David’s Blog

I know, you didn't ask for homework this summer but then again who does? I remember getting homework for the summer, I think. I am sure that not only did I never do it I never had any intention of doing it. Summer is for hiking and swimming and reading the sports page. It is certainly not for homework. I mean really, who would do homework in the summer?...

Those rascally spring ephemeral wildflowers! You wait all winter, your pulse quickening as March dissolves into April, eyes on the ground ever scanning for green hints of blossoms to come. And then when the time comes and the flowers are blooming, Poof! They are gone! Botanists call them ephemerals because they have a very short period of time to grow,...

I was prowling around some old teaching handouts of mine preparing for my upcoming workshops and found this excerpt from an article I wrote 20 years ago entitled "On Becoming a Pro."  the message is as relavent now as is was then.  The premise of the article was a series of questions an amateur photographer might ask some old, crusty pros. Just for the...

Its diffuser season here in Vermont, the time of the year when there is lots of little stuff to photograph and often lots of bright sun in the sky. Unfortunately, those two things don't usually go hand in hand. Here is my rule of thumb on the relationship between the type of light and subject- soft, delicate subjects need soft, delicate light and hard,...

It is that time of the year for flower photography, at least for most of you. Not so up here in the cold climes of Vermont but else where many of you are scraping off the icy crust of inactivity lingering from this last winter and are out searching for wildflowers to photograph. So what is the most overlooked aspect of wildflower photography? We all know...

I wanted to let everyone know that there are only a couple places left on both my Pacific Rim National Park workshop ( on Vancouver Island, Canada and on my Shooting Like a Pro workshop that I hold in my home area of Manchester, Vermont. The Pacific Rim National Park is the wildest, most wonderful workshop location that I know of in North America. The...

The larger concept with regards to fiddling around too much before taking a picture is that in the digital photography world a camera is nothing more than a device to capture data. That's it. Picture taking is the process of capturing a good set of data. This means there aren't too many blocked up shadows or burned out highlights, the depth of field is...

One of the common things I see when doing workshops is how much phiddling, excuse me, fiddling goes on before a picture is taken. Fiddling, for those of you who aren't familiar with this technical term, is the art of making unnecessary and ridiculously fine adjustments to a image that is basically just fine. The two places that people fiddle the most are...

I just returned from a great workshop for the Rhode Island Photographic Society. We spent much of our time prowling around the beautiful coast of this little state, a coast that is more than 400 miles long! Two mornings we headed for the working harbor of Galilee and my students got some amazing shots- wonderfully bizarre and colorful abstracts mostly....