09-12-12 Join Me For A Photo Walk

17,392 people have signed up to be part of the 5th annual Worldwide Photo Walk. Why not be 17,393? This is the first such photo walk in Watertown and I'll be your leader. What is a photo walk, you ask? Well, photography enthusiasts, from pros to little children meet and are lead to various photogenic sites by someone who is also a photography enthusiast (me).Our goal is to take some photos, have some fun and learn a little. And there are prizes for the best photos from around the world. Check out the Photo Walk web site.Then go to the Watertown Worldwide Photo Walk site and sign up. It's free and painless!

09-03-12 25,600

This photo is ugly in many ways. It lacks contrast, it's subject is less than perfect and it is more than a little grainy. But consider this: it was shot with my Canon 5D III at its highest "normal"* ISO setting of 25,600. It was so dark where I took this, I couldn't read the writings on the buttons on the camera. I grew up in a photographic world where 400 was considered a "high speed" film. The 5D III's sensor is 64 times more sensitive than that!When I bought my Canon 5D several years ago, I told my wife that I would never need another digital camera. It was a beautiful, high resolution camera. But then I learned that one thing that improves with each upgrade of the DSLR is it's ability to take better and better photos in lower and lower light. So when the 5D II was released, you know what happened. And now I have the 5D III, which is a beautiful high resolution camera. Maybe this one is the last camera I'll ever need?*There is an extended setting that allows for 102,400 ISO, but I'm not brave enough to try that.Canon 5D III 1/13s f/4.0 ISO25600 102mm

08-28-12 The Art of Seeing

So here's a variation on my themes from yesterday: spider webs and seeing. And here's a quote that every photographer should keep in mind:

"Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others."Jonathan Swift

Canon 5DIII 1/160s f/4.0 ISO200 100mm

08-26-12 Golden (As seen at the Arrow Education Foundation Fund Raiser)

I'm no expert on sunflowers but it seems to me that they go from coming out of the ground to full flower in a fairly short time. And, sadly, they go from full flower to drooping to done in a short time, too.This field is east of Pierre, which doesn't narrow things down much since there are several sunflower fields east of Pierre. We were heading to Lake Oahe, Deb was driving and, after watching several fields go by my window, I said, "Stop. I've got to take some photos."The challenge with photographing sunflowers is something like the challenge of photographing a public building such as the Berlin Hauptbahnhof mentioned yesterday: how do you get a unique picture of something that so many others have photographed? (I just did a Google search for "sunflower pictures" and got 19,000,000 hits!).For better or for worse, this photo is my attempt at something a little different.Canon 5DIII 1/2000s f/2.8 ISO100 35mm[maxbutton id="8"]

08-20-12 Glamorous Grain

Some of you remember Tri-X Pan black and white film. It was made by Kodak and was a standard "high speed" film with an ISO of 400. That meant that you could shoot in relatively low light with this film. The down side was that you got quite a bit of grain.I can remember that when digital DSLRs hit the market, some photographers bemoaned the fact that digital photos were so smooth - there was no grain. That prompted software companies to make filters that added grain. It was an artistic effect but it also soothed the jangled nerves of photographers who were raised on film.I never missed grain, though I did play with the filters in software from time to time. This photo is evidence of that. It was shot with my 1D II, a camera that led the market at the time and which produced pretty smooth photos at ISO 100, which is what this studio photo was shot with.It occurs to me as I head back into the classroom tomorrow to meet a new group of photography candidates that much of what I've talked about in this post will be foreign to them. But so are phones with cords and movies on cassette tapes. The times, they are a changing, as Dylan says. Or was that Ecclesiastes?Canon 1DII 1/250s f/8.0 ISO100 40mm

08-17-12 What Do You See?

I don't know about you, but I have never looked closely at a human eye before I edited this photo. The eye you're looking at belongs to Tiffany, one of my Photo/Media students at Lake Area Technical Institute, and she was a good sport when I spontaneously told her I wanted to photograph her eyes. We went up to an area in our school that has great northern light and I took several photos.I'm not sure if a viewer would find this photo fascinating or a bit unsettling. If it's unsettling, I can tell you that it shouldn't be because Tiffany wouldn't unsettle you: she is a beautiful person, with a beautiful personality. And she has beautiful eyes.Sorry for the deep thoughts here but I think close-ups of body parts, like a single human eye, are striking because we don't tend to look so closely at them. In fact, if someone stares at us too long, we often look away. Further, an eye is in the realm of people like optometrists, not teachers, friends and acquaintances. And beyond that, it is only part of a whole that we call our bodies. I believe we are less our bodies than we are our experiences. Our bodies are like suitcases (Samsonite? Luis Vuitton?) in to which we pack our true selves.That aside, today I am showing you Tiffany's eye and asking you "What do you see?" In my case, to quote the famous discoverer Howard Carter, I see "wonderful things". . . .Canon 5DII 1/60s f/4.0 ISO200 100mm

08-14-12 Hand County, South Dakota

This is another HDR (high dynamic range) photo that is actually a combination of two photos. I'm not sure I like the dramatic "rays" that seem to be streaming to the ground from the clouds because I didn't see them when I took the photo. And they look a little unreal.But they are real. The HDR process only enhances and demonstrates what the camera "sees." As I was looking at this photo, wondering whether I should post it, it occurred to me that light is to a good camera what the high pitched dog whistle is to a dog: the camera and the dog perceive things much differently than humans do. And though cameras are tuned by humans to show us what humans normally see in terms of color, brightness and contrast, software processes allow us to see an alternate reality. In this case it is an HDR photo that shows us what shadows under clouds look like.On a side note, I took this photo where I did to pay homage to my mother- and father-in-law. Years ago they had a painting hanging over their couch that was a winter scene showing a prairie that was table flat and that stretched out to infinity. My mother-in-law said the picture reminded her of home, which was Hand County, South Dakota.Though it isn't winter yet in this scene, the landscape is certainly table flat.

08-05-12 Window Peeking

In my quest for something other than landscape and macro photos for this blog, I have gone "dumpster diving," which is my term for going back to old photos that people more organized than I would have gotten rid of a long time ago.This picture, taken in Delft, Netherlands, is certainly not art. But it is a narrative. Because of that, I converted it to black and white, in part because it was the two dogs that caught my eye in this scene and they were both black and white to begin with.And why is it a "narrative." Well, I think it tells a story, though, like so many other photos, it has many different stories to tell if you give it a chance. Is it about how life in Delft in different than life in your home town? Is is about the couple? What is the young man saying that is causing the woman to look the way she looks? What about the man in the background with his hand to his head?And, of course, what about the dog looking my way?What I like about candid photography is that though I am really "in" the photo because of how I frame the scene, I am also a kind of a voyeur. And so are you. As a photographer, I am saying "Look into this window and feast your eyes."

07-24-12 Depth of Field

07-15-12 Frank (Revisited and Reworked)

When I check the viewing statistics of my photo blog, I can see which photos are viewed most often and and what links brought people to my web site. Last week I noticed that my post from a while ago called "Frank" was getting the most hits, which were coming from another web site called Facepunch.com. Facepunch seems to cater to a broad set of interests, including the graphic arts.It turns out that a user who calls himself Bakyte had posted a reworked version of my photo that looks like this:And then the citizens of the forum were encouraged to fill in the blank.Before I reveal a few of my favorites, I would like to mention that all of my posts are shared through a Creative Commons copyright that allows for use as long as credit is given, no money is made and the original work is not altered. I don't want to sound selfish, but Bakyte violated at least two of those provisions. I did politely inform him of my concerns and he politely said he would try to remove the posts if he could.That aside, I enjoyed many of the modifications and will share four of my favorites:And last, one that was inspired by the group A Ha's song "Take On Me":And why not watch the A-Ha official "Take On Me" video? It was aired on MTV in 1985, won many awards and is a brilliant display of the animator's art. It also does a brilliant job of linking a fascinating visual story with a song that is otherwise insipid! In some ways, that's what MTV was all about in the 80s . . .The work of art, incidentally is called Frank, by Chuck Close. It is a photorealistic painting of a photo of a guy named Frank.

6-30-12 Daisy, Daisy, daisy

Not counting the parts of daisies on edges of this photo, there really are three daisies in this photo. "Really?!" you say. Really. This is a layered HDR photo that I made (not took) with my Canon 5D Mark III. It has HDR capacity built in. The things you can do with the new-fangled cameras. . .Incidentally, the title of this post pays homage to the famous scene in Stanley Kubrick's fiLm "2001: A Space Odyssey," where an astronaut "kills" HAL, the on-board computer. (HAL, by the way, is an acronym that is only one letter away from IBM. Coincidence?).When that film came out in 1968, 2001 seemed so far away. And now it's 2012 and we have cameras that are smarter than those who use them. Like me and my 5DIII. . .

06-27-12 Sadness

What you see in this photo is a pile of debris in the middle of a cornfield. But what I see is much more, for this pile is all that remains of a farmstead north of Watertown, South Dakota, that had become for me a place of photographic pilgrimage.This farmstead had an old house, a fairly large barn and two other out buildings that were part of the farming operation years ago. The buildings were subjects hundreds of photos I have taken. It was also what I called "the north studio," because I took many of my senior portrait subjects to this location due to its wealth of good locations for pictures. More recently, I took some of my LATI photo students there to share this great location. The photos they took are likely the last photos that were taken of this South Dakota relic.The group Kansas was right when they sang that "Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky." And so I suppose it was inevitable that an abandoned farm would be bulldozed and turned into crop land. But I feel like I've lost a friend. This place had an important place in my personal history and it had a soul that had become part of my soul.But at least I have the photos. . . .