A Stony Gaze
Many of the photos I have posted recently have been resurrected from a fairly large collection of old digital files that have been languishing in a virtual closet. They are a little like old, worn t-shirts that have great sentimental value but should really be turned into rags. My wife even tells me that if [...]
Monument
This is a shot of the front of the Terry Redlin Center in Watertown, South Dakota. And I think it is a good example of the power of the photographer to direct the viewer’s attention to details and views that he or she wouldn’t or couldn’t get independently. Most people see the Redlin center like [...]
The Pantheon Redux
Yes, this is a repeat – and I’m not even on vacation. Why the repeat? Because I’ve been learning some new things about photo editing. In fact, I’ve made a video:
Joelle
In my search for photos from my early days of digital portraiture, I came across this photo of Joelle that I took almost 9 years ago. I had a great subject but the the photo also represents the power of Aperture by Apple as an editing tool in that in a minute or two I [...]
Lost!!!
This photo was a “shoebox” experience about 30 minutes ago. In a quest to find photos I have been ignoring, I started at the chronological beginning of a library of digital photos that has close to 50,000 pictures. About 300 pictures into my search, I found this. I don’t remember taking the photo, but I [...]
A Little Prayer
For the first time in two years, I have updated my blog’s look. I’ve been contemplating a change for a while but fear of the unknown kept me at bay. When you change themes in blogs, all of the photos have to be resized, hopefully by an automated process. And who knows what you’ll get? [...]
Tiny Dancer
I am going on my third full day in New Orleans and I still haven’t found what I would called a “brilliant” photo. Nor has one found me. In analyzing this, I realized that when I’m not attending the photo conference I am at, I am more tourist than photographer. And there’s a difference. The [...]
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 [...]
Conveyance
Ljubljana, Slovenia, is a picturesque town that a photographer could easily get lost in. There are things someone like me, from a small town in a rural state, never sees – such as rustic looking painted bicycles. However, I do believe that if someone came to Watertown from Slovenia to photograph our town, they would [...]
Split Harbor (HDR)
This is not a true, layered HDR photo. Instead, I made it using Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro 4.0 and Nik Efex HDR. It creates a bit of a surreal effect, I think. Are you a photography student wanting to know more about the process that leads to photos like this? Here’s a tutorial I [...]
Melissa
Melissa looks a little sad here but she was one of the more ebullient subjects I had the pleasure to photograph. She was a dancer and actively involved in theater and made posing very simple. And she had many great looks. Here, we are in an abandoned building in Gary, SD, in 2002. I had [...]
Darcie
I took this portrait the first year I was serious about senior portrait photography. That was almost 10 years ago. The camera was the Canon 1D, which was a groundbreaking digital camera. It cost $5500 and had a whopping 4.4 megapixel sensor! I had a lot to learn about photographing people back in 2002 but [...]
Triplicate
One of the good things about this blog is that it forces me to go back to my old photos and find things that I’ve forgotten about. This photo is one of them. I took this of my son Jon at the Santa Ana airport in California. I used my iPhone 4 and an app [...]
Rural Relic
This is another example of an HDR (High Dynamic Range) photo. In fact, there are two photos here – one exposed for the sky and one exposed for the dark side of the old hulk of a car. This photo is fairly realistic, though the rays that are visible in the sky aren’t something you [...]
The Photographer’s Ghost
Yes, the man in the chairs is me. (I struggled hard with the grammar of this sentence.) What you are looking at is my rudimentary first attempt at light painting, which uses a long shutter speed and a flashlight of some sort. I didn’t paint my head because it was very early in morning and [...]
Out By Lonesome Lake (LATI Festival of Trees Choice)
One of the good things about my job is that when I give a photo assignment I often go out and do the assignment myself. Such was the case this past weekend. My particular mission was to shoot an HDR photo or two. I have spent about 10 hours on this task and, of the [...]
Through the Bus Window
I went to Sica Hollow, west of Sisseton, SD, with several of my photo students. Sica Hollow is a state park that I thought would provide unique photo opportunities for photographers. We were closing in on the park when I thought I should take a photo. What struck me about this this scene, of course, [...]
On Location
Here are a few of my favorite people in one of my favorite places. The place: the old Redlin farmstead 15 miles north of Watertown. The people: Kendra, Sara, Ashley, McKenzie, Kelly, Holly and Alli (sitting). These are 6 of my second year Photo/Media students at LATI and one of my first year students (Alli). [...]
Mercurial II
I’ve compared water drops to mercury before in this blog. But for those who have seen beads of mercury, you’d have to admit that these water drops, photographed from the inside of my pickup’s front window, look more like silvery mercury than beads of water. A good photo? You’ll make that judgement. A different view [...]
Breaking Ground
OK, so in a minor way I am breaking ground in this blog because I am A)publishing a painting and B)I am posting someone else’s work. Why, you ask? The answer is that I am assigning a “Copy Da Vinci” portrait assignment to my studio photography students and I thought this might also teach you [...]
Emily
This is a photo that I took a few years ago and used as a retouching demonstration for my Studio Photography class. It takes about 20 minutes per portrait to do the things I think need to be done, though I have Photoshop actions and filters that would do some of the same things in [...]
Window Seat (iPhoneography)
When I travel, I am as captivated by looking at the scenery as any other tourist. But if the situation allows it, I also like to take photos of people looking at the scenery. I guess I’m a bit of a voyeur in that sense. In this case, I was on a plane flying over [...]
Shadow and Light
This is the fourth in a series of sunrise shots that were all taken within 30 minutes or so of each other. This photo was almost rejected (which is my way of throwing things away – kind of). The rejection would have been based on the fact that so little is well exposed on this [...]
A Little Coffee
I took this quite a while ago using an iPad app I had read about called Photo Soft Box. You set any number of patterns on your iPad, find a dark room and an object that has interesting reflectivity and then take photos. I think it’s pretty cool and a creative eye might find interesting [...]
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