Speaking of cool tools…

I hit the National Camera Exchange annual Tent Sale this weekend, and came

away with a cool new photography tool.  I have a good collection of bags by Lowepro, and think they both make great bags and stand behind them exceptionally well.  I spotted a new bag, the Photo Sport Sling 100 AW pack.  This is a lightweight, sling-style pack, which Lowepro describes as being designed for “trail running, mountain biking, snowboarding and other active outdoor pursuits.”  I immediately recognized it as a great way to shed some pack weight on short photo trips.  A few hours later, I had stuffed in my 5D MkII with the trusty 24-105 lens, plus my 14 mm superwide and 65 mm tilt-and-shift lenses, a small bag of essentials and a case for spare CF cards, tucked a water bottle into the side pocket, grabbed a monopod and was off for Como Park to get some new images for the Festival booth next weekend (note about the booth here) and then on to Osceola, Wisconsin for for summer pictures of Cascade Falls.  The pack worked great!

The narrow form factor meant no interference as I hiked around, the sling-side opening gave me easy access to my camera, and I could easily shuck the pack to change lenses.  The sling strap has a secondary strap for stability when you want it on the trail, and there is a full-size rain fly tucked away in the bottom of the pack (and those really work - one kept everything in my big trail pack dry under rain and hail in Yellowstone!)

I don’t think I will take this pack on longer outings, where I need more equipment than could comfortably fit and I would appreciate the heavier gauge construction of Lowepro’s Trekker packs, but I am pleased to report that it is an excellent way to carry all the stuff you need for a short trip without adding bulk and weight on your back.  Highly recommended!

[FTC disclosure - no promo or consideration from Lowepro - I bought the pack with my own money...]

Going Wide…

I shot a great (but very cold) sunrise on the North Shore of Lake Superior at the end of February.  One of the choices I had to make was what focal length of lens to use.  Here’s a short video (shot by my photo buddy Brian F.) that explains my thinking that morning in deciding to use a super-wide lens.

Using HDR techniques for vibrant Black-and-White Images.

The High Dynamic Range ("HDR") technique in digital photography has garnered quite a bit of interest in the last year or so.  I am not a great fan of HDR for color images; I have seen too many overdone HDR shots with impossible color and contrast, halos, and exaggerated details.

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Cool new Photo app for iPhone and iPod Touch

I've been playing with a great new app for photographers from Adair Systems called PhotoCalc.  This is a very focussed utility app that does on-the-fly calculations of several key photographic measurements.

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Compositional Tools: Have we come full circle?

I've taken a trip back in time as a result of my newest camera.

When I'm out in the field shooting with (usually) one of my 35mm-format digital cameras or (occasionally) our Mamiya 645 medium-formal camera, I like to take along a pocket-sized digital camera as well.

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Timing is Everything…

I sat at dinner in Farmington, New Mexico, with a view to a bluff just a few hundred yards to the south. For three minutes (I timed it), the setting sun lit up that bluff and turned it brilliant shades of gold and ocher. Then the sun dropped just a bit in the western sky, the light changed, and all the color faded away, leaving the bluff just dull brown. It was a stunning example of the fleeting nature of landscape photography, and reminded me of the adage - perfect for those of us who love to capture the beauty and wonder of the natural world - that "timing is everything."

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Telling Stories

In the early 1970s, I was an undergraduate student at Macalester College in St. Paul, majoring in Theatre Arts. My professor for Directing classes was Douglas Hatfield, then the Chair of the Department.

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Exploring the Great Gallery

The Great Gallery is the largest pictographs site in Canyonlands National Park. It sits in a detached portion of the Park known as Horseshoe Canyon. The Gallery is about 200 feet long, 15 feet high, and contains dozens of greater-than life size pictographs. Pictographs are rock paintings, as distinguished from petroglyphs, which are figures etched into rock with a sharp stone.

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"Working the Scene" and avoiding The Obvious Picture

True fans of the CSI television series will recognize the investigator's phrase - "work the scene." While most of us don't photograph crime scenes, Grissom and his crew give us a method for trying to photograph imaginatively.

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Printing and Esthetic Choices

So, you've taken some fantastic shots—now what? The best images in the world are of little value if you can't share them with others. Which means you need to print them out.

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I Love a Good Tool.

If you've read my thoughts about "working the scene", you know I believe in reframing a great shot in the opposite orientation - changing a landscape composition into a portrait composition or vice versa - as you search for the best picture. But the problem in doing that with a normal tripod head (ball or multi-axis) is that the act of rolling the camera over 90 degrees changes the composition you worked so hard to refine. Not only do you re-orient the camera body, you also move the whole camera sideways at the same time. On my Manfrotto 488RC2 ballhead, the center of the lens moves over almost three inches between vertical and horizontal orientation.

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