Tag: nature

iPhone Friday

Two perspectives of a plant: one in color, showcasing its vibrant filaments and leaves, and another in black and white to emphasize its structure. Which do you prefer?

A quick snapshot for today from a visit to New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill in nearby Boylston, Massachusetts; this is always a great location to visit to experience the calm surroundings and lovely flora that is managed so expertly by the staff. Visiting always provides me with new source material, as the colors, shapes and environment are inspiring.

Today’s shot is a slightly different perspective from the usual…

Radial Entanglement (Color)

The interweaving of the whitish filaments with the leaves radiating out from the center caught my eye. It would have been interesting to shoot this with greater depth of field (iPhone 14 didn’t have that possibility yet). As I was looking at this image, I also took a look at it from just a structural perspective…

Radial Entanglement (B&W)

The black & white treatment provides more focus on the pure structure of the plant. I’m not sure which one I prefer yet. What are your thoughts?

Monday’s Portfolio Musings – v. 2.12

In a portfolio, how do I categorize the interplay between abstract and landscape imagery, such as when we capture mysterious reflections and shapes, evoking all kinds of ideas.

In last week’s post titled ‘Monday’s Portfolio Musings – v. .2.11’, I mentioned that categories and themes are emerging in looking through the volume of images from the last 20 or so years of my photography. At this time, I may not have descriptors for each of the categories yet, as they have me thinking that images are crossing boundaries between the categories.

One of these boundary crossings is between abstract and landscape, as might be the case for this particular image…

Floating Mystery

This capture from 2012 still intrigues me, as it has a combination of reflection, variation in light and dark, and unusual shapes that crop up in the pond. This gives a bit of an otherworldly sense, as one could imagine that alien creatures are arising from the pond, on a mission of exploration to find out what this Earth is all about. I can only think that humanity might confuse these aliens into either leaving in despair or taking pity…

As long as we’re not ending up the subject a Twilight Zone episode, we’ll be alright.

I’m curious how you would categorize this image.

A Thursday Throwback – 1

A step back in time to 2015, when I visited the magnificent Godafoss on a sunny day.

Thus far, I have visited Iceland three times (I’m not counting the short times at Keflavik airport when I had a connecting flight there), and I am confident that there will be more visits in the future. Iceland is simply a photography paradise with so much to offer that I cannot see myself ever getting to the point where I will experience a lack of subject matter there.

Today’s image is from my trip there in 2015, when I spent a short number of days in the Akureyri area and thoroughly enjoyed the beauty that the landscape offered…

Godafoss

One of the mighty waterfalls in Iceland is Godafoss; this waterfall of the chieftain is not the largest or tallest, but does present a truly impressive sight when one clambers down to the side of the river to observe it up close. On this occasion I was lucky enough to catch the falls on a sunny day to create this spectacular vista.

Monday’s Moment – Portfolio v2.1

The challenge and joy of pulling together a portfolio. The memories of the circumstances are relived in this process.

As I have started in earnest to begin to pull together a more comprehensive portfolio, I’m also beginning to realize how monumental a task this may be. There are just a lot of images to go through and I really want to do a solid job gathering all that might come into play.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that it’s an unpleasant task, as part of the fun is looking at older shots and remembering things about the time and situation. Among these, this is one…

Fixer-Upper near Vik

As there might be an opportunity to capture the Aurora Borealis while we were in Vik, a bit of location scouting was needed. Part of my thoughts about shooting the Northern Lights was that there should be a certain amount of interesting landscape silhouetted with the sky’s light display. Plus we should be far enough from any town to reduce light pollution.

This field became the location for our Aurora shoot a couple of days later (cf. A Return to Iceland post). It helped that there was good access by road and far enough away from a main road, and the experience was amazing!

A note about the process I am using to organize my portfolio; Lightroom is my tool of choice, as it enables me to quickly go through images. If I see an image that I want to take a closer look at later, I give it a rating of 1 star. On a second, slower pass I take the time to decide whether this image actually speaks to me, in which case I upgrade its rating. Sometimes this does mean that I will take a quick dive into processing the image to get some idea of what the end result might be.

There will be more on progress!

Rainy Day Adjustment…

When caught in inclement weather at Reynisfjara Beach in Iceland, exploring a cave can be rewarding.

What to do when you’re at an iconic beach location in Iceland and it’s a windy, rainy day? Find a cave!

In August of 2022, we were shooting on Reynisfjara Beach near Vik and the weather was just not cooperating with us, as the rain was coming at us from all directions. At this beach there is a magnificent cave, where I found this…

Natura Artis Magistra

On the basaltic rock columns that protrude seemingly out of nowhere, I found that numerous plants find a way to hold on to the sheer rock and find enough purchase to grow. The contrast between the vivid plant colors and the black basalt makes for a wonderful subject.

The hexagonal columns at this location are the result of lava flows that cooled and contracted, cracking in the distinctive hexagonal pattern that can be seen at a number of locations.

Bay of Fundy

From 2007, a visit to Nova Scotia produced a capture of the tidal variation at the town of Digby.

Summer of 2007 my wife and I took a trip to Nova Scotia, as there was a dog agility event being held there. Rather than spending the entire day at the event, I took some side trips to explore a bit more of this magnificent area.

One of these explorations had me in the wonderful town of Digby on the Bay of Fundy at low tide…

Low Tide on the Bay

The Bay of Fundy has phenomenal tidal variation as can be seen from the markings on the dock and the position of the boats.

After I took this shot, I found it to be kind of flat, as the clouds were too bright in the image; it’s something that nowadays I would have photographed with a bracketed series of exposures to increase the overall dynamic range of the image. It was not until several years later that I re-processed the image with a single image HDR technique, as well as adding some texture to the image itself.

As I still like what I captured here, this will be on my list of images to re-process with some of the skills that I have picked up over the years, so I can get it to the next level.

A Test Shot from Iceland

Even a test shot might reveal something interesting.

It’s fun going through some of my wintry images, as I’m working towards a bit more coherence within the set of images to ultimately become the core of my portfolio. As I was looking through some of my Iceland images from earlier this year, I flipped through the folder that holds my Aurora Borealis images and noticed a particular image…

Pre-Aurora Test Shot

As my friend, George Fellner, and I were setting up, I took a quick test shot to get a sense of the exposure values that we would need, as well as some idea about how I wanted to frame the landscape for the sequence coming up.

That’s where this image came in, and even though it’s rather grainy at 6400 ISO there is a certain amount of interest in it; at least for me, as I don’t normally get to see this many stars in the sky. Settings for this shot were 25 second exposure at f/2.8.

If you’re curious about the actual series of images, please take a look (and listen) here: Aurora Borealis on YouTube .

Wednesday’s Wintry Wonder

It was windy, snowy and might blustery, and also gorgeous!

It’s hard to believe that it’s almost 10 years ago during the winter of 2014 into 2015 that we had a wonderful amount of snow fall. I’m sure that not everyone enjoyed that snow, especially those who struggled to clean the roads and driveways. Then in January, there was the blizzard of 2015, which deposited snow amounts ranging from 2 – 3 feet (60 – 90 cm) across the entire state.

One of the reasons I appreciated this storm was the opportunity to take photos such as this one…

A Snowy Beach

As it happened, John Slonina (yes, he of Slonina Photography) put together a jaunt to the coastal areas of northern Massachusetts and New Hampshire; I jumped on that opportunity and broke out my best cold weather gear to be able to spend a blustery Saturday outdoors in the elements to capture some of the spectacle!

Dressed in layers, snow pants, a heated vest, toasty gloves and my favorite The North Face snow boots, I was ready for a day of photography! Of course, even my trusty Canon EOS 5D Mk III was wrapped up in layers to help keep the batteries as warm as possible. I can honestly say that I was extremely comfortable throughout the day; the only tricky part was making a bathroom stop during our lunch!

I’d love to hear about your extreme elements shoots and how you prepared for them.

Working toward a portfolio

Portfolio struggles are real (at least for me)

I’m sure that I’m not unique in the struggle to really define what might constitute my portfolio of photography. Over the years, I have captured tons and tons of images, the subject of which has varied tremendously; it ranges from lots of dog sport images from agility competitions, portraiture and human events, food photography, abstract images and lots of nature images.

As I’m starting to renew my effort to define what my portfolio might be, I’m taking a stab at my nature images first. These have great variation in them as well, as I tend to love landscapes, but also have a mix of animal images, some of which I still enjoy reviewing.

A Pensive Puffin

The image above is one of these. This headshot provides a sense of gravitas to this lovely puffin, as he appears to be considering the next discussion to have with one of his closest friends, many of whom are nearby.

There are still some technical issues with this image, as the pose and sunlight didn’t line up perfectly in the way I would have preferred (these puffins didn’t pay much attention to my requests); so I still see some future editing to improve the overall look, but in the mean time, I still like this little fella.

I’m curious what struggles other photographers have in defining their profile and how they tend to tackle these demons.

iPhone Friday – Zion

Great views are everywhere in Zion National Park

Welcome to another wonderful Friday! It’s time to revive the iPhone Friday series with a shot from last week’s trip to Utah and Nevada.

This view is walking into the amazing canyon in Zion National Park, which is just stunning on any day…

Looking into the canyon

As you see, it is simply gorgeous out there! The trip was amazing and props to John Slonina of Slonina Photography who knows just the right places and has the experience to make every trip magnificent (and fun).