I made this image exactly 1 minute and 10 seconds before I made the Doggie Bliss image that I shared yesterday.  Not a bad “hit” rate for just a few minutes of walking around my back-back yard.  While it is pretty much impossible to tell from the image, these geese, at least I think they are geese, are heading south to a pond on a neighbors property where they pretty much live.

When I first imported this image I thought it was a nice silhouette of the birds, but after looking at it a little more it was clear that there was actually a good amount of detail in the birds, especially along the trailing edges of their wings and along the far side of their breasts.  That alone made this image a winner for me.  I regularly ask you to click through for the larger version and I am going to ask again for you to view this one on the largest your screen will allow, it really helps bring the detail out.

I will admit though, this image really is unlike pretty much anything I would normally go out looking to shoot, and was caught more “on the fly” while out grabbing shots of my dog.  I am so glad that I decided to aim the camera at the sky.  As for processing, this is pretty much out of camera with the exception of upping the contrast in the sky to help pull some detail out of the clouds and adding a fairly heavy vignette.

The post Heading South appeared first on Scott Wood Photography.

I can honestly say that I had no intention of going 11 days between posts here, and while Ursa might be in doggie bliss in this image, I have been absolutely hammered with both the day job and life in general.  I actually came very close to putting this over on my non-photo blog, but I liked the image so much I wanted to share it here.

The weather has been very nice over the last week or so and we have been spending a good deal of time doing yard work, and when you have a 2 acre yard, that can become quite a chore. :-)

This image was captured when we were getting a bunch of brush piled up.  We found a couple long since forgotten Ursa toys in the tall grass and the rest is history as they say.  For the record, the grass isn’t tall any longer. :-)

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The post The 2013 Olympia Procession of the Species appeared first on Scott Wood Photography.

In my very humble opinion, the poor dandelion really has an unfair reputation.  Somewhere along the line it was declared a weed which I think is really unfair.  When it is in full bloom you will not find a more magnificent yellow color in nature, of course it doesn’t hurt that yellow is my favorite color, and when it goes to seed, it really is a marvel to behold.  It almost looks like an engineered dome.  But sadly, it has been declared a weed which means that countless people go out of their way to kill each and every one that they see.

When I came across this specimen in my back yard yesterday I had to grab a camera and a macro lens.  I also thought it would be a great subject to hone my focus stacking skills on, and after 11 shots at different focal points, this image is the final result.  I don’t normally do square crops, but in this case it seems to work for me.

Oh yeah, if you think I am the only one who loves the dandelion, I thought I would share this image from the recent Procession of the Species during the 2013 Olympia Spring Arts Walk.

Speaking of the Procession of the Species, I have quite a few images in my events gallery and will be sharing more of them here on the blog very soon.

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I currently use Lightroom for 100% of the images I create.  For my conventional photography I use Photoshop about 10% of the time, but for my IR work I use Photoshop 100% of the time.  I also use an older version of Premier Elements for some of my time lapse videos.  When you factor in the cost of upgrading Lightroom and Photoshop when new versions come out, the Creative Cloud might not make much sense, but when you factor in the ability to now use Premier Pro, that changes the game for me.  I think it would for a lot of people, but I sort of question if it is actually a matter of cost that has a lot of photographers upset about all of this?

It is probably no secret, but Photoshop is one of the most pirated pieces of software out there.  One of the reasons for this is that Adobe charges, IMO, way to much for it.  It seems to me that one of the reasons for Adobe to make this bold of a move is to actually crack down on the number of “illegal” copies of Photoshop, and other Creative Suite products that are floating around out there, and if that is indeed the reason, it is hard for me to fault them for that.  I have always found it very ironic that certain photographers will get upset if one of their copyright is violated for an image that was processed with pirated software.

As I said, the Creative Cloud makes sense for me, and I have been planning on subscribing anyway, but who knows what the future holds.  In a perfect world Adobe will come up with some sort of “ala carte” pricing module where you can select 2 or 3 products of your choice, but as I said, that would be in a perfect world.

The post My take on the Adobe Creative Cloud announcement appeared first on Scott Wood Photography.

Why do I suspect that there are some readers of my blog who don’t actually know what a postcard is?  At the very least I am sure that there are a good number of people who have most likely never sent or received a postcard.  When I was young, postcards were a pretty big deal and if you had family members travelling anywhere you would expect to get postcards from each and every stop of their travels.  When I made this image of Seattle on Saturday the very first thing I thought after I imported it was that it looked like it could have been on one of those postcards of my youth.

I actually captured this image while I was shooting a time lapse sequence of Elliot Bay and the Seattle waterfront.  I will be sharing that time lapse video here soon, as well as more pictures from the recent Olympia Arts Walk.

I hope you enjoy this image, and as always please click on it to see a larger version.

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I suspect that you have heard of Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain in England, but did you know that there is a Stonehenge along the Columbia River in Washington State?  Granted, the one in Washington is not as old as the one in England, but according to the information available at the site it is the same size and dimension as the one in England.

While the one in Washington is not sitting on a plain, I suspect that with it’s views of the Columbia River and Mt. Hood in the distance, the one in Washington far surpasses the one in England when it comes to view of the surrounding landscape, but since I haven’t been to England I am making an assumption on that.  This image, captured with one of my IR converted camera is the view from Washington’s Stonehenge looking west along the Columbia River.  If you are curious about the stonehenge itself, I did make a 360 pano with my iPhone while visiting.

The post Washington’s Stonehenge near Maryhill appeared first on Scott Wood Photography.

I have never been a big fan of magicians, I don’t have anything against magicians, I just don’t typically find them all that entertaining after just a few minutes.  Jugglers on the other hand are an entirely different thing, I love jugglers, and One Fine Fool, is no exception.  We discovered One Fine Fool, aka. Jules McEvoy, during the recent 2013 Spring Arts Walk in downtown Olympia.  It was without a doubt the biggest crowd we saw for any of the street performances and it was a well earned crowd.

I grabbed a few images from the show that I will be sharing here.  I also must apologize for the irregular posts as of late, I am on the road for work and haven’t had a lot of time for blog posts or photo processing.  I still have a huge backlog of images from the Arts Walk and the Procession of the Species to process and share.

I hope you enjoy these images half as much as I enjoyed the show.

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This was a very busy weekend in Olympia.  Not only was it the 2013 Spring Arts Walk and Procession of the Species, but it was also the 2013 Dragon Boat Festival.  This even is held at the Port Plaza in downtown Olympia and the main attraction is the day long dragon boat races.

To be honest, we didn’t stay at with the dragon boats all that long, while the races are fun, they are not really the most photogenic event when you don’t have your 500mm lens with you.  We wandered around a bit and for me the real treat was being able to get some shots of a dragon boat that wasn’t being used for the races.  I loved the vibrant colors and the very detailed carving.  This image is a shot of the head of that boat.

Given the amount of event shooting I did this weekend, and that Olympia has a number of events from spring to fall, I thought it might be a good idea to create a new events gallery on my photo gallery site.  Clicking on this image will take you there.  So far I don’t have a lot uploaded, but there will be more coming in the next couple weeks.  I am heading to Boise for work this week, and while I have some images ready for blog posts while I am on the road, I won’t be able to process more until I get home next weekend.

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I made the jump to serious digital photography in the summer of 2007.  Prior to that I had played around with various digital point and shoot cameras that I always carried around for snapshots, but all my serious work was still done with film.  My first dslr, a Nikon D40, while a very consumer type camera, really sold me on serious digital photography. At that time I didn’t want to invest a larger amount of money into a dslr until I knew that the whole digital thing was going to work for me.  I used that D40 for about 8 months before upgrading to the Nikon D200.

I ended up selling my D40 to help pay for the D200, and even though I still regret that sale, perhaps I will blog about that someday, I absolutely loved the D200.  Up until that point it was the best camera I had ever owned.  I don’t base that statement on image quality alone, I base it on a number of things such as build quality, how it feels in my hands and how it generally is to use.  In many respects it is a very subjective thing.  I used that D200 as my primary camera for a really long time, it is the camera that I shot my now famous haboob time lapse video with, I have sold a lot of prints of images made  with that camera, and I have had images licensed for publications around the world.  In short, some of my most popular work has been captured with that D200. It should come as no surprise that I had developed a bit of an emotional tie to that camera.

In the fall of 2011 it became clear that I needed to add another camera to the lineup so I picked up a Nikon D7000.  The D7000 became my primary body and the D200 became a combo backup / time lapse video camera.  I shot with that lineup until December of 2012 when I picked up a new Nikon D600 and moved the D7000 to the backup / time lapse video role.  The new lineup sort of pushed my old D200 out of the camera bag and into my gear storage locker.  That is until I shipped her off to LifePixel for a Deep B&W IR conversion.

I already had a D200 with a “Super Color IR” conversion from LifePixel and prior to that I had an IR converted Nikon D70s.  IR photography had become a pretty serious part of my photographic life.  Having the old D200 converted and added to the line up really has given the old girl a whole new life.  No longer is she relegated to sitting in my safe “collecting dust.”  She is now half of an IR dedicated camera bag, and is back to being considered a primary shooter, truth be told, I consider both of my IR converted bodies as primary shooters. As the title of this posts says, it have a whole new life to an old friend.

Finally, a little about the image above, I captured it with my old friend this weekend at a park in Olympia, and for those that are wondering about the difference between the “Deep B&W” and the “Super Color” IR cameras, stay tuned, I am working on a screencast and blog post to give side by side comparisons.

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