest of the image. The most basic way to do this is to create a level adjustment and then to mask out the subjected with a simple graduated mask. By creating this mask, you create a contrast between subject and the rest of the image by placing the majority of the brighter tones in the subject. Using a curve layer you can fully remove true whites from the rest of the image again drawing the viewer's eye by placing the stronger contrast in the center of the image. The adjustments do not have to be entirely tone based, but can be based on color as well. Look at the image of the ants, using the movie poster popular blue/orange contrast the image becomes stronger because it feels more dynamic because of the contrast. The ants to begin with were already red orange and yellow dominant, so it was easy to create the contrast by making the area surrounding them green blue and purple dominant. Further since the center of the subject is warm while the outside is cool the ants again become the focus. As teh view's eyes are drawn to the warmer tones first.

Next: Nature Tips #5 Trespassing and Public Access Land

Nature Tips #3 Shooting The Sun

2010-07-28T18:28:00.000-07:00

Someone asked me last time for tips on shooting the sun, so random guy out there, here you go.

When you put the sun the image the trick is to get light between it and the rest of image balanced. You can balance the light with a filter or some work in photoshop. A graduated neutral density filter (referred to as a gnd from now on) fits this role just fine. It still has all of the normal problems of flare and unwanted vignetting that can come with using filters, but it still does the best job. If you do not have one, simply cannot get the shot without a prohibitive amount of flare, or the scene has too jagged of a horizon for a gnd, you can come back and fix it up in photoshop.

When you fix it up in shop, you can either simulate the effect of a gnd filter, exposure blend, or shoot HDR (which has its own problems). There are limits to what you can do with a single exposure in terms of 'fixing it.' First is that when you brighten, noise becomes apparent in the image but to expose the sky correctly you need to underexpose the ground. Make sure you have histogram on in your display and highlight warning. Take a test shot and then compensate (it's hard to meter well for this at first, so enjoy the advantages of digital as you learn to gauge it). You are aiming for a shot that has the sun true white and reasonably small while retaining cloud detail. The highlight warning will show you when you start clipping the highlights in the clouds, showing that you have taken in as much as you can get away. When correcting like this, you have to pick and choose the foreground. Silhouetted or shadow heavy foregrounds, like a forest, the dark side of mountain, etc do not work well, there is just too much correction and subsequent noise. Well lit sand, brush, flat areas, and particularly snow work the best. With snow, there often is hardly any correction at all.

Once you have the image in the raw importer, you should notice a little icon shaped like a filter and filter holder on the top menu bar, that is the gnd simulator. Like with everything that has to do with exposure correction, if you can do it in the raw import, do it there. The gnd tool allows you to draw the transition line creating a primitive gradient mask in the importer. While the masking leaves something to be desire, you get a solid set of tools to edit with that draw on data from raw file allowing for less damaging changes to the image. Once you have corrected the image import it and edit as normal. Masking based on percent gray is the best way move on from here. Tony Kuyper has a good tutorial on creating and using such masks over here. For this image, I made brighter than 50% mask and brought down those tones in the sky while retaining the top ones with a curve. Then a similar move with the shadows. Next I added contrast to the moving water with a brighter than 50% mask lowering the mid-tones while brightening the highlights. Finally I adjust the cyan to true blue in the sky and removed the yellow in the sky along the horizon.

Now suppose you were smart enough to bracket your shots and you have multiple exposures to work with you can blend exposures or do HDR now. Pick two exposures, one for the sky and one for the foreground and open them in Adobe Camera Raw. In ACR process the exposures with only the relevant area in mind. Once you are satisfied, adjust for the color on which ever has the most information. Then, in the upper left, select both images and click "synchronize." In that menu select white balance to make the two match in color. Leave checked anything else you want synced between the two images (like cropping or leveling the horizon). With both selected, click open images.

After opening the images select all of one of the images (for the example I selected the one set for the sky) and then copy paste it into the other file. With the top layer (sky in the example) selected click on the layer mask button. Into the mask were going to make a gradient, to make sure it is level you will want to turn on your grid lines (hot key cmd ' on mac). The gradient tool will auto snap to these lines. Usually to get a gradual enough change you will want the gradient to cover up a fair portion of both the ground and sky. What will look best will be different for each image. In the example image you can see the placement of my mask in red. On the right is the final blend, from here you can continue to edit as normal.

Next: How to vignette not like an idiot hipster

Long Island, Maine

2010-06-27T21:52:00.001-07:00

Off the coast of Portland Maine is a small little place called Long Island. On the island with a view of the bay is the house called the Captain's Quarter's. Four generations of my family have been through that house, either calling it home or place to go and get away. I have visited the island three times with a camera in hand. The first time right when I was beginning to get interested in photography, armed with a Elan7; the second time when I had gotten my feet wet and started to understand how it works, armed with a 30D and my first wide angle; lastly just this past spring with a stronger understanding of light and my first real run with my 5dii and 16-35. By visiting the island in this manner a clear pattern of self-improvement and development of taste was made clear to me. In this blog post I want to talk about the island how I have developed as a photographer.

Back in 2006 I accompanied my family out the island. I had just graduated high school and under the tutelage of Mr Fey