I love the look of fresh snow, especially the kind that builds up on the trees, fluffy and white. We had our first real snowfall of the season yesterday – several inches. It was a wet, heavy snow. Here in Minnesota, we see a lot more of the light, dry snow with our typical cold temps. But, it’s been fairly mild so far.

Luckily, there was practically no wind today. The snow covering the trees was still there pretty much all day. I told Lynne I might go out and try to grab some shots. I was thinking driving out to the countryside and looking for some cool image. My car does okay in the winter with its winter tires, but it’s not the sort of car you go wandering about looking for some out-of-the-way location.

When I look over my big collection of photographs, winter and snow shots tend to be few. I do like the look, the way it blankets the landscape. But I really don’t like cold. I figure it’s my Mediterranean blood.

Still, I can’t deny how terrific snow photos can be. I still remember some I shot after a big snowfall back in NY when I was shooting slides. Some of those were pretty darn good, if I do say so. Lots of big fluffy, heavy snow back there.

Lynne thought I was talking about walking out back and taking some shots of our trees. Hm. Why did I immediately think about going out driving and hunting for a shot when the backyard looks so great?

I pulled out the camera and thought a moment about lenses. It might be cool to shoot some close-in photos. Focus on the snow and some other natural element. And, it could be useful to shoot wide-open and avoid having any nearby houses or other distractions in the shot. So, I grabbed my 135 f/2 lens.

I dialed in the aperture to f/2 and set about shooting. The obvious starting point is our crabapple with its load of fruit waiting for birds to clear it, usually in late winter. The red crabapples look great with the white of the fresh snow. And it’s one of my favorite color combinations – red and white.

Then I started looking around for other interesting subjects. Couldn’t miss Coco, our neighbor’s dog. He doesn’t like to stand still so focusing with such a shallow depth of field is a challenge, but I started seeing this peaking-out view of him and managed to grab a nice photo with sharp eyes. Or, I guess, sharp eye.

The grapes still hanging from the vines on our fence and the apples in the neighbor’s tree caught my eye. You might imagine how the grapes look in December, so I was thinking black and white when I shot them. The apples are looking a bit worse for the wear, too, but their color was just too wonderful to leave out.

I thought the snow on the gate was interesting with the patterns and gray background. Another good subject for B/W treatment. Of course, it was already nearly black and white to begin with.

Sometimes you do need to just look around you. Even living in the city with a small yard, there can be some cool photographs waiting for you.

There has been lots of picture-taking in the weeks since I returned from Photoshop World. I’m hoping to write another post or two or three, but I thought I’d start with colors of fall. It’s that time of year here in the north when leaves lose their green and their moisture and their life and blazon the landscape with a variety of color.

Southeastern Minnesota has range of terrain and features, some of which show off the autumn colors. But there is a lot of farmland, too, with a tree here or there and fields of corn or soybeans. It’s certainly different from the Southern Tier of NY state where we once lived. A nice car ride takes us to the beautiful bluff-lands, though, approaching the Mississippi River.

Last weekend, Lynne and I set off to see what we could find, and I drove us south to Lanesboro. Lanesboro sits on the Root River and makes a nice starting off point. Lynne asked what I was looking for, what did I have in mind. I frankly wasn’t sure. I tend to like zooming in tight, showing off a few leaves as in the photo above. Having a mix of fall colors and remaining green is something I like.

But heading to the bluff-lands, I was also hoping to find something more expansive, too. Big wide shots of trees undergoing their change can make a nice photo, but those shots seem to me so overdone. Thus my preference for the tight shots.

I told Lynne I wasn’t exactly sure. I had some thoughts, some visions in my head, but we’d go look a couple places and I’d see what struck me. She was fortunately okay with that!

I bought Lynne a DSLR for her birthday. She had a Canon A-1 back in the film days. She likes the tiny digital cameras now for their amazingly good quality and their great portability. But after using my camera to take some shots, she mentioned how she missed looking through a viewfinder.

Lynne has a terrific eye and sees things I often miss. So, I was happy to provide her a little better platform for her photo-taking. (Now, I just have to convince her of the value of RAW!) This little drive was her first chance to really try out the new camera.

From Lanesboro, we drove east to Rushford. When my son was in scouts, we camped once at the top of the bluff overlooking the town. My favorite moment from that camp-out was walking to the edge of the bluff early in the morning to find a blanket of fog filling the valley like a lake. It was beautiful. I thought we might have a nice view from there.

It took some doing to find the way up the hill. I didn’t remember – not sure if I rode with someone else or just followed someone to get there, and it’s been a while. But the GPS map on my phone came to the rescue. The view of the valley is amazing, and I took a range of shots including a couple of these wide-vista photos. I’m growing to like these more than I once did.

Lynne suggested heading up to Winona which sits on the Mississippi. There is a park on top of one of the bluffs there with a big panoramic view of the Mississippi valley. As we were walking from the car to the overlook, I spotted these wild flowers. There are a few flowers which bloom in fall that are just gorgeous. Not sure what it is – perhaps they are just hardier to survive the occasional frost, but their colors are vibrant and they just photograph really well.

The sun was setting and the view was great. The leaves were brightly colored here and there, but not the entire valley by any means. This was one of my favorite images as the setting sun set the leaves on fire against the background of the fading light in the valley. It’s probably one of my favorite shots of the day.

But for some reason, the shot I liked the best had little fall color and seemed to lend itself to a black and white treatment. This shot was from the bluff overlooking Rushford. The pattern of the corn, dry and ready for harvest, the bordering trees, a roadway through this great farmland, and a single car, all just strike me right.

Sometimes you are looking for something and you find something else. And that’s okay.

I had the great fortune to visit Yosemite National Park in California in January. I enjoy our great national parks, but this was my first visit to Yosemite. Walking in the footsteps of John Muir, seeing this fabulous valley, and turning my camera on this beauty to try capturing some of the awe I felt was amazing.

I was there to attend the first session of Moose Peterson’s final season of Digital Landscape Workshop Series. Moose is an incredible wildlife photographer who’s landscape shots are also breathtaking. He has a few friends who aren’t too shabby, like Joe McNally, who attend DLWS as instructors. For this event, Joe wasn’t available and RC Concepcion filled in. I’ve known RC from his work at Kelby Media (Kelby Training, NAPP, Photoshop User TV, etc.), and I sort of met him at Photoshop World in September. But he is a hoot to hang around, especially when you both have cameras.

Also filling the instructor ranks was Kevin Dobler. I met Kevin and Moose in Hawaii two years ago along with Joe and Laurie Excell, when I attended the DLWS in Kauai. That event provided me a huge photography boost just from the inspiration and photo zen. I absorbed something there, for sure, so having a chance to attend another DLWS, this time at a park I’ve wanted to visit for years, was great. I had forgotten Kevin is a pilot and works for Cessna. He recently flew to Yellowstone and captured some amazing in-flight shots which he shared with us.

But we were there to shoot the scenery in Yosemite. It doesn’t hurt that this is essentially Moose’s backyard. He lives nearby in the Sierras and knows this area – and its history – inside and out. We stayed in the lodge that’s right in the park. You walk out of your room and look around and think, “this is not real – it can’t be.” There’s Half Dome nearby, and you can see Yosemite Falls from the doorways of many of the rooms. My room faced south, so I had to take a few steps to see the falls.

You never know what to expect in the mountains in January. There had been some large storms in December, but it was dry during my stay. The earlier snowfall provided lots of good moisture to feed the waterfalls around the valley, though. We also happened to be there during the full moon. I’m sure that factored into the schedule. We had a fun moonlight shoot, and we later watched the moon rise from Tunnel View.

From there, you have a beautiful view of El Capitan and Half Dome. As the moon rose and I snapped away, I suddenly noticed the color. It was staggering. I’m not sure I’ve seen such a magenta sky, and there it was all around the rising moon. This and many other shots might make great black and white photos. I think of the work of Ansel Adams whose Yosemite photos have become iconic. But the colors. How could I rob my photos of the colors on display?

There was the cool blue of the moonlight shots. There was the magenta sky, and the bright red that pulls your eye to Moose Peterson, standing in the meadow. And there was a rainbow in the morning sun nearly surrounding the upper Yosemite Falls as the wind whipped the water into a great mist.

Yes, I have some nice black and whites with the textures of thousands of years of erosion on ancient granite born deep under the crust of the earth. But it’s the colors that I witnessed and captured that I’ll remember. And those colors I’ve chosen – for now at least – to preserve in the majority of my photographs.

A particularly hot type of photography – really, a type of photography post-processing – these days is HDR, or High Dynamic Range. It’s sort of a misnomer. Let me explain…

Human vision is incredible. In a way, digital cameras are somewhat similar. There is the eye, or the sensor, and the brain, the processor. The sensor just gathers the light and the processor makes sense out of it. Our human vision uses a processor unlike any other. We take in the light around us, but we mix it with the input from our other senses plus our expectations and moving eyes and head and convert it all to what we call vision. We can see all sorts of images unrelated to our subject, and we can instantly tune it out. We see what’s important.

We see over a huge range of light and dark. Technically, this is known as dynamic range. It’s the same term used for audio – the range from the softest flute to the pounding drum of a symphony. In the visual realm, it’s the range of light we, or our cameras, can see and differentiate detail. Human vision has a large dynamic range, but our cameras do not. Not only our cameras, but our displays and printing technology are limited in the range from lightest to darkest.

For HDR imagery, we cheat. We take several exposures which allow us to capture detail from both highlights and shadows, then combine those images using a technique called tone mapping. Remember, we don’t really have a way to show or display the dynamic range our eyes can perceive. Instead, we map the highlights and shadows into this smaller range. Two parts of the image which should be different – one lighter than the other – are shown with the same intensity allowing us show all the detail we wish.

The images can look unreal because, well, they aren’t very real. But they can look very interesting and can be captivating. The term painterly is often used to describe these images.

When I was at Whitewater State Park last Saturday, I took the photograph above. At the time I shot it, the sun had disappeared below the bluffs. The light I was capturing was sunlight reflected by the sky. This light is very even, coming from everywhere in a way. The result is an image with a fairly low dynamic range. The camera is able to capture the entire range of lightness with no trouble. Without applying any postprocessing, the photo will be flat. Another word for flat is boring.

In Lightroom or another photo editor, we can punch up the image to add contrast and color. What we’re doing is sort of the opposite of HDR, but we’re tone mapping just the same. Rather than compressing the dynamic range, we’re expanding it. I nearly always do that with flat images, and the result is often very nice. I liked the photograph I made. (Ansel Adams said, he didn’t take photographs, he made them.)

But we have more options, more possibilities. We can push the limits and see what happens.

When I took this photograph, I saw strong vibrant golds that glowed. That’s what my brain told me. I knew this was a low dynamic range situation, and I knew I would punch it up in Lightroom. But the more I looked at it, the more I wanted. I wanted the colors to jump out at me. I wanted you to feel the golds. I wanted the other shades to work against the gold, providing color contrast, not just lightness contrast. I wanted the dark bark to push the viewer toward the golden leaves and frame them in.

Using mostly Lightroom with a bit of Photoshop help, I think I was able to capture my vision. This image, to me, screams to be printed and printed big. It might not be everyone’s favorite, but it speaks to me. It draws me back to Whitewater in Autumn, to the wonder and splendor of nature. Why do leaves change color if not just for us to see? And to make into a photograph.

After one of the wettest summers I can remember and a 7 inch rainfall over less than two days, we’ve been given a beautiful start to autumn. Last week was amazing, and the weekend was actually hot. I headed out to Whitewater State Park yesterday late afternoon to see what I could find for autumn colors in the fading light.

Many of the leaves were already gone. Some wildflowers are still hanging on.

I’m always amazed by the flowers that show up this late in the season. Bumble bees were out and about apparently also enjoying the flowers.

But there were still some nice leaf colors to enjoy, like those in the first photo above. Sometimes, there are just a few glowing in the fading sunshine.

Some are rich with color.

As I filled the frame with these oak leaves, I was struck by all the red. So much red, the leaves almost disappear into one another.

I found these leaves hanging out over the river which provided a wonderful dark background to help them pop.

It was a nice evening, and I worked up quite a sweat even with the temperature falling with the sun. I was hoping for more leaves, but I had already decided to mainly focus in tight. I find I really like these leaves-up-close shots. They tend to be less common than the grand colorful hillside photos, and they give you a sense of connection to the individual trees producing all that color. I like to fill the frame with a color.

I like to contrast that color with the darkness of  the trunk and the branches. That’s why my favorite of these shots is the first one I showed above. It feels a bit like a painting to me. A variety of muted colors and the golden leaves against the blacks of the bark. A successful hike.

While I was in Las Vegas for Photoshop World, I decided to stay an extra day and maybe see some sights or go to a show. I did both. I’ll post later with some shots from the strip, but on Saturday morning, I did a tour of Red Rock Canyon with Pink Jeep Tours. They picked me up at the Mandalay Bay, then stopped for two couples at another hotel, then off to the canyon. I was happy to find the tour lobby in the hotel, so I was read when they arrived.

There are tons of tours available through Pink Jeep and a host of other tour providers. The Grand Canyon is popular, but I decided against that. I visited the canyon a long time ago, and it really isn’t all that close to Vegas. That means a long bus ride there and a long bus ride back. But the worst thing for a photographer, we’d be visiting the canyon right in the middle of the day. I want to visit the canyon again, certainly, but I’d like to be there for sunrise and sunset, and on my own terms. So that will wait.

Red Rock Canyon is actually fairly close to Las Vegas. They offer morning and afternoon tours, and I opted for the morning tour hoping the light would be a bit more reasonable than midafternoon. A few hours earlier would have been better for the photos, but it wasn’t bad. Regardless, I was able to enjoy being out in the desert and away from the bright lights and clanging casinos. Did I mention the high temperature was 108F that day? Yeah, but it’s a dry heat! Actually, it was tolerable and probably a bit cooler than that being morning and being a bit higher in altitude the Vegas.

Debbie, our guide, told us this is a desert oak tree and said there are actually acorns that grow on these small trees. Sure enough, I saw a few acorns and was able to capture this one. I think it’s interesting that they grow upward. The leaves are small but do have that distinctive oak leaf look. Debbie mentioned that many folks mistake this plant for Holly.

As we traveled along the one-way road through the canyon area, I spotted this seemingly out-of-place vehicle. A sports car, an SUV, a family car – all would be expected. A white stretch limo just doesn’t look right in this picture! I doubt the driver of the limo explored the same unpaved road we did.

One of my take-aways from Photoshop World is embrace the light. This is something of a philosophy I want to become part of my photography, and it basically means take the light as it’s given, don’t complain, don’t stop shooting. Use it and make it your own. One couple from the tour climbed this rock and posed for Debbie to take their picture. I swung around so I was shooting mainly into the sun and captured this image. I’m pleased with it, and might never have tried without this new found thinking.

I hope I never stop learning or trying new ideas.