Long Time, No See...

Yep, I'm still here. And wow, it sure gets easy to put off posting once you get out of the habit of doing it on a regular basis.. before you know it, one or two months have gone by.
My regular commercial work and now,  running the new gallery, are conspiring to keep me from getting outdoors to shoot, but that should change in September, since my wife and I have booked a week-long trip to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington right after Labor Day... I hope to spend a lot of time photographing the lush, green rain forest and uniquely beautiful beaches up there.  That should certainly generate some interesting new work and will be kind of a fresh subject matter for me, which is always nice.

A couple of weeks ago, my old friend (from art school days, back in the '70's.. a long time!) stopped by here for a few days with his family, while on a north-south tour of California, visiting various family and friends along the way. He teaches art now at a private school in western Massachusetts, where we both grew up, and is a really fine plein-air painter... he works at that a lot during the summers while he is off from teaching. He of course wanted me to show off some of my favorite local scenes so he could take a stab at painting them and on the one session that I hung around while he was working, I couldn't resist to wander up the stream and do some studies with my trusty iPhone while killing time. Of course the quality is not there for any kind of printing, but it's sometimes fun to just shoot carefree with no tripod and no worries about quality... and see what you can see.


Since I don't have any new stuff right now and haven't had the inspiration to dig up and talk about anything already in the can, I thought I'd post a few of these just for a hoot.  All here shot with my phone. Notice the detail in the shadow area of the first one below. The iPhone has a pretty nifty HDR capability built right in; it takes two exposures, then blends them right in-camera and it works quite well... I actually had to tone it down some to make it look natural. I expect most digital cameras will have this feature in the near future.

Winter Oaks with Mistletoe

This is a reference shot (done on my iPhone!) from 2 weekends ago.  Locating new subjects is a never ending job, so when I have a free afternoon and I don't have a specific location in mind to work, I like to drive around checking out new roads, or hike a bit at spots that I normally pass by, just to see what I can see.  Usually it's mid-day and the light is not interesting, or the weather is not right... but I'm not concerned about all that, because I know I can come back at a better time.  If a new spot seems to have potential, I just take some quick reference shots as a kind of visual notebook, or "photographic sketch", if you will.
I was strolling around this clearing and thinking that there was not much of interest here, until the sweet light just before sunset lit up these bare oak trees and the background, making it suddenly magical.  For some reason, the clumps of mistletoe in the trees really make the scene for me... makes them look like they were somehow deliberately decorated.  Kind of wish I had been prepared to shoot it properly, because the combination of clouds and light was so perfect, but I can get to this spot in a few minutes next time the conditions and my time permit... and I'll know what time to be there and exactly where to set up to get what I want.
If you click on the image to look at the expanded version, you'll see that the sky is a little noisy and the detail in the grassy area is not the best, but I have to say the the new iPhone 4's 5mp camera is pretty impressive for what it is, with built-in HDR processing and geo-tagging... and on top of that, it shoots HD video!  I think the detail in the branches of the tree is quite nice, at least for a device that fits easily into your pocket and does about a hundred other useful things besides taking pictures:) 

Bare Bones, III- A Photographic Sketch

Probably my favorite of this quickly shot set from my iPhone; good enough I think, that I will return and re-shoot the subject with an actual camera next time I am here. Maybe try some different compositions, but the shapes and contrasts are ideal for a nice image. I'm planning to experiment with this in the future as a "sketching" tool or "visual notebook" of sorts, to quickly pre-visualize scenes and subjects, helping to decide which are worth returning to and how to set them up for the actual shot... much as a painter would quite normally do. I often spend a lot of time in a new location just wandering around, composing images in my mind and getting a feel for what I might want to attempt at a better time of day, so this could be really useful, especially if I have a laptop handy to download and play around a bit during mid-day "down time".

Bare Bones, II

Continuing with my "iPhone Chronicles".. a straightforward scenic for today. (I wouldn't contend that you should expect any very technically challenging work to succeed with such limited equipment, but knowing your limitations and working within them is always necessary no matter what you're doing, isn't it?) ... and it can still work out pretty well.

It's not unusual in this area for the coastal cloud/fog to recede off-shore during the day and slowly work its way back in the late afternoon or early evening. The sinking sun, peeking through an occasional thin spot in the cloud cover, creates a wonderful shimmering light on the waves and beach against the almost black overcast off in the distance. I kind of wish I had been prepared with my "real" gear to shoot this, but like I said, this kind of situation is not so uncommon here, and I'm very lucky to live only a few minutes away.