I took a very short vacation this past week to go fly fishing in Quebec with one of my great friends. Originally, this was supposed to be a 4 day trip… however we had to make the awful decision to leave a day early due to Hurricane Earl’s pending arrival near my home in Nags Head.
Although Hurricane Earl didn’t effect our area of the Outer Banks very much, I’m glad I was able to get home to make some preparations including boarding up our home just in case. Thankfully the storm stayed off shore and we didn’t experience much except tropical storm force winds and some heavy rain.
Sadly, I did very little photography on the trip. As I mentioned in my last blog, the prime fishing time is also the prime photography time. The little photography I did do was mostly at night with time lapse. I’ve included a couple of stills from the trip for today’s entry. The time lapses may take a few days to put together, but I’ll be sure to post them when I’m finished.
Below are a couple of pocket captures from the LX3. To the left is a mornings catch… actually after I shot the B&W landscape above, I got in a canoe and caught these 4 trout. That great catch made making the decision to leave early a little more palatable. In the picture on the right, I’m ATVing the international boundary vista between the US and Canada. There is about a 10-20 meter cut that runs the length of the border in this area. The tree line to the left is Canada… to the right is the US.
I spend a lot of time thinking about things that “work” in my photography. I think that lots of photographers do this as well, but perhaps not in quite the same way. They may think about rules, guidelines, or principles that if used someone may deem the work to be of a certain “quality”. Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about why things work “for me”. This often has little to do with any of the traditional composition rules and is usually more in line with an inner dialogue that I have with an image that I create.
I can hear the comments now… “You talk to your pictures?!”. Yes.
One of the series that I’ve been working on this year is called “directionals” or more formally “Seeking Direction”. This is a small body of work right now, just 3 finished images with 1 more in progress that I want to recapture. When I made the first image, I didn’t have the series in mind. I just knew that I liked the picture and I developed a strong “inner story” with it. That led me to exploring the image more and deciding to try and develop a series around it. I’m not sure where it’ll go from here… I’m simply having fun capturing. I think the important thing is that this idea is in my mind as a concept that I’m always looking for in my travels through the world.
I’ll be mostly offline though Labor Day. I’m leaving for a week of trout fishing in Quebec. I’m bringing my camera gear along and plan to sneak away for a little shooting. Sadly some of the best fishing time is also the best photography time. I’m also planning to do some more overnight timelapse work which I’m really excited about. The great thing about that is that it’s all captured while I’m sleeping!
I mentioned a few posts ago that I had a little more Pea Island work that I processed from July 19th to share. Here are the last two from that session. I’ll save my rant about the power lines on Hatteras Island for another time… I’ve mentioned them numerous times on the blog before.
Photographing has been a little slow of late. I seem to have misplaced a bit of my shooting mojo for the last 2 weeks, having only gone out a handful of times. This happens for me in cycles… I’ll be super hot for a few weeks where I’m photographing all the time and then cool off for a week or so. I’d love to think of it as recharging my creative energy, but it’s not exactly a pleasant feeling. I put a lot of pressure on myself to shoot as often as possible and I’m often ridden by guilt when I watch an amazing sunset from my deck knowing that I made a conscious decision to skip a potential opportunity.
It’s been challenging to photograph during the summer with the number of visitors to the Outer Banks. It’s a classic excuse, but I think that plays into things a little bit. A number of my favorite locations are often packed this time of year and I’m very much looking forward to things slowing down in September and October. I’m constantly looking for new places to explore where I know that I can get away by myself for landscape photography. This in itself is a great exercise of creativity. In the next few weeks, I think some of the ideas I’ve bottled up will explode into the camera with fewer visitors and my return to some amazing locations.
I’m definitely looking forward to a short vacation at the end of the month. Although I’ll be bringing my gear, that will be the perfect time to recharge. After the trip, I’ll come back focused for a very busy fall preparing OBXPS’ programs for the 2011 season. There are many things to look forward to!
I’m feeling really worn out on this spot on Roanoke Island. It has been my “go to” sunset spot for several weeks now. It’s close with easy access and I’ve been lazy it seems. I need to make it a point this weekend to scout some sound side sunset locations north of the inlet this weekend.
Laura and I took a walk out to the Beach on Thursday night around midnight to see if we could catch any of the Perseid Meteor Shower. We were out there about an hour and only caught a dozen or so. We might have been a little early though.
While we laid on the beach staring at the sky, I setup a quick time lapse and captured enough frames for a wopping 4 seconds, which pathetically shows no meteors. Time lapse is the ultimate test of patience! I hope to do some more of this kind of stuff soon… I’ve just been putting so much focus on capturing stills.
A big storm rolled through Thursday afternoon, after which I shot sunset and got a couple things I’ll be sharing over the weekend. Thanks for visiting!
I’m starting to experiment with cropping to a specific panoramic format and training my eyes to see in a new aspect ratio. I continue to have a nagging idea in my mind about picking up a 6×17 camera. It’s a pretty sizable investment and I’m almost more inclined to pickup the 17TSE and a proper panoramic head instead. However, the 17TSE or pan head ideas are not always favorable because I shoot along the surf quite a bit and blending images with moving water like that is very difficult.
I’ve been working on a concept of abstractions that look like aerials of a strip of islands or a sandbar… much like the Outer Banks might look like from the air. I posted a photograph of this same concept a few weeks back. I’m not quite sure where things will go yet, but I’m having fun!
Since Laura is out of town this week, I headed over to Manteo’s First Friday by myself for a stroll around town and a little gallery hopping. There are a number of new galleries that are opening in Manteo as well as a show that just changed in the Festival Park Gallery featuring a few area photographers. I was very surprised at the crowd around town… it appeared a little heavier than the last few months, which is a great thing! The new Dare County Arts Council space was jammed and there was some great work hanging there. I also stopped by a new gallery, “Art by Locals” which also had a very decent crowd and a ton of amazing work already hanging. Sadly I didn’t make it over in time to see the show at Festival Park, so I’m going to head back this weekend at some point to check it out.
I could definitely tell some heavy weather was moving in and I decided to motor over to the sound to see what was happening. I’m so glad that I did… arriving to find a clear horizon and a perfect setup for some storm light. I didn’t have much of a kit with me… just my 5D2 and a 24-70 lens. Thankfully I keep a tripod stashed in the car. There wasn’t a lot of time to find something new, so I worked on a few compositions I’ve shot before.
I know I promised some more of that Pea Island work… I’ll post some in the next few days. There is definitely a couple shots in that folder that I want to process.
Please let me know your thoughts and I appreciate you visiting!
3 sec, f/16 iso 100
Canon 5D Mark II, 16-35mm f/2.8L II @ 16mm
My apologies for the radio silence lately – I’ve been out of town for a week and I’m finally settling back into the office. Shooting for me has been a little slow over the last ~10 days and I’m itching to get back into the field. For today’s post, I reached back into one of my many “to be processed” folders and grabbed a little bit of work from July 19th. I was driving south in Pea Island NWR looking for a sunset. At first, things were not looking very good and there was a massive southwest wind that made conditions rough with blowing sand. I finally stopped at one of the pullouts and went up to the top of the dune to see if anything interesting was going on. I immediately saw that the tide was low and the wind was blowing out the water quite a bit revealing some amazing patterns in the sand. Needless to say, I quickly went to work.
I’ve mentioned this “Other Worldly” series several times before and I’m glad this body of work is starting to get filled out a bit. Originally, I wanted to keep the aspect ratio of this work all the same, but I’m starting to feel that this photograph is really calling for a crop from the right side.
Looking through this folder, there are few other files I want to process and I’ll be sharing them over the next few days. I welcome any of your thoughts and thanks for visiting!
For the past several weeks I’ve been working to organize a local photo walk as part of Scott Kelby’s 3rd Annual Worldwide Photo Walk. Last Saturday was the big day and we had an amazing turnout of 20 photographers! It was a great outing and I had a lot of fun meeting other photographers in the area. I use the word “area” loosely because many participants traveled some distance to attend. I believe a few folks even drove upwards of 2 hours specifically for this event – I couldn’t be more grateful for that.
It was sweltering… with a heat index over 100 by our 9AM start if I had to venture a guess. I spent a lot of time trying to talk with other photographers, making sure folks had a bottle of water and they were finding shade if they needed it. It was a tough challenge because the group scattered much more quickly than I had anticipated. This was definitely a group that liked to engaged in their photography! I only managed to click off about 100 frames in two hours. I’m posting a few of my favorites today and would love to hear your thoughts.
Outside of the Worldwide event, I’ll be planning these walks 2 or 3 times a year here on the Outer Banks. If you’re interested, keep an eye out on obxphotowalk.com for the next event!
Not much time to blog today but I did want to share something quick from last night. I intended to go out and work on testing some stuff for this IR radiation filter problem, but found I was clouded out.
There is a gigantic Purple Martin roost over at the Umstead Bridge connecting Roanoke Island to Manns Harbor – an estimated 100,000 bird converge at sunrise and sunset.
This is a composite concept I’m working on. Now that I’ve assembled this first version, I do know that I want to go back and capture some more material and try it again.
Speaking of filters – if anyone has any scratched 4×6″ filters they’d like to donate to a good idea – doesn’t matter what they are, I’d be interested. Really just looking for 4×6″ optical resin to test something.
