01-09-12 Mike, Scott & Clarence in Las Vegas

I have been to Las Vegas only once, and this photo documents the highlight of that visit: our hotel had a swimming pool! That's my brother Mike and my dad sitting on the diving board. And the story I am told (because I don't remember it) is that when no one was looking, little 7-year-old Scotty went out to the edge of the board and jumped in. The problem was that Scotty really didn't know how to swim. Whether that event occurred before or after the photo was taken, I can't say.This photo doesn't pass the test as far as quality photos are concerned: it has compositional issues and the photographer (my mom?) posed us with our backs to the sun, leading to underexposed faces. But like billions of other bad vacation snap shots, it is still an important photo - at least in my personal history.This photo, incidentally, was in an album that my aunt Betty had kept. In managing her estate, we ended up with several of her photo albums and it is obvious to me that even though she lived in California, her South Dakota family was very important to her.

12-09-12 Experiment With Bokeh and Water Glass

As far as photographic experiments go, I would say that this photo represents a successful failure. I spent time yesterday learning about the quality of bokeh produced by various lenses at various degrees of focus. In the midst of this, I had the idea of putting a full glass of water in front of our Christmas tree. I imagined that the round bokeh would show up in the water glass, given the lens effect that water can have. But I imagined wrong. Oh, well. . .What I like about this photo is that everything is soft and round - except the way the light shows up in the water glass. Here, it is sharp and linear. Too abstract? Boring? Maybe. I suspect I will revisit this idea to see if I can end up with something better.

12-05-12 HDR in B&W (Variations on a Theme)

Yes, I repeat myself. But it isn't because I'm being lazy today. It's because I couldn't decided if I liked the color version of this photo (yesterday's post) or the black and white version. So I offer both.

10-19-12 Justin

Just to prove that I do take portraits of guys from time to time, here's a picture of Justin P that I took a few years ago at my favorite old farm.

10-11-12 Mighty Oak

10-07-12 Newlyweds

Canon 5DIII 1/60s f/4.0 ISO5000 102mm

10-06-12 Jessica & James

08-21-12 Self-Conscious

I took this informal portrait of a waitress at the VooDoo BBQ restaurant on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans. She wasn't the least bit self-conscious, as I think you can see in this photo. I was.And it occurs to me that when I am self-conscious as a photographer, I am not conscious of other, more important considerations than me. For example, if I had been totally "focused" on the task of getting a decent portrait of this young woman, I would have checked the full frame. I would have removed the styrofoam cup behind her. I would have tried to frame the photo so there wasn't a distracting bright area in the upper left corner of the photo. And I would never had tried to take a portrait with a 1/50 sec shutter speed.Why was I self-conscious? Well, I don't normally take semi-posed photos of people I don't know. And I had 5 of my photo/media students sitting at the table watching me.Like so many other subjects and places I've photographed, I'd like to have another chance at the VooDoo BBQ restaurant.Canon 5DII 1/50s f/3.2 ISO1000 50mmPlease take the "A Photo A Day" survey!

08-16-12 Allison

So I was looking for a connector for my iPad yesterday, which I hadn't seen since May. And though I didn't find the connector, I did find a collection of DVDs of senior portraits I had taken in the summer of 2004. And when I saw "Allison R" on one of the labels, I immediately remembered this particular outfit and pose.Allison was a beautiful subject who came to the session with many props and ideas. I am always worried when a portrait subject says he or she wants to bring a prop. I usually ask two questions: 1)Is it living? 2)Is it bigger than your face?The first question is because living things (boy friends, snakes, cats, dogs, parrots, etc) can be challenging, though I'll takes snakes over the other animals listed.The second question is because, if you ask me (who is admittedly old fashioned), I think a portrait is about the face.In Allison's case, she brought her cello (bigger than her face but OK by me) and a huge, hot pink prom dress. The prom dress begged for a high-key treatment and that's what we ended up doing. Allison liked this photo and so did I, largely because she is very comfortable in the shot and she has a wonderful, relaxed smile. Allison ordered this photo in color and when I did some basic re-editing today, I decided to convert it to black and white, maybe because I am even more old fashioned than I used to be - I don't want you to be distracted by the bright color of her dress.I have been writing a bit about what is "real" in the last few posts and I think that this is the "real" Allison. And that's what portrait photographers should always strive to capture.

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."

07-23-12 Patterns

Last in a series of wheat photos.

Conveyance (Variation)

In the three years that I've been posting to this blog, I try not to post the same photo twice. However, I'm reposting yesterday's photo again, but this time with a different look.Why am I doing this? In part because I want to show the kind of impact color and black and white can make on a scene. I guess I'm also show the kind of power the digital photographer has these days in manipulated photos through fairly simple processes - such as what I've done.