Dog art?

Yes... Conan just hosted a dog who's owner claimed he was an artist. The dog proceeded to bark incesantly and walk and bite a board with a paintable surface. Seriously... sure dogs are cute, but can't we all agree that they are not capable of being an artist. I can't believe i am even writing about this. The dog had just won a $100,000 art prize. Maybe I need to rethink my entire approach to creating art.

Btw there are new images in the smoky mountain gallery.

Influence of media presentation devices...

When I first began to study photography intensely over 8 years ago, my preferred image presentation was portrait orientation.  I can't really explain why my eye preferred that orientation, I simply knew I had a bias toward the portrait orientation.  Then I began to quickly learn about the powerful "near/far" composition where one can present a deep 3D image by presenting a very large depth of field spanning from a nearby rock or bush to the distant vista.  Of course the Ansel Adams f64 group  made this approach one of their cornerstones of image presentation.  At that time, many images I was viewing were also in magazines where the preferred orientation is portrait.  

During my first workshop with Alain Briot, one of the photographic exercises he emphasized was to capture an image with both a portrait as well as landscape orientation.  Since that workshop I have made it a practice to do just that.  At first I still preferred the portrait orientation, but recently I have noticed a significant change in my preference for landscape presentations.  A significant majority, if not 100%, of the Smoky Mountain portfolio is going to be presented in landscape orientation.  So i began to reflect on what might have led to the change in my bias.  

The leading candidate is that the change in viewing devices has influenced my eye dramatically.  The move from relatively square TVs and CRT monitors to the more elongated 16:9 HD TVs and LCD computer monitors has certainly influenced my eye's preference for landscape oriented images.  Even the portrait oriented images I have now bother me just a touch when they are presented via my light box image viewer on the web pages. The only time I really like the presentation of the portrait images is when I flip my iPhone so that the image is presented in its full display.  

Another factor is the relative newness of the "panoramic" presentation.  I love this presentation and only web-based presentations on wide screen monitors or fine art prints can present the image as it is intended to be seen.  

I don't know if this influence has made a major impact on all of photography, but it would certainly be interesting to study.  My guess is that as we move away from magazine oriented photography to web-based photography, landscape presentations may become the preferred orientation for images.  See if you can find any correlation to this hypothesis.  

What to do?

You may or may not know that my professional career has been in pharmaceutical sales.  For 23 years I have worked for sanofi-aventis and legacy companies Aventis, Hoechst Marion Roussel, Marion-Merrell-Dow, and Marion Laboratories.  On Monday I was notified that my services were no longer needed as part of the most recent downsize of the company.  Over 750 reps received that information that day and I pray for their futures. 

The pharmaceutical industry in the U.S. is largely in decline with only small glimmers of hope in the biotech arena.  Fewer product approvals every year and big revenue products coming off of patent only foretell more downsizing of the industry in the future. 

So now...what to do?  That is what I spend my every waking moment discerning.  I am not discounting much of anything at the present time.  Everything from teaching to financial services to day-trading to healthcare to law school are all in play.  I ask for your prayers as I and my family go through the process.  In the meantime, this website will largely serve as a place of comfort.  Working and posting new images are the most safisying activies I engage in and I hope to be able to continue to do so here with some consistency.  This refuge will serve as a break from the pressures of career search and job hunting.  Thanks so much for your involvement with this website and your prayers.  Who knows, maybe I will become a full-time photographer!  Take care and until next time.   

iPhone camera fun

It is nice to always have a camera on you nowadays.  The images from the camera phones are great ways to share images with friends and family via Facebook and Blogs.  What has been interesting are the iPhone apps and what they can do to enhance the usability of the in-phone camera.  I have the iPhone 3G and the camera is 2 megapixel with a slightly larger than pinhole camera lens.  The camera works pretty well in brightly lit scenes.  I have been experimenting with the a couple of the panoramic construction apps. 

The first was PanoLab Pro ($2.99).  This app attempts to make a pano out of already captured images.  It does a nice job, but I found the interface wanting and slow and the construction of the panos to fall short most of the time. 

I then found Pano ($2.99) by Debacle Software.  What I like about this software is that it works live with your camera capture.  What this means is that you load the app and it presents to you the live camera view on screen.  You take the first frame of the pano and then the next view of the live screen has the first frame at a slightly reduced opacity so that you can align in real-time the second frame of the pano.  This really makes for well aligned panos and maximizes your frame capture. You can work either in landscape or portrait mode, but not both at the same time.  So you can construct a pano, but not a mosaic. 

Here is one of my first experiments with the program from my living room.  This is straight out of the camera.  It is hard to believe this was captured and constructed within a cell phone!  Just a few short years ago Photoshop had a hard time with this or couldn't even do it automatically.  We were using complicated manual alignment programs like PanoTools with very clunky interfaces to achieve good landscape panoramas. 

The next example is further complicated by the very dark scene, but the pano came together pretty nicely.  I would never have thought of attempting a panoramic image at a rock concert, but it worked pretty well.  I had to take 3 stabs at it to capture the lighting just right as the scene would change rather quickly from capture to capture.  I believe this is a 3 frame capture and it was all accomplished while in the concert, a total of about 3 minutes.  Again, straight out of the camera. 

Now here is a panoramic that proved to be too challenging for PanoLab Pro. 

I subsequently brought all of the images into Photoshop and the automated merge function pieced the pano together nicely. 

Pano Lab Pro will only work with already captured images.  Pano will work with the images while you capture them.  I find Pano to be the better alternative for in-camera processing.  They both can do some very nice things for images that are destined for Facebook or blogs. 

Cutting Room Floor

Images make the cutting room floor for many reasons.  While constructing this website I revisited many of my images from the past 5 years.  One in particular has haunted me, this dramatic sunset from the Mittens in Monument Valley, UT.  It was during the Natalie and Alain Briot Navajoland workshop on March 14, 2004.  The moment was one I will never forget as it was host to the most dramatic sunset I have witnessed to date.  I had been working on the Mittens Panoramic composition, which was 180 degrees from the sunset.  Moments after the light in the east had faded on my composition the sun decided to step it up a notch to this incredible display of intense light.  That is what I remember about it the most...the INTENSITY.  You could almost feel the heat of the moment.  It was very invigorating.  In my hands was my relatively new Canon 10D.  I was still learning the ins and outs of the system, but that isn't what ruined the technical execution of this image.  It was a simple matter of violating the 1/focal length rule for exposure times.  My focal length on this composition was 40mm and my shutter time was 1/10 of a second.  Too long to be hand held and there is a bit of softness on the image to ruin a high quality print.  I also left the ISO to 100 which could have been increased dramatically to shorten the shutter speed.  But it all seemed to happen so quickly, which is why we really need to be well versed in all of our camera controls.  Another problem I had with this image is that I really struggled with the color balance.  Bringing some new techniques, software, and a better-trained eye, I decided to take another run at processing the image today.  Most of the work was performed in Light Room 2.5 with some tweaking in PS4.  Even with all of this, the image would be very challenging to print well as the intensity of the color and light are difficult to translate from the monitor to the printer.  I have added no saturation to the image at all...like I said...it was intense.  I love the image for what it does for me...recalling an incredible moment in time of intense light at a beautiful location.  Enjoy the image and prepare for your next moment of intense light in the landscape.  Take care.