Downstream from Snoqualmie Falls is a whole other ball game than the actual waterfall itself; the water flows pretty strongly but it’s nowhere near the strength it is up at the falls. Back in January I visited the falls on a somewhat-not-wet winter’s day and was able to capture some images of the falls as well as this image from the surrounding area, just downstream east of Fall City, WA.

I don’t often post any high-key-style B&W images but figured this would be a perfect subject to shoot for this style. While following the river downstream, I spotted the trees sticking up out of the river on the other side of the river that looked reasonably accessible. It took some wrangling with a GPS unit but I eventually made it over to the other side and down onto the riverbed to setup shop.

I don’t often post EXIF info, but the key ingredients to this shot are 195mm, f/11, ISO 200, 30.0 seconds. The use of a 10 stop ND filter here was key to blur the motion of the water and catch the reflections of the tree trunks. The rest of the post-processing was done in Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 to accentuate the blacks and whites, add some structure, and the image border.

Back in January we saw some pretty spectacular sunrises here in Seattle. While it was fairly enticing to shoot the whole skyline I couldn’t resist a photograph of Mt. Rainier. It’s such a rare morning to have the combination of clear skies, sunrise, and amazing clouds that I was literally scrambling to capture the images that I wanted in the roughly 15 to 20 minutes of golden hour during sunrise. While I wanted to make sure I got the photograph I’d been chasing for a long time (of the skyline and the mountain at sunrise) I also had to make sure there was time to catch this particular photograph of the mountain.

It’s hard to imagine but there really isn’t just a bad way to view this mountain. It dominates the Seattle skyline. In winter or in summer when visible, it’s simply a sight that takes your breath away.

John Batdorff

I’m not quite sure what to say to introduce the author of today’s post, other than to say that I hope my homage from yesterday is enough to do both him and his photography justice. I’ve wondered at and continually attempted to perfect what makes a great black and white photograph, and while I’ll forever continue to be a student of the genre I will always respect the work of John Batdorff, the current contributor to my Your Story series.

I had the privilege of meeting John last September, albeit briefly, in Las Vegas at Photoshop World where we discussed his book on black and white photography. I’ve always been intrigued at what makes a great black and white photograph and why some photographers choose to process their work in black and white. I think of John as an industry leader in this form of photography not because he’s written a book on the medium (which is by no means any small feat) but because his passion for photography so visibly emnates from his words and his personality.

I invite you all to spend the time today to read John’s story — to read about why John is a photographer and what it means to him. I think you’ll all agree that the images of his you see on my site today are quite compelling. It’s truly an honour and a privilege to have him contribute to this series… Thank you, John.

You can follow John on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ as well as keep up with his latest work and projects on his website.

I want to start off by thanking Jacob for inviting me to the party; it would appear that I’m in pretty good company. I met Jacob this last year at Photoshop World while I was promoting my new book, Black and White: From Snapshots to Great Shots, and we hit it off right away. Jacob’s a great photographer, and most importantly a very sincere guy, so I’m going behave like any good party guest would: grab the best seat, eat the last cookie, and only talk about myself.

I grew up in Northern Michigan during the 70’s which was synonymous with fishing, hunting, playing sports, and getting in trouble. Truth is, back in the day I would have probably received more fanfare for catching a 20 inch Brown Trout on my fly rod than for taking an award winning image with my camera. However, my parents’ passion for photography eventually pointed me in another direction. My mother was a natural with the camera and had a way of connecting with people that was simply magical. Her ability to extract a sincere emotion and capture it within the frame was a gift that has taken me years to understand.

Both of my parents were working journalists for our small-town family-owned newspaper. I guess in some ways you can say ink runs through our veins. My father worked as the publisher while my mother worked as a staff photographer. Countless evenings were spent listening to the police scanner, and on occasion (if we were lucky) there would be action. Mom would yell, “Grab your coats kids, there’s a barn fire on 16 mile road and I need to get pictures for tomorrow’s paper.” Like many late breaking news stories, the images and the cut line were the story, so in the eyes of my sisters and me, my mother had one of the most important jobs at the paper. Times have changed significantly, but my natural curiosity for photography was born in the back of an old woody station wagon chasing police cars from one adventure to the next.

I think like many photographers I’ve spent most my life with a camera in tow. While I never attended photography school or spent countless hours memorizing the inverse-square law, I have dedicated myself (obnoxiously by some accounts) to the pursuit of recording and creating images.

The trick throughout the years has been learning to find my own way. Every photographer leaves a fingerprint on their image and some of the best photographers leave a mountain of evidence while never distracting from the quality of the message. Many of us in the trade call this “personal style,” but I tend to think of it as insight into a photographer’s soul. As a photographer, it has taken me years to learn to be vulnerable and to worry less about what others think and more about creating images that are sincere and true to my vision. It’s within those moments of truth that I capture some of my favorite shots. I’ve learned that relating on a sincere level has opened far more doors than it has shut, and it’s my hope that my images reflect that feeling.

Finally, life is short; do yourself a favor and break a rule here and there–take a day off, skip school (I know I did plenty), and most importantly make time for your art. I know it might sound selfish, but making time to connect with your photography can be every bit as important as time spent nurturing any other important relationships in your life.  And above all, remember to have fun!

All images in this post are owned by John Batdorff and reproduced here with his permission.

Do you have an interesting photography story? I want to talk to you! I’m looking for contributors for the series who want to share their passion for photography with the world. Click on the “Contact” link at the top of this page and shoot me an email!

I’ve processed this image last week; one of the first few images that I processed upon returning from Australia. I waited to post it because I wanted to post it as a prelude to tomorrow’s Your Story post whose author will be revealed tomorrow. While I’m not revealing the author today, I waited to post this image as some form of homage to them. Read into that whatever you will. So, with that in mind… behold! The Sydney Harbour Bridge!

This photo was fairly difficult to take at first glance. The path was littered with tourists taking their own photographs of the bridge, people getting married have wedding photos taken, or just people out for a Sunday stroll. Did I clone them all out? Heavens no. I found my frame and composition and then I waited…. not for everyone to walk out of my frame, but for 30 seconds of exposure time thanks to my LEE Big Stopper. Several iterations of this left me with either a clear lawn, path, and/or harbour. Perfect Photo Suite and layer masking thanks to onOne Software did the rest! All the people moving through the frame were blurred out and when they weren’t in one layer, they were in another so some very quick and easy masking made it very easy to achieve an empty frame here.

The long exposures also captured some of the motion of the low clouds in the sky too, giving me three different degrees of leading lines helping to draw the viewer’s eye. I processed it in black and white to accentuate the lines and emphasise the ominous and dramatic bridge that dominates the harbour.

I took this particular image a few months ago towards the tail end of summer (anyone else get the feeling I’m trying to will summer back? Yeah? Sweet.). This shot was actually taken with a 400mm lens from the 12th ave bridge in Seattle, looking out into Puget Sound.

I had the privilege of borrowing this 400mm lens from a friend for a couple of months and I’ve got to say I really enjoyed shooting with it. The focal length was a challenge at first but once I began to get a feel for “picking off” subjects from a distance, it became something I was able to visualise and photograph.

What you see here is the roof of a football stadium and the ferries crossing Puget Sound… from around a couple of miles away

I took the opportunity while I was in Perth in the middle of last month to record a couple of timelapses. This isn’t the world’s greatest timelapse by any stretch (iMovie can’t do slide transitions less than 0.1s apart… sad) but hey, I’m not looking to win an oscar with this thing

I was fairly surprised when what I thought was going to be a cool sunset turned into a fairly hefty summer rain storm. There’s a cut from the video above if you want to get a feel for what I’m talking about. If you want to see the real deal, spend the next 90 or so seconds watching this YouTube clip below.

Timelapses are a great way to spend an evening. While I was shooting this, I was sitting down next to my camera with my family just chilling out, enjoying a bottle of red wine and watching the weather roll in. It was a perfect evening.

The Sydney Opera House was high on my list of places to photograph when I visited Sydney at the end of last month, not because of its iconic status but because I was itching to put my own spin on it. It’s got to be one of the most photographed buildings in Australia and that means finding an original photograph of it has to be difficult, right? Maybe. I can’t say for sure because, well, I didn’t hunt down the images of the building before I went there. I wanted a fresh perspective. A fresh perspective that would force me to think outside the box after getting the classic shot.

Maybe one day soon I’ll do a google image search for the opera house and see what comes up. Maybe there are tons of photos just like this one out there, I don’t know. What I do know is that even if this photograph isn’t visually unique on the Internet, the motive behind it certainly is – it comes from how a performance I’d just seen inside the same structure made me feel. I attended a matinee performance inside the opera house and it left me simply speechless. I know next to nothing about opera but I left in awe of what I’d just seen. The acoustics inside the main theatre mean that the performers don’t need microphones and what’s left is nothing but the raw power of the human voice.

Late last year when I saw Annie Leibovitz read from her latest book here in Seattle she spoke about Ansel Adams briefly and one quote of his that she mentioned really stuck in my head, so much so that I wrote it down in the split second that she finished speaking it.

The subject was not the way it appeared but the way it felt.

That’s what makes this image unique to me. I understood it when Annie was reading it but when I saw this image and photographed is when it truly meant something to me. The patterns, the lines, the building, the history, the performances, bursting from the light so powerfully… just like those voices, just like those performers, just like how it felt to be there.

I’ve just returned from a two point something week long trip to Australia and upon my return I’ve been greeted with the most perfect Seattle winter weather. It’s crisp and wonderfully sunny and warm for this time of year. I expected to leave the hot, summery weather of Australia to find myself in the middle of an overcast grey sky. It’s most certainly and suprisingly not the case and as such, I’ve been inspired to post a panorama that I’ve been working on lately.

I’ve recently bought a panorama kit to match my Really Right Stuff tripod. The kit comprises a bunch of different components to allow me to shoot panoramas with wide-angle lenses or telephoto lenses with those little “feet” and also at the same, removing any distortion introduced by the panoramic photography process. The distortion occurs because of a couple of reasons but put simply, as the viewpoint moves from left to right, objects in the frame further away from the camera relative to those closer to the camera appear to move slower, and distortion is introduced. The kit allows you to offset the camera back off the axis of rotation to prevent distortion evident in panoramas introduced by an effect called parallax.

Here’s the panorama at a higher resolution size than the lightbox above. You can mouseover the image to move it left and right to see all the different parts of it.

The RRS panoramic gear that I used to create this image can be found on their site very easily. For my purposes, my kit includes:

• PCL-1 Panning Clamp
• Dovetail Adapter
• 192 Precision Plus Package

Nicole Young was also along with me on this shoot and while I was prepping my shot with the new RRS gear, she snapped this photo of me getting everything ready and perfectly aligned to be sure there wasn’t any parallax. Thanks for the photo, Nic!

Photo by Nicole S. Young

Want to learn more about posting panoramas? I’ve posted a tutorial on exactly that topic right here.

This is Trigg Beach off the coast of Western Australia, just north of Perth. I spent many a weekend at this beach and at many other beaches along this coastline growing up and it was a real pleasure to return to the coast here and photograph the ocean lapping the shore as the sun set.

I scouted this particular location from Google Maps before I returned to Perth over the last week. I knew exactly what time the sun was going to set and how far ahead of it I needed to be to capture this shot. From this location there are many different scenes you could capture – beautiful sunsets, crashing waves, tide pools, and so on. I ended up opting to go wide on this and capture a wave crashing over a rock, with the coastline framing it. Overall it encompasses the sheer beauty of the WA coastline and many memories from my time spent growing up there.

As usual, the wallpaper is available for download at 1280 X 800 or 2560 X 1600. Enjoy!

I owe this shot to my friend and shooting buddy, Rod Hoekstra. We spent one day of a weekend the other week shooting up around Snoqualmie Falls and after we got done with the falls, spent some time driving through nearby townships that ran along the river. Being the driver, it was very hard for me to actually notice spots to stop and shoot. Rod saw this particular view from the car as we drove up along the river chasing another particular location. We made a point to stop and shoot it on the way back.

It was pretty random to see what looked to be an abandoned wooden cabin in the middle of this forest, stricken by winter. It looked so alone amongst all the trees without their leaves and reminded me of a scene from possibly dozens of movies I’ve seen over the years in a similar setting to this. To complement this feeling, I opted for a dark, contrasty feel in post to help tell this story that I can’t quite put my finger on.

Thanks for spotting this, Rod. It was a great way to cap off a fun day’s shooting.

This is one of those images that has eluded me for the longest time. A sunrise from this particular vantage point, with an interesting sky, Mt. Rainier in the background of the city skyline with the Space Needle… the shot really has it all. For some reason though, every time I’ve come up here for sunrise, one of those elements has been missing.

In the summertime it can be too hazy to see the mountain. Sunrise is also very early so actually making it out to shoot sunrise is a challenge in and of itself. In the winter, the sun rises much later in the morning so it’s far more acceptable an hour to wake up and get out and comfortably shoot. That said… it’s winter. You don’t often get a clear sky. In the last week, there was consistently somewhat clear nights so I chanced it on a couple of days and went out to shoot.

The image here came from the first of two days… the second I’ll be posting at some point here in the not-too-distant future. I couldn’t be happier that I’d finally been able to experience such a view come to fruition. It feels pretty good to stick at chasing a vantage point long enough and have it actually pan out. For all the sunrises I’ve woken to inopportune views, this makes it all worth it.

Ahhhh the warmth of summertime. This is the time of year where I start to get fed up with the cold weather and start to really wish for the heat of the summer sun. I can’t find it outside in Seattle right now… so photographs have to suffice.

I took this over the summer of 2011 in Mt. Rainier National Park. I was in the park to shoot sunset and found myself there about forty-five minutes early. I wasn’t just going to sit in the car and let this gorgeous day go to waste… so I went for a walk and started shooting. I crossed into a field off the road where these tall wildflowers (or weeds? I’m not sure what they are exactly) were glowing in the light of the setting sun. It was so small a thing, but I’d really never seen anything like it. It made me really feel the warmth of the light. I had to shoot it.

I opened right up to f/2.8 for this shot, and metered off the plants to catch the glow. The point of focus is somewhere around about the middle of the frame, but at f/2.8 there’s a wide enough depth of field to blur out the surroundings and catch some sweet bokeh and blurred sunlight.

A little over twelve months ago I spent some time in a town called Peterborough, about 2 hours north of London. The town was rather small and right in the middle of it stood a cathedral from the middle ages. It took a little while for me to come to grips with just how old that made this cathedral. I knew that I had to photograph it – at least from the outside.

Upon entering, I met with a caretaker who said for a small donation I could take photographs inside. Awesome! As I walked through the building, I encountered a lectern with an open bible, set amongst an area for a choir to sit and sing from. The lectern was in the shape of an eagle, pointed straight down the hallway through the middle of the church.

I knew I had to photograph this in some way, though I struggled with how to bring it all together. Isolating the lectern just wasn’t working so I threw on the fisheye. I had my shot. The entire hall began to encircle the eagle-shaped lectern with the open bible, framing my subject perfectly.

The image above is my original tonemapped (from 7 brackets) and unprocessed image. To get the final look, I took this image into Perfect Photo Suite from onOne Software. To achieve the effect, I processed the lectern and the background separately. I wanted to bring out the gold in the eagle, so by masking that out of the background it became its own layer. I could then process that independently of the background to accentuate the gold. Subsequently, I could then process that same background without impacting the lectern to bring out almost a gothic feel.

The Perfect Layers / Perfect Effects combination from onOne’s Photo Suite is very powerful. There’s a somewhat steep learning curve, but once you figure it out the abilities you have when processing your images are endless. It’s quite a powerful editing tool. You can download a free 30-day trial of the suite from the banner link below. If you decide you would like to purchase, use code JFLPHOTO for a 10% discount!

My first post of a photo from 2012 from my first shoot of 2012 taken from my first real outing with my new 70-200mm lens. Ahhh. That’s a lot of firsts. I’ve wanted to shoot a moody scene out at Snoqualmie Falls near Seattle for a long time. It’s not that far out of town really, about forty-five minutes drive. The catch is not really knowing what to expect from the weather. So, on a whim… I got together with fellow shooting buddy, Rod Hoekstra, and headed for the mountains and the falls.

A mild winter’s day in Seattle turned into a blustery, misty setting at the falls which made shooting somewhat difficult. The wind would carry the mist right into the front of the lens. This made long exposure shots, like this one, very difficult. Patience rewards you of course… it was a matter of waiting for the wind to dissipate briefly, clean the front of the lens, and shoot.

It’s very easy to get distracted by the vastness and sheer size of these falls. They’re actually fairly massive and are accentuated by giant cliffs on either side. Temptation would have you try to fit it all into the frame but I wanted to do something different (after I got that shot… ). I decided to focus on highlighting the sheer power of the falls themselves. By using the telephoto lens, it compressed the rocks and the water flowing over the edge all into the frame. I found an aesthetically pleasing orientation around the water and rock formations… and then I had my shot. I opted for the B&W processing to highlight the rocks at the top and the mist at the bottom, forged together by the power of the falling water.

2012 is here and Seattle welcomed her in the front door with quite the fireworks display last night. Before the show went off, I posted an image to my G+ feed that I mocked up with an empty sky and the G+ creative editing kit.

I’m stoked to be able to share a triptych right here on my blog of the real thing, as photographed by yours truly during last night’s festivities.

Happy New Year!!!