Welcome to our blog! Come here often to get insights to our creative endeavors and have fun reading about our imaging adventures. We'll keep you up-to-date on our diverse range of projects and share info about our exciting photo workshops. Enjoy!



  • Still a few seats left in my upcoming May 26 "Intermediate DSLR Photography" workshop at the Octagon Center in Ames!


  • Archive: ‘Travel’



    iPhone Photography Adventure! (May 5 Workshop at The Octagon)

    Tuesday, April 17th, 2012

     

    Good afternoon! Here are a few more details about my upcoming iPhone Photography workshop ~ iPhone Photography Adventure! ~ May 5 at Octagon Center for the Arts in Ames! It’s the third workshop in my Spring 2012 Digital Photography Workshop Series at the Octagon. Here’s the scoop on the session!

    The iPhone has been widely heralded as the first smartphone that finally offered a credible built-in camera – or, some would rather say it’s a fabulous point-and-shoot camera with a built-in phone. Regardless of how you view it, the iPhone’s image quality - particularly that of the newer models - is competitive with, or even better than, many point-and-shoot cameras. And with so many Apps and image-sharing services such as Instagram available for the device, image capture, manipulation, and sharing with the iPhone have become amazingly fun!

    This 3-hour workshop is designed to help the iPhone user master the phone’s camera and become familiar with a suite of photography Apps that will allow you to have an absolute blast taking, manipulating, and sharing iPhone photos!

    We will begin by covering techniques of shooting the camera using professional photo techniques, and will explore a collection of the more capable available photography and image-manipulation Apps. Whether you want to create photo-realistic snapshots or creative art; whether you want sleek, modern looks, or retro/vintage grunge; whether you want to share your images online, via a mobile device, or to make prints (Gasp – yes, it’s possible!); there will be something for you in this session!

    We’ll build a portfolio of iPhone photos when we venture out to an eclectic mix of fun Ames locations to photograph a variety of subjects while discussing camera-handling techniques, composition, and lighting. With a collection of newly-created images, we’ll return to the Octagon’s North Studio to post-process and share our masterpieces – all on our iPhones.

    Participants should bring their iPhone and have an Apple ID to download Apps during the session. Note that while some of the Apps we’ll cover are free, others may cost $3.00-4.00 each depending on your imaging tastes.

    Registration materials for this workshop are available on the Octagon website, here.

    Thanks for reading! If you’re in the area and are an iPhone user, I hope you’ll join us for this fun event!

    A note about these photos: The images in the above gallery were captured with my iPhone 4s, and manipulated with an assortment of Apps that we’ll discuss and use in the May 5 class. The above images were cropped into the square format for sharing on the Instagram photo-sharing service. I happen to really like the square image format - it reminds me of the fun I used to have working with my medium format Rolleiflex film cameras, which also produced square photographs! I also happen to really like textured images with rough borders and a grungy overall look. But that’s just my style – participant workshop images won’t necessarily be square, or textured, or grungy – participants will leave the workshop with the tools to share photos that express their own artistic style!

    2011 Autumn Color Workshops

    Sunday, September 11th, 2011

    Our popular annual Autumn Color photography workshops are fast approaching – and there are still spots available. This year we are expanding the Midwest Nature Photography Field Workshops fall color events to include another fabulous Iowa location – Wildcat Den State Park!

    Saturday, October 15, we’ll be offering our one-day field workshop at the gorgeous Wildcat Den State Park, near Muscatine, Iowa. This lovely state park is conveniently located about 30-minutes West of Davenport, 1 hour Southeast of Iowa City, or 2 hours 40 minutes East of Des Moines. It features a variety of fabulous nature photography subjects, and a historic stream-side mill.

    Sunday, October 23, we’ll then be returning to the beautiful Ledges State Park in Boone County (about 30 minutes North of Des Moines) for another one-day field workshop. The Ledges has been a highly productive workshop location for us in past years! This park’s mix of prairie, cliffs, and deep valley streams make a marvelous location for our workshop participants. Central Iowa photographers won’t want to miss this opportunity to shoot with us!

    The itinerary for each Autumn Color workshop begins early, with a quick pre-dawn get-acquainted meeting, and then we move right into a very packed day of hands-on photography, creating beautiful fall color photographs until dusk!

    Topics covered include both basic and advanced topics of outdoor nature photography, including exposure, selective focus, composition, proper field technique, numerous creative techniques, equipment and gear, and much more.  Our experienced instructors are hands-on and do not shoot their own images in the field; rather, they focus 100% of their efforts on assisting participants to learn proper technique and to create fantastic images. Our goal is to help you return from the field at the end of the day with a collection of publication-quality autumn color photographs including landscapes, close-up or macro images, and evocative artistic images.

    Our Autumn Color one-day field workshops generally sell out and have a waiting list! We keep group size small to ensure plentiful individual attention and to allow the group to move from location to location in the park without difficulty. If interested in joining us for one or both days, please contact us right away for more information and to reserve your spot! Please note that our workshops are targeted at SLR users – digital or film.

    For more information, please see this link. For questions or to register, please contact us right away! Registrants will receive complete itinerary, details of the day, packing list, and a list of recommended nearby hotels, prior to the event.

    As always, thanks for your interest in the Midwest Nature Photography Field Workshop Series. See you in the Field!

    View from the Frog Bleachers

    Tuesday, July 5th, 2011

    Recently, I visited one of my favorite “soul places,” a beautiful local park with a lovely natural pond area.  The pond is full of frogs of several varieties, including very large bullfrogs.  Located over part of the pond, are some covered, tiered benches on a platform – the platform is sort of a dock over the water, and the tiered benches are not unlike those in a (very) small sports stadium.

    This location is an extremely peaceful place: there are few visitors most days, and the sounds are merely those of the water, of course the frogs, insects, and birds. It’s one of those places that is fabulous to reflect, to think, to be inspired by nature, or perhaps to share quiet time or even mark a special occasion with someone special.

    Recently, I’ve been inspired to refer to the tiered benches at the pond as “The Frog Bleachers.”  Here’s a recent image created there, which I call simply “View from the Frog Bleachers.” Enjoy!

    Halloween at Granary Burying Ground, Boston

    Saturday, October 30th, 2010

    Finding myself in Boston a few days before Halloween, it seemed an appropriate time to visit an historic graveyard.  So I stopped in at the Granary Burying Ground on Tremont Street.  The Granary Burying Ground is noted as being one of the oldest graveyards in Boston (it’s not the oldest, but rather the third oldest), founded in 1660. But it’s the final resting place of many Boston notables, such as Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, several other signers of the Declaration of Independence, Samuel Sewell (the Salem witch trials judge), some members of Ben Franklin’s Family, and the victims of the Boston Massacre.

    The day was warm, rainy, humid, dank, and overcast…a perfect day for making some moody photographs in one of the nation’s oldest cemetaries.  I played with some long exposures, and did some lightpainting with my little keychain LED light.

    Here are a few of my favorites.  Enjoy, and Happy Halloween!


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