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.

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.

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″.

Bridget and I in front of our tents.

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!!

Here are a few examples of my newest works:

A big 24x36 of a bug and some flowers.

One of my favs - a cool mountain stream. Note: Emma's coloring books sold separately.

And here is one for the ladies.

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.

While I did manage to get it assembled, I could not raise it up or attach the sides.

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.

Take for example Maples. No one ever associates Maples with flowers. Here is a Norway Maple in my front yard. At a glance it appears that the tree is simply pushing out this year’s set of leaves. Closer inspection reveals that it’s actually the maple’s bouquet of flowers, it’s offering to would-be pollinators. I have no idea what those pollinators are, but I’m sure it’s some kind of insect.

And here we have a Norway Spruce. Apparently someone of Norwegian descent must have lived here decades ago and attempted to recreate their homeland. I assume these are the starts of flowers, but I could be wrong. Spruces and Firs often have red, purple or bluish colored flowers and I believe most conifers tend to rely solely on the wind for pollination as they produce exorbitant amounts of pollen.

1. Unless I have scrap in the necessary size, it is generally more cost and time effective to purchase pre-cut mats on sizes 11×14 or smaller.
2. Mat board is expensive and easily ruined.
3. Carrying several sheets of mat board across a parking lot on a windy day is an excellent way to ruin a lot of mat board.
4. Cutting mats sucks.

I have also determined that the larger the mat, the more ways I can screw it up. In fact, the frustration level involved in cutting my own mats can be expressed mathematically, being directly proportional to the size of the mat. So Here is a formula I came up with where F represents the level of frustration, L and W represent the outside dimensions of the mat:

F = (LW) x 1 / ∏

So you can figure that cutting an 24 x 36 mat is going contain roughly 5x the amount of frustration units (FU’s) as an 11×14…ha. While I should probably set my prices based on cost of materials and some arbitrary “art” markup, I have decided the only thing I really care about when pricing a finished print is how irritated I get when cutting the mat.

Although I am more than ready for warmer temps and seeing the deciduous trees come back to life, I always enjoy a good snow storm. Taking this was actually a bit tricky, thanks to the horizontally blowing snow. I felt like I was trekking up to the north pole or something just walking around in the front yard.

What’s really on my mind though is the bike ride this saturday. I recall when they postponed it to March thinking “it can be really cold in March… heck it could even SNOW!” So we’ll see how the next few days shape up for bike riding…

It’s supposed to be nice out tomorrow, so this will be a great excuse to get out and enjoy it. I am not sure what the official hours are but I would guess roughly 6 – 8pm.