Near Tofino, BC. 4 Different Skies. The key to great black and white images (and by this I mean the B+W part, obviously light, lines, and moments still come first) is tonal contrasts. Those contrasts will occur within the scene, of course, but the way we chose to render them in Lightroom (or PS, ACR, etc) has a strong impact …
Snake Oil & Comb-overs: A Rant.
I initially posted this graphic in 2008. Seemed appropriate to bring it back… A friend of mine is a world-class chef. He got there after a lot of hard work. He studied under other chefs, all of them masters at what they do. He’s really good at what he does; he’s both a craftsman and an artist. He did not …
Five Minutes, Ten Stops
Lake Laberge, YT, 2012. Apart from a difference in timing, these two images might have been identical. What separates them, in terms of their aesthetic, is a difference in five minutes, and ten f/stops. The second image was made just five minutes after the first frame, but with the addition of the Lee Big Stopper, a 10-stop ND filter …
Lake of Circles, Post-processing.
Here’s one of my favourite images from the trip up to the arctic last month, and a quick walk-through on the post-processing. In Vision & Voice I explain what I call the vision-driven workflow, and there are 4 steps: Identify Intent, Minimize Distractions, Maximize Mood, and Direct the Eye. Identifying the intent here was simply a matter of asking myself …
Cape Kiwanda Post-Production
On Wednesday I was digging around the archives, looking for something new for this month’s desktop wallpaper when I found an image I forgot I had. This is Cape Kiwanda, near Pacific City, Oregon. I did about 10 minutes of post-production on it in Lightroom 3 as one last hurrah before moving to Lightroom 4. Here are some of the …
Mara Impressions I
Mara Impressions I, Kenya, 2012. Click it to see it larger as the smaller image really does it no justice. I made this in the Maasai Mara, still under the spell of my friend Wendy’s expressionist / abstract work. What struck me most about her work is the effect of motion and light to create new lines, almost brush strokes, …
Faking It.
Ice Abstract, Peggy’s Cove, NS. 2012. Every artist I know, particularly those who feel uncomfortable calling themselves artists, feels like they’re faking it. In those moments when I’m totally transparent and feeling brave, I’ll tell you it’s one of the two fears with which I wrestle daily – the first that one day I’ll wake to find my muse has …
My Next Book – The Print & The Process
My next book just went up on Amazon. It’s always a little surreal because no one tells me these things and suddenly I’m looking at a cover of a book that looks suspiciously like mine. The less coffee I’ve had, the longer it takes me to figure it out. Wait! That’s MY book! 🙂 The Print & The Process began …
Mongolia Dodged & Burnt
Gobi Desert, Mongolia, 2012. Click to enlarge. I shot this image in the Gobi last week and used it to show a little dodge and burn to some of the photographers I was traveling with. Most of my images get a little dodge (lighten) and burn (darken), to push and pull the eye subtly through the image. If you know …
Photographing My Father
This fall I took my girl and my camera to visit my father. We drank some wine, watched the leaves change colour, spent some time riding around the back roads in his 1949 Willys Jeep, Patches. And we went off for an hour to do a portrait project I’ve been wanting to do, more and more urgently as my father …