Beavertail and Canada

Last weekend I went out to Beavertail with a couple of friends to do some shooting..the clouds were pretty amazing:  cirrus clouds that almost looked like ocean waves.  The color never really came into the sky as the sun set but this conversion to black and white seemed to capture the feel of that day.
This weekend I am off to the Canadian Rockies for the fifth time.  It is a place that provokes a feeling of peace and belonging in me; there is just something about the Canadian Rockies in Alberta and British Columbia that is inexplicable...I have been blown away by Fitz Roy and Torres del Paine, but there is a quiet strength in the Canadian Rockies that seems to touch my soul...the mountains there are not as dramatic as the Andes but every bit as impressive...

Dressage

A friend and dressage trainer asked me to photograph at her farm recently.  It was a real challenge to go from photographing landscape to photographing horses in motion. The Canon 70-300mmL  F4-5.6 lens is not a fast lens for action, but with the new Mark III, and its ability to shoot a very high ISOs with a minimum of noise,  the lens was more than adequate.  I shot at ISO2000 most of the time with excellent results, hand held with speeds of 1/500 to 1/1000 sec..at F8, I found the background wasn't blurred out enough so I switched to 5.6 or 6.3 and found the results much better...here are a few examples of the shoot.

Canon 5D Mark III in Scotland

These images would never have looked noise free with my Mark II, a camera that I thought was amazing...after talking to a friend, who does a lot of night and twilight photography, about the wonders of the Mark III in low light photography,  I purchased one and  have never looked back...the camera is absolutely mindboggling. The three night images above are taken at ISO 800...it was twilight and I was able to get amazing clarity and brightness without long exposure at ISO 100...the one that is below of the interior of St. Giles Cathedral was taken at ISO 12800 with a Canon 24-70mm 2.8L lens at 42mm...it was hand held..and it is sharp...the interior of the cathedral was dark with lots of shadow, but this camera was able to hold the dynamic range...in the post processing in ACR, I used the Camera Raw noise reduction lightly...the noise was removed..the Mark II could have never handled this shot at ISO12,800; it would have been unusable...what I really loved in Edinburgh was the ability to walk around and shoot with a full frame DSLR, just as if it were a point and shoot...

Scotland

I have just returned from two weeks of photography on Orkney and Shetland...my recommendation to anyone headed to those two islands is that landscape photography is difficult in May..the true sunset didn't come until approximately 10:30pm and sunrise was somewhere around 3am..Most of the time was spent shooting in bright harsh light and it was hard..I am a true landscape photographer who loves the colors of morning and evening, but it just didn't work out for me.. this trip was a compromise with lighting..a lot of it was night photography;  so I did have a lot of practice in that genre..attached are some images from Orkney and Shetland..remember that these islands also have a paucity of trees..Shetland didn't have any trees to speak of, therefore, you are photographing a stark, open landscape..Edinburgh was fantastic to see and lots to photograph architecturally; but only had two days there..planning to go to Glencoe and Skye on my next visit to Scotland; will have to go later in the season in order to get the morning and evening light...

Light Painting

The other night, a few other photographer friends and I went to shoot the sunset on Jamestown..unfortunately, there wasn't a cloud in the sky and the light really sucked...so what do you do when that happens?  And it happens a lot, first of all: you can go home and come back another day..but there is also the opportunity to be creative and try something different. We went below the Newport Bridge shortly after sunset and started to light paint the rocks in foreground.  With a little experimenting with the length of time to light rocks, the images started to improve. Initially, the rocks were too bright and looked very odd, then we shortened the time we lit them with our flashlights and the images improved..then before leaving we tried to paint images in the air with our lights..the lower image is my attempt to paint a horse in air..not bad for a first attempt..but it was a lot of fun and I recommend light painting when you have a bad night with bad light.

good light

Sometimes the light can just blow you away...the other afternoon, while walking my dog in the woods, the late afternoon sun suddenly popped through the dense and turbulent looking cloud cover.  It was magical light: the boring and dull tree trunks of early spring suddenly sprang into life as the sun brought them from nothing into amazing contrast ..this is just a shot taken with my Canon G12 but the way the trees are lit against the dark, brooding sky makes it an interesting image.