Dean Allman Photography

"And the Winner is: Not D700x!"

2010-02-09T06:59:50-07:00

Several years ago comedian Robert Klein did a funny bit where he dealt with the pain of losing after being nominated for a Tony Award by recounting exactly what he heard when he was sitting in the audience and the winner was announced. All he could recall hearing was the presenter saying "Not Klein!" and everything went numb after that.

If you keep your ear to the ground for the rumors that swirl around Nikon product announcements, and you are hungry for a new Nikon DSLR release, then you can identify with how Robert Klein felt when the much-ballyhooed product announcements prior to PMA were made in the last two weeks. We get new Coolpix cameras, one of which has 1080p video, and two new lenses; a 16-35mm VR zoom and a 24mm f/1.4 fixed-mount. In other words, not D700x.

We kind of knew this ahead of time, as Nikon Rumors had already predicted that there would be no DSLR release. Still, the announcements felt anti-climactic, and it appears that Nikon is indeed following the strategy for marketing the D3X that was speculated on earlier in this blog.

The D700 is coming up on it's 2 year anniversary on the market in March, and in addition, the D3X will be on the market for 2 years come November. If sales are lagging on either model, then the only high-end DSLR releases we may see this year are of the "s" variety, similar to the D3s release last October: mid-term releases in the product life-cycle designed to keep buyers interested while newer models are being developed for release next year or the year after.

There is some logic to this. The market has changed quite a bit in the last two years. We have a global recession to deal with, and Panasonic and Olympus have taken the lead in the new Four Thirds market segment that is a direct threat to Nikon's product line on the low-end. If you are having to commit finite resources to product development then you have to go to where you get the most bang for the buck. Since Nikon currently has no Four Thirds offering, they most certainly have to be studying this segment closely, if not already developing their own line, and weighing the return (or the possible opportunity costs) of developing a camera for this segment vs. introducing a D700 body with the D3X sensor. Now that we are at mid-life (or close to it) in two of the major cameras in the product line, that's a tough call.

The Four Thirds segment is a huge commitment. Not only do you have to develop a new camera body, you have to create a new line-up of lenses as well. And the potential D700X would have engineering (pushing around all that data with less horsepower) and marketing (where do you price it without hurting your high-end camera?) issues that are difficult to surmount. In the end, a product planner may conclude that the net gain from releasing a D700X would be minimal at best.

As it is, we get two new interesting lenses, which is always a good thing. VR in a wide-angle zoom - that is pretty awesome. I've seen some preview pics on Bob Krist's blog and they look great. Still, it would have been cool to see a new Nikon DSLR release with the features a lot of us want. Oh well, wait till next year.

The StreetLight Project Debuts with Lady in Distress

2010-01-28T08:57:38-07:00

Since I've launched into photography on a full-time basis my primary focus (no pun intended) has been on landscape photography. It has always been my first love and why not? I get to travel and go to beautiful places, capture images, and share them with the world. Sounds good to me.

I don't believe in boxes, though, like defining myself as a Landscape Photographer. When you put yourself in a box like that it stifles your creativity, and sometimes you can learn stuff in one genre that you can use to strengthen your approach in another. I have done some glamour work, a few weddings here and there, and even enjoy product photography, which is about as commercial as you can get I guess. But if I had to rank anything up there with landscape work, I would say that street photography is at the top of the list.

I have long admired the work of Jay Maisel who is as close to a rock star in this genre as you can find. I also took a workshop on street in Miami once. That was cool as well - if you want a good place to get started with street Miami is as good as any. It is a very diverse community and on any given day you have a wealth of subjects to work with, and that gorgeous South Florida light can make all the difference.

But I don't live in Miami, I live in Denver, and that's not going to change anytime soon. We are at 5,280 feet above sea level here, which means we have one mile less of atmosphere to diffuse and soften the light from the greatest key light in the universe, so oftentimes images can be very contrasty. We learn to work with this (kind of have to if you think about it). But it can be limiting at times.

Coinciding with all of this, I picked up a book by Joe McNally called Hot Shoe Diaries which is a great source of inspiration. Joe's a little too in love with Nikon's Creative Lighting System, but his enthusiasm and his determination to take over control from the greatest key light in the universe is eye-opening. Joe also pointed me to Strobist which, if you can spend some time on it, takes what you learn in Hot Shoe Diaries and puts it on steroids. The Strobist approach is great in Denver. Essentially what you do is pick a location, dial down the ambient light, and use flash from speedlights in several different creative ways to highlight your scene. The more I got into this the more fun I started having, and that is how the StreetLight project came to be.

What StreetLight is all about is getting outside with a model or two or 15, and highlight different parts of the scene with gridded, snooted, goboed, or diffused speedlights and seeing how we do. A lot of post is involved as I have to use Voice-Activated Lightstands (an assistant moving the lights around) and oftentimes I may make 4 or 5 exposures of the same location and then work some magic in Photoshop to bring it all together, and erase the Voice Activated Lightstand from the image.

We just completed our first series for StreetLight which we call Lady in Distress. The idea was to take a well-dressed, elegant woman and have it appear that she is fleeing a scene. We don't know why she is fleeing. She could have jumped out of a limo after an argument with a boyfriend, or she could be chased by a group of PETA Paparazzi (we had her dressed in a fur coat). The results from the shoot are shown below (click on the image for a larger shot). Thanks to Zac Dalton and Mike Zielinski, who worked as my VALs, and to model Katie who gave us all she could.

This image of model Neeyla, actually this group of images of Neeyla, is one that is simply called Many Neeylas. It's from an early testing shoot and is interesting in it's own way.

I think we've made a good start with StreetLight. We'll be doing more shoots in February and March, and I will post results from those shoots here. It certainly does open up the universe that much more for creative exploration, which is always a good thing.

Place your bets: Nikon D900? D700X? 24mp? 18mp?

2010-01-21T12:30:02-07:00

Rumors are flying left and right again on the possible introduction of a new Nikon camera in early February. It will have an 18 mp sensor in a D700 body. No, the 24mp sensor used in the D3X will migrate downward. It will be a D900. No, It will be labelled a D700X. There is enough confusion and anticipation that if you are in the market for a new high-end Nikon, you might want to wait until after the first or second week of February. At least at that point we'll have some clarity on where things are going.

If I had a wish list, it would include sensor cleaning, 1080p (not 720p) video, and improved live view, along with the larger sensor. It's silly that the D3X does not have sensor cleaning. I look at the video as a nice little add-on that I can experiment with, not rely on, but handicapping it with 720p rez as on other Nikon models makes little sense in an era when we have 1080p as an emerging standard. And live view, which I rarely use, could use some usability enhancements. But I can dream with everyone else.

If the number of hits on this blog are any indication, Nikon is missing out on a tremendous opportunity if they do not release a camera like this. Hits to this blog quintupled after I posted this piece speculating on Nikon's motives when they released the D3s, and they have not stopped in the 4 months since that post was written. That's simply amazing. Ah, gear lust! I love it.

Prepping images for eBay using a DIY macro studio

2010-01-09T14:12:12-07:00

Well it's January, and I have lots of ambitious plans this year, so I thought I would start out by selling some equipment to fund some upgrades. I decided to list my venerable D2X and some lenses that I am not using on eBay. The most powerful thing that I learned from my years in web development was that Presentation is Everything, so I searched for the best way to capture images of the equipment to post on eBay. After all, how would it look if a photographer is using poor images to try and sell his equipment?

You can spend lots of money setting up a home studio for product photography. Lastolite sells something they call a cubelite that starts at $150 on up. Or you can go to David Hobby's Strobist site where you will find tons of instructional material on how to set up basic systems using very inexpensive materials and speedlights such as a Nikon SB800. On Strobist I found an article on a Do it Yourself Macro Studio, and after a trip to Office Depot and an art supply house I had all the materials I needed: a 3' by 3' box, duct tape, sheets of mylar, and tracing paper. Total cost was about $25. I cut 3 holes in the sides and the top of the box, and taped the mylar over the holes, thus creating the light box. I then set up two SB800's on either side of the box, set to 1/4 manual power, and attached a PocketWizard to one of the lights. I then taped a piece of the tracing paper to the back wall of the box. The entire configuration is shown below:

I was very pleased with the results from this initial trial (See images below. Click on image for larger view). I'm going to experiment further with different colored backgrounds, with colored gels on the lights, and with pieces of polarized plastic taped on the flash heads to photograph glass art. I was impressed with how much fun this is, as you have a lot of creative control, and for a photographer, sometimes that is all that matters. Oh and watch for my stuff on eBay! It all goes up on Monday.

Enabling a Photo Website for Social Networking

2009-12-29T17:16:41-07:00

The galleries on my website, deanallman.com are now enabled for social networking. Along with the home page, visitors to the Colorado, Alaska, Fall Color, Kodiak Island Bears, Skagit Valley Tulip Festival, Grand Teton National Park, Yellowstone National Park, Fall Wine Harvest, and the Palouse photo galleries can easily share a link to a gallery on Facebook, Twitter , Digg, or share as a Delicious bookmark. In addition all galleries now show images at the same large size. This really helps the Yellowstone, Tetons, and Tulip galleries in particular, as they were displaying in much smaller sizes. I also added a few more images to the Yellowstone gallery, as it had to be completely rebuilt to accommodate the larger image size.

Initially this appeared to be a fairly simple task. All of these megasites publish the tools and guidance needed to integrate links to their sites in any website. It gets a little trickier if the links need to be customized. For instance, when a user clicks on the Twitter link, as long as they are logged into Twitter, the link will take a user to their Twitter home page and the description and URL of the sending page will populate the Twitter "What's Happening" text field. The user can accept the suggestion for the Tweet and simply click update and the Tweet is posted, or they can modify the text prior to updating.

As I have 9 galleries on the site, I didn't want to have to rewrite code all of the time to generate the links with the specific page description and URL. That makes site maintenance a headache. The solution was to write two methods that generate the links dynamically. The same methods are used everywhere on the site. They grab the page URL dynamically and I just pass them the page-title and description as parameters which are then used to generate the string that gets sent to Twitter to populate the text field.

All of that took some time to construct, as each service has their own way that they like this stuff to happen. Facebook has the simplest and most flexible, and also allows you the luxury of displaying whatever image you want in their Share link. In addition they have services that allow even greater tie-in between a website and Facebook, and I will be exploring these as I go along.

Why social networking for a photo website? They fit together like a hand and glove. There are millions of great pictures out there on the web, and getting your name out as a photographer is a primary undertaking for any photographer wishing to promote what they are doing. We started with websites, and having a portfolio of images is certainly essential if you are advertising yourself as a photographer. But how do people know they are there? We can seed meta-tags with as many keywords as possible and hope that Google will do us the honor of throwing our sites at the top of the 10,000,000 search results that they return on a query. Or, we can use the 6 degrees of separation concept to our advantage.

My friends on Facebook have friends that I don't have, and if they like the images in one of my galleries, why not allow them a feature that easily allows them to post a link to the gallery on their Facebook page? Their friends in turn can pass the link along to their other friends. It becomes a much more dynamic and direct way of generating traffic to your website. Anytime you can gather 200 million people under one roof, things start happening.

I still have to add links for the video section, and update the new slideshow feature as well, and that will happen in the next week or so. But for now this is enough to get started. Feel free to share as much as you like.

New Zealand Slideshow Online

2009-12-06T13:56:38-07:00

I've just opened up a new section on my website called Slideshows and have my first show posted, called Autumn in New Zealand. Several years ago I launched deanallman.com with but one piece of content: a downloadable slideshow of images taken during a photo workshop I attended in New Zealand in March of 2004. The workshop was put on by Denver photographer John Fielder. Once we returned to Denver we had a portfolio review session, and I put together a slideshow of images from the photoshoot for the review. It was this slideshow that I posted online.

The slideshow was a downloadable executable that you had to save to your desktop. It only ran on PCs so Mac users were excluded, and when it came time to redesign my site I decided to omit the slideshow until such time as I could post it in a format available to all users.

It turned out to be a longer wait than I had anticipated. Although I know how to develop using Flash it was going to take a lot of time to build it from scratch, so I always pushed the project to the bottom of my schedule. But recently I was viewing an episode of PhotoshopUser TV and saw an interview with a representative from ShowIt. These folks market a product that allows users to simply and easily put together slideshows and create a .swf file for posting on web servers, and suddenly the NZ project was back on.

The project also gave me a chance to go back over the original images and do some re-editing. The majority of the images were shot on Fuji Velvia 35 mm transparency film with a Nikon F100 and then scanned in using a Nikon film scanner. At the time of the workshop there was a lot of discussion on the trip about when or if people were going to switch to digital. I also brought along a Fuji S2Pro which was basically a Nikon F80 body with Fuji digital insides. I was the only one who even brought a digital camera.

Fast forward 5 years - and the world has changed dramatically. I was curious to see how well things would go when editing in Photoshop CS4, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that CS4 did a great job with the edits. It also helps that my Photoshop skills have improved, but the images came out looking a lot sharper and better detailed. The S2Pro images in particular looked a lot better. The original imports had sort of a yellowish cast, but CameraRaw did a much better job of working with the data in the Fuji RAWs, so much so that I want to go back into some of the files that I never used or worked with and see what I can get now.

I look forward to producing more slideshows now. They are a lot of fun to do, especially when you can integrate music or narration. And New Zealand is a fabulous place, so I had a great subject to work with. Enjoy!

Why There is No Nikon D700X

2009-10-17T10:39:35-06:00

For months Nikon users on Internet photo forums have speculated that Nikon would release a D700X, essentially a D3X in a D700 body. After all, the D700 itself appeared a scant 11 months after the D3. In essence the D700 is the D3, with only a few things missing (dual CF card slots, faster internal motor drive, and a viewfinder with a reduced field of view being the most notable). The D3X, at a suggested retail of 8 thou, is very expensive in relation to other Nikon camera bodies. In essence it's a D3 with a 24mp sensor. Hence, many Nikon users, myself included, have held off on purchasing a D3X, as we have been anticipating that a D700X would soon follow in the fall of 2009.

Then a few weeks back we began hearing that we would not be getting the anticipated camera. This caused a lot of puzzlement and head scratching. Why would they not do this? Nikon did release a new camera body this week, but it was not a D700X, rather it is an updated D3 (now called the D3s) with 720p HD video, a larger frame buffer, and higher ISO capabilities. The D700X was nowhere to be seen. I think that we will never see one actually. The reason has to do with marketing pure and simple, and the release of the D3s also offers some clues as to why.

First of all, when Nikon introduced the D700, they effectively cannibalized the market for the D3. The D700 has become the de facto camera of choice for serious users. Pros even like it as it is lighter and easier to pack than the D3. Slap an optional motor drive on it and you can run with anyone, including a D3, in terms of speed. There is really no compelling reason to go with the D3 over the D700, unless you are shooting hundreds of images daily for a news source and need a bit more rugged camera body. In effect, Nikon has a Lexus and a pretty damned good Toyota, and users are going with the Toyota.

So what is Nikon to do? Product cycles with cameras of this size and complexity usually run 4 years. Is Nikon to sit on the sidelines with a D3 that isn't selling for the next 2 years till a D4 comes out? I don't think so. From a product standpoint everything about the D3s screams "get me through the next 2 years please!". It now has some features that offer a bit more of a reason to go with the D3s over the D700. If you don't care about video in your SLR, then you still probably will not upgrade.

I think they also learned their lesson with the D700. Look at the market that they are targeting with the D3X - fashion and landscape photographers, and the medium format crowd. In this market arena, it is only the landscape photographers who are griping about the price. In comparison to medium format cameras, the D3X is a huge bargain, and you are seeing manufacturers such as Mamiya actually lowering their price to compete with the D3X. In fashion photography the D3X produces images that are just what the market needs, with the added advantage of a 5 fps motor drive, which completely blows away any of the medium format cameras that are at best getting 1fps. In fact, Profoto, the high end lighting equipment manufacturer, has this year had to bring out a new line of power packs that allow for faster recycling time, just to keep up with the D3X.

Now, why should Nikon introduce a camera that effectively undercuts itself with these markets? If they did do a D700X, it would most likely have a much slower motor drive, so the fashion crowd would not be interested. It might cleave off a certain segment of landscape photographers who want to print big, but how many, and for how long? My guess is that this market segment would splinter. Let's say Nikon offered the D700X for 4 thou - a 4 thousand dollar reduction from the D3X. Even there, some would buy it, some would say that is still too expensive and opt out for something like, well the D700 itself.

In short, there really is no business case solid enough for a D700X. And there won't be, until a competitor comes along with a camera that is better in terms of resolution, faster in terms of data transfer, and with an even faster motor drive. When that happens then Nikon simply reduces the price of the D3X, to bide itself time until the next generation is ready. And my guess is those are the specs for the Nikon D4X, which we will see in about 3 years. As for me, B&H is offering the D3X for $7599. I do want to print big - real big.I am already working on my sales pitch to my wife as to why I need this.

Playing for a Moment

2009-10-13T22:34:23-06:00

I am en route to Yosemite National Park for the last photo/road trip of the year. I am taking my time getting there, as there is a remnant of a typhoon from the South Pacific that is hitting the California coast. The weather guys estimate that 60-80 mph winds will be hitting the Sierra Nevadas tonight and tomorrow, so I took some extra time today to explore the Uncompaghre National Forest and the far western edge of Colorado around Nucla, Naturita, and the the Paradox Valley into eastern Utah. These are parts of the state that I have never visited, and I now know where I will be going for aspen pics next fall.

While my destination is Yosemite I don't have any preconceived notions about what I want to shoot while I am there. It is a very famous photo destination, and I know I will find something similar to what I experienced at the Maroon Bells a few weeks back: hordes of photographers.

This is just what happens these days at famous sites. They are usually very congested. I can tell you what is going on in this scene too. You'll notice most people have their cameras on tripods, which of course is essential for landscape work. They have already shot a couple of different frames, and are waiting for the sun to light up the sides of the mountains in front of us. Most are standing around chatting about equipment, places they have been, travel routes to take, etc. Oftentimes you'll hear little one-upmanship games going on: who's got the biggest, fastest, most expensive lens, Canon vs. Nikon squabbles, film vs. digital, etc. Most of this has very little to do with actually taking a picture. This kind of thing can also happen at a workshop or a photo trip with even small groups. It's probably a safe bet to say that about 1/3 of these guys will be happy with what they got, 1/3 will be happy that they were just there and mildly disappointed with their images, and 1/3 will probably be so disgusted with their results that their equipment will show up on eBay by the end of the year.

Too bad, really. The Maroon Bells are some of the most majestic mountains in the state, and for me the experience of being there is akin to being in a cathedral. As a result, when I see photog groups like this I tend to be a pretty anti-social person. I try to ignore everyone else, assess the scene, get a sense for what it feels like to be there, frame my shot mentally, setup, shoot, and get the hell out of there. I just don't want to engage in discourse that takes me out of the mood of taking the picture. If I focus on that, then I lose something. I lose being in the moment, which is a bit of a cliche, but especially with photography it is a very real truism.

When I chat with people about photography, I am often asked questions about what cameras I own or recommend, what lenses I have, how do you do various things in Photoshop, etc. That's great, and I can talk for hours with enthusiasm about every one of these subjects. Rarely does anyone ask about the psychology of taking a photograph, but to me that is just as important.

When I approach a new landscape opportunity, I like to let myself experience how it feels to be there. What are the colors, the shapes, the textures, the patterns, the movement in the scene, and how does it affect me to be in that moment. I look for where the light is coming from, how diffused or harsh it is, how warm or how cold it feels. Once I get this global impression, I will pick up the camera and look at the scene through the frame of the viewfinder. This helps to eliminate extraneous material, and as a result I will oftentimes start to see stuff in a different kind of way. I will then put the camera on a tripod, compose the shot, take care of technical considerations like f-stops, bracketing, etc., and then fire away.

As one might surmise until the end this is not a purely logical process. It actually requires me to suspend my analytical, critical side, eliminate distractions, and let myself get absorbed in the scene and play. We all know how to do this. It's what we did as children. Watch a child sometimes while they are playing with their toys. They are totally in the zone. But as we grew up we acquired the ability to give ourselves negative critiques about what we were doing. Whole fields of psychological thought have developed as a result of this phenomenon, but suffice it to say that it is harmful to the creative process.

I have found two remedies for the self-critique that can get us all blocked up internally. The first is a book that came recommended to me by my massage therapist: The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. This book is a great resource for creative types who find themselves blocked at some level. I won't go into detail here, but I found the tools that she recommends to be very helpful, especially the Morning Pages, a form of free association style journalling.

The second is more technical : macro photography. With a macro lens (one that is capable of very close focus on a particular scene) you can very easily lose your self-critical sense, as it is just so interesting to see what things look like when they are enlarged. You can focus in on details that you would otherwise miss. The image below is a water amarylis that was growing in our pond in our backyard. I'd like to say that I spotted it on my own, but my wife actually suggested I take a look at this, and as is always the case she was right. It was shot with a 200 mm macro lens, but you can use the macro feature on a common telephoto lens to accomplish the same thing. This flower and the particular light around it is gone forever now, but because I let myself play in the moment it is captured forever (well at least as long as it is saved on disk) as well. I didn't have to go halfway across the country to get a fun shot. It was literally in my own backyard.

Try this yourself the next time you go out to take pictures. Block off some time where you won't be disturbed. Take your current camera, and don't worry if it does not have the latest bells and whistles. Digital is helpful to cut down on expense, but film is fine. Find a quiet place where you can study in detail all that is around you. Look for light and shadows, shapes and textures, curves and lines. Concentrate on what it feels like to be there. Then start composing through the viewfinder and start shooting. Try and frame one subject in a variety of ways. You may find that your 3rd or 4th take on the same subject is more interesting that your first pass. Take a break from that subject, try another, then go back to the original subject and see if you experience it in a new way. Remember, it is all good, there are no absolutes. If you want to share them, feel free to send. But you don't have to. You don't have to do anything really, except that you allow yourself the luxury of playing, if just for a moment.

Colorado Gallery Now Online

2009-10-09T17:42:51-06:00

You are looking at the Maroon Bells near Aspen, Colorado. This is probably the most photographed mountain range in the state, and until now, I never had a photo of the "Deadly Bells" in my portfolio. I am not sure why, really. They are very easy to get to. You just drive to Aspen and take Maroon Creek Road for about 7 1/2 miles, and you are there. In the summer time access is controlled to the Maroon Bells, so you have to catch a shuttle bus at Ruby Park in Aspen from 8:30 AM till 5:00 PM. But you can drive up yourself in the fall. The visitor's area is well maintained by the National Park Service, and there are several great trails that you can hike around on for spectacular views of the scenery. I have posted this image and 18 others from my recent trip through Colorado to photograph fall aspen on my website at: http://www.deanallman.com/Galleries/Colorado/colorado.aspx

This image is actually a composite of two images. No, it is not processed with HDR (High Dynamic Range) software. All I did was mount the camera on a tripod and bracket 9 separate exposures. I then selected a base exposure where the lake and the mountain on the right and left side of the photograph were properly exposed. The mountains themselves and the sky were over-exposed in this frame. I then selected a second image where the mountains and sky were properly exposed, and brought this image into Photoshop via Camera RAW as well. I then selected this image, and with the shift key pressed, dragged it onto the first image and dropped it into the frame. Because I had the shift key pressed, Photoshop lined it up with perfect registration as a second image layer. I then created a layer mask, and filled the mask with the color black. This effectively made the second layer transparent. I then selected the brush tool and the layer mask, and changed the palette color to white. This allowed me to then selectively paint on the image mask to reveal the second layer wherever I felt necessary.

I like HDR software, and in fact I have a set of images of the Crystal River Mill (another frequently photographed Colorado location) that I will use HDR software on. But I did not use it on this image for two reasons: (1) The exposure range was more than adequately addressed with just two exposures, so the painting method in Photoshop that I described above could easily be used with only about 40 minutes worth of work, and (2) I want to use a 64-bit version of the HDR software, and I will not have that available until after I convert my current workstation to the 64-bit version of Windows 7 in the next month or so. Why 64-bit? Better RAM access. A 64-bit operating system can address gobs of RAM, so doing things like large panoramas and layer-heavy HDR shots does not tax system resources as happens with 32-bit operating systems.

The rest of the gallery contains shots from around Colorado this fall. I had a great time taking forest service access roads and climbing mountain passes in my Jeep (such as Hagerman Pass). I have lived here 32 years now, and it always amazes me that there are new places to explore. I was also blessed with some funky weather, including our first snow of the season, which added another element to the photographs and made them a bit more interesting. I am going to leave this gallery as an open portfolio, and add images as time goes along. I used to wonder how I could offer something in a unique way that so many other photographers have captured, but I realized on this trip that nature is so dynamic that the opportunities for new images are endless here. I look forward to further trips into the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

I didn't get to use video on this trip, as I didn't have the tools I needed to properly set up the Steadicam Merlin, but I will address that issue on my next trip, which will begin on Monday when I leave for Yosemite National Park. It's another place here in the west I have never visited. I am also not sure why on that one either. The recent Ken Burns series on PBS has me inspired though, and I look forward to seeing what Ansel saw. Ansel, and a million other photographers :-).

Searching for Aspen

2009-09-13T21:44:41-06:00

Summer seems to still be with us, but the beginnings of fall are certainly being felt in the Rocky Mountains here in Colorado, and that means that the aspen trees have started to turn. A fabulous display of yellow and green awaits, and I am anxious to get up into the mountains and start photographing. I'll spend Monday through Thursday this week around the Vail area. This coming weekend my wife and I will take a 3 day weekend based in Carbondale (near Aspen). I'll bring her back home on Sunday night, then turn around and come back up Monday AM and head towards Winter Park and Steamboat Springs. Along the way I will find what I am looking for, and then I will find what I am not looking for, too. Part of the fun of these trips is discovering stuff along the way.

I'm taking with me a couple of items that should make the journey interesting and productive. First off is a copy of the excellent John Fielder's Best of Colorado. John is a celebrated landscape photographer who has specialized in our lovely state. Not only has he taken countless gorgeous photographs of Colorado, he has also explored virtually every corner of the state and his book is so comprehensive that it is indispensable for any photographer interested in capturing the best that Colorado has to offer. I had the good fortune of attending two of John's workshops, one here on Colorado wildflowers in Crested Butte, and one in New Zealand. Both of those experiences were outstanding and very helpful in developing and refining my skills in landscape work.

I'm also taking video a little more seriously on this trip. I have been impressed, and sometimes pretty astounded, by the quality this little Canon HG10 is capable of capturing. But it is so small that camera shake is all but inevitable when I am handholding the camera, which shows in the final product. Some of this is to be expected with handheld, and people have simply gotten used to it when they view it. But I decided to opt for an image stabilization system and will be using the Steadicam Merlin for the first time. I think this will add more professional polish to the video, and, well. presentation is everything.

I'm also taking my bike with me and plan on riding when I am not shooting. Getting off the road and back on bike trails is a great way to see sites that I'd never get to see. For instance, there is a bike path that runs along the Roaring Fork river between Aspen and Carbondale (and it actually goes as far as Glenwood Springs). It is fun to get off the road in my Jeep and travel forest service access roads to find new sites, but sometimes the bike paths do just as good a job. I'll just have to figure out how to lash my tripod to the rack on the back of the bike, but that is why God made bungee cords.

So with all of that, and an iPod packed with a lot of music and lots of NPR stuff, I should have an exciting and hopefully fulfilling couple of weeks here. Aspen trees can be tricky to photograph. You want to stop down to capture a lot of detail in the image, but you also want to shoot at a fairly fast shutter speed. The reason they call them quaking aspen is that, well, they quake in the slightest of breezes, and if you shoot at too slow a speed the leaves all kind of blur together and you get yellow blobby aspen, and that just ain't too cool. So I'll play with all sorts of techniques and see what I get. I'll post the best in a new gallery on my site and will update the blog along the way.