Photography

A large flock of red-winged blackbirds flushes from the brush and takes flight over the San Luis National Wildlife Reserve, California Red-Winged Blackbirds in Flight. San Luis National Wildlife Refuge, California. November 25, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved. A large flock of red-winged blackbirds flushes from the brush and takes flight over the San Luis National Wildlife Reserve, California I first started traveling to and photographing these areas in the California Central Valley because I was looking for sandhill cranes. I quickly discovered the other large migratory birds, especially the geese. But as I go back more often I see more and more things that are worth photographing. On this visit I had a bit of midday time to kill so I decided to go look at a new (to me) area, the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge. The San Luis area is not far from the Merced NWR, where I have most often photographed in this part of the valley. My initial thinking was that it might be an alternative location in which to look for the same flocks of Ross’s geese that I find at Merced, but the staff people at the San Luis visitor center suggested otherwise. They did mention one area further north in the reserve where people had reported good bird viewing, so I decided to take a look. I didn’t see any geese there during my short visit, but I did see a bunch of other interesting birds, including this large and active flock of red-winged blackbirds, who obligingly lined themselves up to display the bright red areas along the base of their wings. G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell. Photographs, text and other media in this RSS news feed from the G Dan Mitchell Photography blog are © copyright G Dan Mitchell - all rights reserved. This web site news feed is for personal, non-commercial use only.

NOTE: the images in this feed have been downsized or removed for copyright reasons. To see them in their unmodified state, please view the original post by clicking here.We have been incredibly lucky over the last three years in that we’ve had countless fantastic couples and locations. We’ve met some of the friendliest people we could ever ask for and it’s made us incredibly proud to photograph weddings full-time. Richard and Gemma’s York Maze wedding was the epitome of everything we have come to love about wedding photography – an awesome couple who both looked great on the day, a multitude of beautiful details and decorations and guests who were so clearly having fun it really was a pleasure to shoot. The incredible array of flowers were provided and arranged by Gemma’s Aunt as part of a final college project and I have to say we were blown away. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many different flowers I can’t name in one room, the whole venue looked incredible with little decorations (many of which were handmade) adorning all three rooms. Sometimes at weddings we see friends and family going above and beyond to help out the bride and groom, it was clear just how much Richard and Gemma mean to their friends and family who stayed at the Maze all day on the Friday getting the venue ready. It just seemed like everyone wanted to do anything and everything to make sure the day went perfectly and with so much goodwill it was hard to see it going any other way. Richard and Gemma are just that kind of couple, you just can’t help but love their company, in fact when we first met them back in September we spent most of the day walking around Fountains Abbey chatting away about their plans. We were also blown away with our couple shots from their day, with so many gorgeous locations we were spoilt for choice! We finished with some photographs with Gemma and Richard sat with blankets outside their amazing ti-pi tent (were they were staying the night) and a lit fire – it seemed like the perfect way to end a perfect wedding. - Chris and Verity Sansom Photography are based in Leeds, UK covering weddings abroad as well as close to home.

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Cape St. Mary’s Ecological Reserve is about a one hour drive south on Highway 100 from the Marine Atlantic ferry terminus of Argentia. The drive to the reserve itself is fascinating and provides many opportunities for images of the rugged maritime coastline, particularly around Ship Cove and Gooseberry Cove. Should your departure point be the international airport at St. John’s, the drive will take about three hours as you travel inland via Salmonier Line, and south across the Avalon Peninsula to St. Bride’s.  Should you want the most scenic drive from St. John’s, take the 350Km coastal drive along what is known locally as the “Irish Loop.”  Be forewarned, however, you will want to stop continuously and can easily spend a couple of days playing tourist before you arrive at the Placentia Bay community of St. Brides. Once at the reserve your best vantage point will be mere metres from the large precipitous pinnacle known as Bird Rock, which is a 30-minute walk from the Visitation Centre. You will be welcomed to Bird Rock by a chorus originating from the third largest nesting colony of Northern gannets in North America. In addition there is a large rookery of common murre (known locally as turres), black-legged kittiwake, thick-billed murre, razorbill, black guillemont, double-crested and great cormorant as well as Northern fulmar all nesting at the site.  By far the most spectacular of these Pelagic species that nest here each summer is the golden headed avian dive bombing gannet. You will also want to be vigilant as there is a strong possibility you will see the resident red fox scampering along the headlines in search of a poultry lunch. Cape St. Mary’s is one of the best locations in eastern Canada to make portraits of the sleek Northern Gannet. Images can be made here even during the harsh light of high-noon. For unique pictures mount your camera on a tripod and extend the legs as far as possible. You can safely lie on the cliff edge and then extend the tripod mounted camera out over the edge of the cliff face, and point the camera straight down yielding what will look like an aerial shot. You should be able to program your camera to take a series of images with a time lapse between frames and thereby increase the probability of getting a good frame.  When you think you have finished the sequence —I would recommend starting with a five image sequence— simply retrieve the camera back to terra firma and see if you have captured a “keeper.”  The nice thing about this location is that if you aren’t happy with your results the first time, try again – the birds and rocks aren’t going anywhere soon. This is also a great location to practise panning technique. If you just sit and watch the birds for awhile, notice how the gannet when fishing dive bomb from great heights and plunge into the water at speed upwards of 100 km/h (60 mph).  The distance and the speed will probably make panning shots of a diving bird near impossible; however, if you observe the birds as they take off and land on Bird Rock you should notice several things: they will almost hover as they come in to land and they will usually always land facing into the wind (as do all birds).  It won’t take long until you learn the habits of the gannets, and why I think they are the most beautiful of all sea birds. With 20,000 nesting pairs of gannets, Cape St. Mary’s is the second largest rookery in Canada.  Quebec’s Bonaventure Island is the largest with around 50,000 pair. Most of your image making will be done facing a southerly direction with an unobstructed field of view to both the east and west.  Pre-dawn is my preferred time, which means leaving the Interpretation Centre about an hour before sunrise. Simply do a web search or check the St. John’s newspaper, the Evening Telegram, for sunrise times. You should also be aware that this area annually receives around 200 days of fog per year, so you will want to dress warmly with a rain shell. Extreme ca

Recently, I attempted to roughly outline the parameters of the gap between the recipes you see here on this site and what I might have made for dinner last night. In the first category, we’ve got words like aspirational and exceptional or unusual and best in category or just seriously we all need to make this right now. It’s fun, noteworthy stuff. Sure, it’s also our dinner, you know, on the days such exciting things come to pass in my kitchen, but it’s the second category — staples, comforts and easy wins, things that miraculously make all three people around the table happy at the same time — that dominate our table the rest of the time. Now, I was perfectly content to keep this dull stuff to myself — workaday salads, breaded thigh cutlets, flatbread with whatever vegetable needs to be used up first — but you asked. And while at first I resisted because I just thought you were being polite in a “We’d love to hear every precious new word your kid used incorrectly this week” or “No, please tell me more about how web analytics work,” kind of way, I’ve since concluded that this is silly. Everyone needs dinner inspiration. Maybe something here could be yours. I hope it will be. ... Read the rest of greek salad with lemon and oregano on smittenkitchen.com © smitten kitchen 2006-2012. | permalink to greek salad with lemon and oregano | no comment to date | see more: Cucumber, Greek, Peppers, Photo, Salad, Summer, Tomatoes

Creating a reflection using Photoshop is one of those things that at first glance looks really hard, but really isn’t, once you break down the steps (just light Light Painting which I covered in another two part series). In this article I’m going to demystify creating a reflection, a technique that works particularly well on images with open pavement, and HDR processed images which tend to make the pavement look wet already. We’re going to learn how to go from this . . . To this! In less than 10 minutes! I recently showed one my HDR classes how to do this, and they all followed along with me step by step.  Some of them were using Elements (which works just fine, but you may find the menus and choices look slightly different), and this technique can be done using that program too, so if you use Elements, not to worry. Many of my students were also self proclaimed “Photoshop novices” and when I asked them if they thought they’d be able to this when I showed the before and after images, most said “no”!  But they all did, and we were done in less than 10 minutes. **Note that also included me going super slow to ensure each of the 12 people in the class were on the same page with me. I’m going to guess this will take less than 5 – ready GO! Here are the six easy steps to follow in Photoshop.  This is the super condensed version for those quick readers and skimmers. copy a section of the image paste it as a new layer flip it position it change the layer blend mode mask it That’s it! You want a few more details? Let’s dive in a little deeper into each step STEP ONE – COPY Using the marque tool (“M” is the keyboard shortcut) draw a box around an area of your image that will become the reflection (see Figure #1 below). Make sure you go edge to edge on the sides, and get enough of the image vertically. If you grab more than you need that’s fine we’ll be moving it around and masking later anyway. Figure #1 make a selection Copy the selection as a new layer. You can do that a few ways. right click on the image and from the menu that pops up choose “layer via copy” (see Figure #2 below) from the edit menu choose “copy” or using the keyboard shortcut “command/control+c”  (see Figure #3 below) Figure #2 right click>Layer Via Copy Figure #3 Copy from Edit menu STEP TWO – PASTE AS NEW LAYER If you chose the “layer via copy” method above you already have the selection pasted as a new layer. If you haven’t already done that go ahead and paste either from the Edit>Paste menu option of the keyboard shortcut “command/control+v”. You will end up with something that looks like this, Figure #4 below. Figure #4 paste new layer Doesn’t look much different right? Right! Because it’s basically on top of itself.  But look at your layers, it is there on a new layer and it only grabbed part of the image. Now the magic begins! STEP THREE – FLIP IT Next from your Edit menu choose “Edit>Transform>Flip vertical” to flip this new layer upside down. You should end up with something funny looking like Figure #5 below. Figure #5 flip vertically STEP FOUR – POSITION IT Figure #6 move tool Next select your MOVE tool from your tool palette (see Figure #6 right – “v” is the keyboard shortcut) and grab the flipped layer and drag it down until the images start to line up where the reflection will begin. In my image I’m using the edge of the sidewalk in front of the diner. If it doesn’t line up perfectly don’t worry about it, you can mask any imperfect bits out later in step six. Now you want to have something that looks like Figure #7 below. The reflection is in roughly the right position. Make sure you don’t move side to side, just down, otherwise you’ll have gaps on the edges of your reflection. NOTE: once you&

by Jonathan Blaustein Jonathan Blaustein: When did you first start taking photographs? When did it all begin? Alec Soth: In high school, I had this experience that a lot of people have. I had a great teacher that woke me up. In that case, he was a painting teacher. He did a little session, once, on photography, and I wasn’t particularly drawn to it. But I knew that I wasn’t a painter, deep down. So I did other things. I made sculptures outdoors, and stuff like that. I went to school thinking I’d be some sort of painter or installation artist. While I was in school, I discovered photography in a new way, partly through photographing these sculptures I was making outdoors. JB: This is at Sarah Lawrence? AS: Sarah Lawrence. Correct. JB: You studied with Joel Sternfeld? AS: Yes. Joel taught there, but it was impossible to get a class with him. He was too popular. So I took two different summer courses in photography, while I was home in Minnesota. One was at the University of Minnesota, and the other was at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. I got excited about photography, and then finally got into Joel’s classes. I took two classes with him, and it was amazing and fantastic. JB: What were some of the core concepts that embedded in your young artist consciousness when you worked with him? AS: It’s curious. At that time, when I fell in love with photography, I was a typical American who was influenced by American things. I was really influenced by that American tradition of photography, in which Joel was a major player. You know, that whole MoMA, Stephen Shore, Eggleston to Walker Evans trajectory. And I was in love with that. Road photography. The standard stuff. The curious thing about Joel, as a teacher, he was adamant that people not mimic him. He’s interested in a lot of different things. This was, at the time, 1990 or so. Post-modern, Cindy Sherman, staged photography was the rage. He really encouraged that. The truth is that I did that sort of work back then. And I didn’t do work like him, or straight photography much at all, at that time. But I wanted to. I just felt that it wasn’t right to. His influence is a peculiar one. I loved his work, I loved him, but almost out of respect, I didn’t want to work like him. It was only when I was away from school that I started dealing with his influence, and the influence of that generation of photographers. JB: Do you now feel comfortable seeing your work in that continuum? It’s funny that you mention MoMA, because I was just there, and there was one wall in the permanent collection installation that was totally insane. It has one of Joel’s pictures, and then the Bechers, Stephen Shore, Robert Adams, Eggleston, and then below it were all the Ed Ruscha artist books. It was like 200 square feet of real estate that captured the fantasies and wet dreams of tens of thousands of American photographers. AS: (laughing.) JB: So next time MoMA hangs something like that, if one of your pictures is up there next to those guys, what does that do to your head? AS: (pause.) I don’t know. First of all, with all respect to MoMA, it doesn’t mean what it used to mean. It’s a different world. Without a doubt, my work, whatever its quality, falls in that historical lineage. There’s no getting away from it. That’s cool. I’m an American photographer. I don’t want to be limited strictly to that. Hopefully I’m not just covering old ground. But I’m fine with that comparison. JB: You dodged the whole ego question, about people putting your work in that pantheon, which is cool. But I think it’s easy to differentiate you, as it’s easy to differentiate the time in which we’re living. One of my little catchphrases, because as a blogger, it never hurts to have a catchphrase, is I love to talk about the 21st Century Hustle. I’ve got to trademark it one of these days

Flickr Pro, which had allowed users to pay for more storage space, is going away. “There’s no such thing as Flickr Pro today because [with so many people taking photographs] there’s really no such thing as professional photographers anymore,” Mayer said (though she acknowledged that there are “different skill levels”). via @zarias more: Tech News and Analysis. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A Revolutionary New Website Design: HTML5 Fast, Easy to Build, Smart Phone/Pad Friendly, Multimedia Galleries and Retina Ready. Free demo (here).

‘Make Flickr awesome again.’ That was the Internet’s message to Marissa Mayer when she was appointed CEO of Yahoo! last year. Last night’s announcement of a new-look Flickr with a new business model was her, and her team’s, response to that claxon. But are the changes all that awesome? To summarise, ‘New Flickr’ has done away with the divide between ‘Free’ and ‘Pro’ accounts. Before, ‘Free’ membership meant limited image display that was supported by ads. ‘Pro’ accounts cost about $25 a year, enjoyed unlimited storage, provided statistical analysis, and were ad-free. Now, everyone has one terabyte of storage for free and photos are undoubtedly the heart-and-soul of the newly designed site. The new-look moasic-style photostream If you want to enjoy Flickr ad-free and have access to statistics, you need to pay $50 a year. For $500 a year, you can buy a Doublr account and double your storage space. Understandably, the split between the ‘Wow’ and the ‘Grr’ reactions seems to fall along the divide between ordinary members and ‘Pro’ members. For ordinary members—those who didn’t pay about $25 a year for unlimited uploads, statistical analysis, and no ads—it’s a win. One terabyte of storage for free, full-resolution display, and some of the organisational tools that were previously the preserve of ‘Pro’ members: what’s to complain about? There are two primary complaints that Flickr needs to solve, and quickly. The first is the treatment of its old ‘Pro’ members. I paid for Pro membership because I wanted the unlimited storage, I appreciated the statistical analysis, and I liked the ad-free experience. ‘Pro’ exists no longer, and instead there is a great deal of confusion as to which old ‘Pro’ members will be grandfathered in to the new deal on their old terms. It seems as if some might, and some won’t. Apart from not being able to determine easily if our previous contracts will be honoured, why the differentiation at all? Flickr’s ‘Pro’ membership was a relatively small percentage of its overall membership; giving all these loyal users the benefit of the doubt seems only fair. The old ‘Pro’ members were the old Flickr stalwarts, who stuck by the site when it felt as if Yahoo! had put it out to seed, but continued to pay them their money and keep the community alive with images and conversation. What could have been a positive transition, with clear communication and recognition for their loyalty, feels more like a shafting. It is, however, an easy fix. The new-look sets lay-out Second, can Flickr please fix its metadata-stripping antics? Display an image online and you run the risk of it being purloined and used without permission; that’s a fact of life. However, there are measures that many of us take to protect our images. Some of us use watermarks, some of us only upload small versions of our images, I’ve disabled the downloading function on Flickr, and most of us append metadata to our pictures. Metadata are a bit like a dogtag, identifying who took an image, where, and when. Unfortunately, Flickr strips images of their metadata, (or takes the collar off of the dog, if you like) so if someone does manage to download one of your pictures, it’s owner can’t be identified. Now that pictures are being displayed bigger and brighter and bolder on Flickr, this is more important than ever. Ensuring that metadata aren’t separated from images really would be awesome. In terms of the look and the feel of the new Flickr: I love it. If the images can’t do the talking, then why bother? And the new moasic layouts and easy enlargement options make it all about the images. When Yahoo! addresses the issues that people are finding troubling, Mayer might’ve answered t