A couple days ago I started the initial stages of preparing for my next art festival (Cider Days) and in doing so I realized I needed to order more business cards. Since college I I’ve had maybe 5 different hobbies/projects/businesses that required me to order business cards. I always order the smallest quantity possible (250) and not once have I ever needed to re-order. By the time I used even half the box (if even that), I would not longer be involved in said project, so the un-needed cards pile up in the closet as a memorial to all the dead projects of years past.

As lame as it may sound, the fact that I am at a point where I need more cards it exciting to me. I feel like this trivial process makes this particular hobby just a little more legit than previous ventures. Plus, not only am I ordering more, but my first order was twice the quantity of all the abandoned projects of the past.

In my MSU days when I was shooting on 35mm film my favorite setup was TMAX black+white film with a red filter on the camera. I thought this gave landscapes a kind of … “ansel adamsy” type effect.

When I transitioned into digital, one downside was my loss of this effect. I tried numerous ways, including photoshop layers, digital effects, and even using a red filter and converting the image to black and white. No matter what I tried, the results looked plain terrible. It seemed that JPG files deteriorate when exposure and contrast (especially in the blue channel) is pushed to the extreme.

Saturday I decided to try some new things, in hopes I would be able to better reproduce the “ansel adamsy” look. I had come to the conclusion that using an actual red filter on a digital camera was not the way to go. So I shot normal color photos, and used a polarizer filter to keep the nice blue sky from getting washed out. If you have a graduated neutral density filter (who doesn’t!?) that might work as well. Then I set my camera to “RAW” mode, which saves images straight to disk with no processing or JPG compression. Shooting RAW files vs. JPG allows significantly greater flexibility in adjusting color temperature (white balance), exposure, and all the other settings I would need to digitally reproduce the effect film use to achieve so effortlessly…but at the expense of files that can only be opened by special programs and can exceed 35mb each! Yikes!

So here is a color example from Saturday’s shoot:

And here is the same photos with the black/white + red filter effect:

Here are a couple others of two Bur Oaks:

I think it’s a fairly cool look, although I feel as though I am somewhat violating my unspoken rule of minimalist “photoshopping” to my photography. Then again, this same effect can be achieved via traditional photography techniques. After all, one of my favorite photographers, Ansel Adams did it back in the ’30s and ’40s.

When I was on the way home from Cider Days I stopped along the highway and took a cool pic of the valley near my parents house. This year on the way home from Artsfest I was about a half mile from home when another cool photo presented itself.

I remember liking this stretch of highway even when I was a kid, long before I knew I would reside here. As luck would have it, I now travel this route constantly to get into town (Carthage) and also because Steph’s parents live about 3 miles up this way.

I like living on historic route 66. Most of the road itself isn’t anything special, but it represents an idea of nostalgia. Once a major thoroughfare, now it’s just an out of the way back road. But it’s famous and I think it’s cool having an address that is “Old Route 66″.

It is now May and Artsfest is officially over. In some ways I am glad to be done but in other ways I am already looking forward to the next festival if for no other reason than I enjoy spending part of 3 days with my dear friends Bridget and Andy.

This time around we made some significant improvements over Cider Days. The 3 biggest being that we each had own own space, new tents (with sides to protect our stuff from rain!), and I made some display panels from which I could hang some larger sized framed prints. I also brought more (and better) framed prints. I am still learning but this year was infinitely smoother than Cider Days. I was also excited to have won the “Best of Show 2D Category”. Personally I saw lots of other artists with stuff that I felt was far superior to mine, but nevertheless it was exciting and encourages me to keep doing it.

At any rate, Artsfest was a success and lots of fun in the process!!

Artsfest is this weekend so for anyone who enjoys pottery, photography, art, or just festivals in general – you should come up to Springfield. The past few days have been a flurry of excitement around the McCoy household doing some last minute preparations. I’ve been framing and matting lots of new prints to take in anticipation of selling at least a few of them!

Here are a few examples of my newest works:

Another significant improvement over last year is that I have a tent with real sides so that when it pours rain my stuff won’t be ruined like last year. I decided to do a trial run of the new tent, but since it was raining and windy outside I thought I would try it inside. Funny how you think a room is really big until you try to setup an exhibition tent inside it.

I enjoy trying to capture small things in nature that we don’t often notice or pay attention to. Small moving subjects are extremely difficult to shoot because they are small, unpredictable and the depth of field in these shots is extremely shallow. I’ve shot many insects in the last couple years and here is my latest attempt, one of my better ‘bee’ shots I’d say.

Bee’s tend to hop from flower to flower and don’t stay very long at each one. Chasing the bee from flower to flower is frustrating so I have concluded the best way to take their photo is to pick a flower and hope the bee comes to you.

I have yet to get a decent photo of a bee (or anything) in flight, but that is high on my list of photo “to-do’s”. I am thinking I may have to pre-set the focus and wait for a bee to not only come into the frame, but into the focal plane as well. Here is the ‘best’ in-flight shot I’ve managed to get so far:

This photo was just a matter a millimeters away from being a pretty cool shot. If the focus ring would have been adjusted just ever so slightly, or I would have waited an additional nano-second the bee would have been in perfect focus.