David’s Blog
Thoughts on Writing
I have several rules to writing. OK, there are not really rules. Let’s call them strong suggestions. None of these are original and I take no credit for any of them, but all have proved true over my 30 years of writing. The suggestions are not listed by importance — I put them on the page as they tumbled off my pointy, little head. Write however is...
Hidden behind the Color
Messin' around with some pics late last night and look what I found!! There, right in front of me all this time, where some really nice black and white forest images! they had been hiding behind all the wonderful color! Several of the 20 or so pics I turned into b&w in Lightroom where color images that were nice but didn't quite make it as really nice....
Photographing the Forest
Forests are some of the hardest environments to photograph in, at least they are for me. I doubt anyone has taken more pictures in forests over the last 30 years but still I find it an extremely challenging place to find a good image. The problem is that there is just so much stuff going on visually it seems almost impossible to make any sense of it so...
Spring Tulips!
Since it is cold, dreary and miserable here in the Northeast I thought I would post some very Spring tulip pics. These were all taken one morning in the Keukenhof Garden, an internationally famous garden in the Netherlands, I visited a couple of years ago. April is tulip season in the Netherlands so if these photos interest you I would get ye' to Amsterdam...
Making a Difference with your Photography
Have we all had, by now, just enough of the ‘Hey, look what I did!’ part of photography? We show our friends, we show our family, we show our camera clubbers, we show our workmates, our neighbors, our maids, our butlers, we basically show everyone we possibly can our pictures...and then what? Are we doing all this work, putting in all this time, spending...
Oldies-4
Okay, just one more (maybe). This is a shot of the tundra in Denali National Park in early September- the peak of their fall color! There were miles and miles of magnificent tundra- all right under your feet! Of course, there were also grizzly bears and caribou and moose and that terribly distracting towering white mountain- Denali- to photograph as well....
More Oldies-3
This was the perfect day at Crabtree lake in the Oregon Cascades- fresh snow, no wind, soft light and no a soul in sight. I had one of the prettiest places I have ever been all to myself. A week later the access was snowed in so I was lucky to get this shot when I did. I took lots of shots of this lake but this one I like the best. I need to go back!
More Oldies-2
There was a time when I spent every April photographing desert flowers in Arizona. I haven't been back in two decades but looking at this image it makes me want to go back and do it all over again. I took this Globemallow with my Pentax 6x7 medium format camera. It wasn't very good for close-ups but from a couple of feet away it worked really well. I was...
More Oldies
Sol Duc Falls in Olympic National Park, Washington is one of my all-time favorite places in the world. It is a ¾ mile hike through a magnificent old forest to get to the falls and there are photographs everywhere. Go there on a quiet, misty day or even a lightly raining day- the light will be magnificent and the forest will magically glow. Please don't go...
Golden Oldies
You all are going to have to suffer through a visual trip down memory lane for a few posts. I am just about done going through my 100,ooo slides I had in my office and in the process of doing so I found some images that I hadn't seen in a long, long time. The first ones I am going to show were taken with a Pentax 6x7 that I owned for a few years in the...
More Errors!
Here's an oldie of mine that I took 20 years ago. Do you see the compositional error that makes me twitch every time I look at this photo? The penguins are placed too close to the corner or the composition. It's not a horrible composition but it is also not as good as it could've been. Moving the penguins out, away from the corner just a smidge would've...