Winter View, Hudson Valley

Canon 1DS Mk III, 19mm, 1/8 sec, f/14, ISO 200

Winter has been rather mild this year with little of no snow fall until now – finally! With 4-6″ on the ground, I headed out for a long and very cold hike yesterday up to this spot overlooking Cold Spring, with West Point Military Academy further south along the Hudson. I managed to capture just this single image after struggling to find an interesting foreground and eliminating trees and branches that would have been distractions in the composition. I used a  single 2 stop graduated filter to darken the sky and let the highlights in the foreground snow really help lead the eye into the composition.

With ambient temperatures around 4°, it’s tough to manage the controls on the camera and keep my fingers warm, so I use Manzella convertible gloves which make it easy to use my fingers when I need to, but also keep them warm. I have a very difficult time with cold fingers, so I always keep chemical hand warmers in my pockets for that extra burst of heat.

I love visiting this spot during in different seasons and conditions, you never know what you’re going to get, and it challenges me to find new ways to photograph the same view. Thanks for reading!

Cloud Light, Hudson River

“A heart in love with beauty never grows old” – Turkish proverb

Trail Fog, Hudson Valley

“He who is contented is rich.” – Lao Tzu

Trees in Silence, Hudson Valley

“In a world filled with metrics and bestseller lists, it’s easy to decide that everyone is your competitor and easier still to worry about your rank. Worry all you want, but if it gets in the way of your art or starts changing your mission, it’s probably a mistake.” – Seth Godin

This great quote captures much of what I have struggled with over the years, and how I think about the whole issue of comparisons these days. Competition is rampant in landscape and nature photography – it seems there are always contests to enter, and endless ways to compare ourselves to the “competition”.

Just visit any art fair (or worse participate in one) to experience this first hand. The endless “I can do that” or “is my work good enough” really misses the point of it all. If you have something to say, then it should measure up against what you have said in the past. If it’s not making an impact, then it’s time to improve your vocabulary, or practice your story telling. Comparing our images to others doesn’t take into consideration many important variables like skill, dedication, practice, and most crucial personal experience.

If you allow your  perceptions of where you stand in the overall “rank” of photography to guide your creativity, then you’ll never develop your own vision. Is there a shortage of photography in the world today? Not by any stretch of the imagination – in fact we are over saturated with imagery. I would argue that what is in short supply are original voices willing to tell their stories about what inspires them.

Don’t worry about competition, worry about whether you are getting any real responses to your work – often that comes when you forget about what everyone else is doing.

Hemlocks and Hardwoods Trail, Kejimkejik National Park, NS

I’ve been traveling in New Brunswick and southern Nova Scotia over the last two weeks on a much needed family vacation, so that’s the main reason for my lack of activity on the blog recently. I typically try and take some time off in August before the busy fall schedule starts, both personally and professionally. It’s been a very busy first half of the year for me so far, and the remainder looks no different. I have no complaints, and can only be grateful for the opportunity to spend my time doing what I love to do – for me that is the essence of humility.

Exposed Rocks, Bay of Fundy, NS

The Bay of Fundy in northeastern Canada is world renowned for it’s amazing tides, up to 40 ft in some places, and this creates some very unique landscapes to photograph. I spent most of my time on the peninsula of Nova Scotia, which is southwest of  Cape Breton Island which I visited and photographed last year. I also had a chance to visit Kejimkujik National Park  which has great canoeing and biking trails, plus offers amazing photographic opportunities.  I was specifically interested in a section of the park that contains a rare stand of old growth hard wood trees, and a rainy day provided great light and mood- perfect for image making.

Tidal Pools, Bay of Fundy, NS

We also visited Bay of Fundy National Park and Fundy Trail in New Brunswick, places I definitely plan to visit again in the future. I enjoyed mountain biking with the family, as well as visiting many of the ports and harbors in the area. Of course my main interest was the amazing seascapes along the coast, so I’ll be uploading more images over the next few days as I get more time to process my raw files. I also plan to create some Lightroom videos showing how I processed the images. Stay tuned…

Parker Cove, Nova Scotia

Fog and Light, Hudson Valley

For me, the practice of photography often leads to more questions about subject matter and why I am drawn to some more than others. Certainly the ‘”voice” or vision that we all have is a large part of that, and it is something I have been thinking about for quite some time now. This happens after a while, when you’ve made all types of images, and decide you want to get something more out of all the time you invest in your work.

Light is magic to me. It speaks to me in ways that nothing else in my life has. So many ways to interpret it, and composition is so vital to conveying some type of message or meaning, Whether I’ve done that with “Fog and Light” is up to the viewer, but I do know that during the very short amount of time I had to capture this fleeting moment, I knew of nothing else, except for the light, my breathing, and my appreciation for being where I was. Ironically it is the same mountain I climb 2-3 times a week, and I have to admit it gets rather dull at times. But there is always something to learn from the ordinary in our lives, and often it is right in front of us. We just have to learn to see it.

This is one exposure, no HDR or filters. I exposed for the vegetation by turning the camera away from the light and setting my exposure, then recomposing back towards the light. This keeps the shadows from getting too dark, and of course blows out the light rays around the tree . A little highlight recovery and fill light in Lightroom evens everything out, and gives me the interpretation I was after.

Hidden Path, Hudson Valley

I love capturing fog in nature, and often the subject of the image becomes the fog itself. How do we photograph fog? Well for sure there has to be some context and that is where composition and the use of light is essential.

While I was drawn to the shapes of these trees and the path that leads  between them to some further unknown destination, it is the fog that creates the mood and feel. The atmosphere is what I really wanted to convey, and so the challenge is not to let the other parts of the scene obscure the main character of the image, the fog.

I can’t tell how much I have practiced this, and how often I have failed. But slowly my sense of composition and balance is getting closer to what my senses tell me when I’m in the field. What does that translate to in the real world? Simplify, simplify, and simplify. Lead the viewers eye without any distractions, tell your story with as little words as possible, or in this case, remove everything from the frame that does not add to the image.  Time and practice is all it takes, and those investments are never wasted when it comes to photography!

From a technical standpoint, I find I usually have to overexpose my meter reading by about a stop or so when photographing in heavy fog, otherwise I don’t get the important parts of the image into the right hand side of my histogram. I want to preserve the dark shadows more than the highlights here, and not lose the detail in the trunks of the trees. While this scene does not exceed the dynamic range of most DSLR’s, by exposing to the right I keep the shadows cleaner (less noise), and my large prints look that much better for it.

Below you can see my histogram in Lightroom 3 and the different parts of the image that I think about when both exposing and processing the RAW file. The final image was finished and printed completely in Lightroom, I didn’t see any need to export to Photoshop.

Comments, feedback, and questions are always welcome, thanks for reading!