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.

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.

When you think of spring flowers on trees I would expect things come to mind like Dogwood, Redbud, or the ever so popular Bradford Pear. But pretty much every tree flowers in one way or another… it has to in order to perpetuate it’s species. It’s just that not all of them do it in such a showy fashion.

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.

This has been among the coldest of winters I can ever recall so I guess it’s fitting that the first day of spring brought about 9″ of snow to the Joplin area. After several years with little to no snow this winter has been off the heez, as far as snow goes. Joplin averages 16″ per winter, and so far this year we’ve amassed 31.5″ (according to Doug Heady).

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…

Anyone who follows this blog or my photography knows of my obsession with trying to photograph storms and lightning. Last night I noticed some flashes of light coming from the north side of the house…turned out to be one of the most easily photographed lightning storms I’ve had the opportunity to shoot. It was also one of the creepiest and there was almost no thunder…kind of reminded me of the movie War of the Worlds.

Since the strikes were somewhat predictable (as far as lightning goes) I decided to take a gamble and use my telephoto lens to get in closer. Which made the lightning stikes larger, but it also severely reduced my chances of actually catching a strike in the frame.

Turns out I have become pretty decent at manually focusing my camera in the dark on something that I can’t see!

In spite of a very rocky start on Saturday and modest turnout on Sunday, I felt like Cider Days was a success and I think Bridget felt the same! I sold several prints and enjoyed the numerous compliments and encouragement I received. We learned a LOT about what we could do better next time and I enjoyed fraternizing with the other photographers who were ‘peddling’ their work. Here are a few highlights (and lowlights) from the weekend…

Here is Bridget’s mother helping us put the finishing touches on our booth saturday morning. We managed to cram a lot of stuff into a small area.

The festival opened at 10:00am, at approximately 9:57 it started raining. Initially the forecast did not call for rain and our tent did not have sides…so saying we were ill-prepared would be an understatement. Our booth, and some of my photos were basically ruined before the show even started.

I estimate that it rained for appoximately 5 of the 7 hours of Cider Days on Saturday, but thanks to some quick help by Bridget’s mom we improvised some tarp sides, keeping most of our stuff fairly dry for the remainder of the show.

Things took a turn for the better when we were awarded the “best regional artist”. We were pretty stoked to display our award. All in all it was a lot of fun spending the day showing off and occasionally selling my work. And most of all just spending time with good friends.