Reorganize

Spent a great amount of time tonight completing some housekeeping on my main photography website.  I never really liked the way I organized my photos to begin with, so I renamed a few galleries, moved pictures here and there, and added a new gallery.  I probably should've spent more time on this task from the start, but I was in a hurry to get enough photos on the site to make it meaningful.  Not sure if I'll end up keeping things exactly as they are now, but I'm happier with what I changed.

I still had some photos from my pre-vacation 50mm outage that I wanted to post, so those are now in my new gallery, "Things," which can be found here.  They didn't really fit in any of my other galleries, so I simply created a new one.  As a preview, here are a couple of my favorites:

I already mentioned that I recently returned from vacation.  Although I didn't take nothing close to the amount of photos that I normally would have, I did get some that I'm very happy with.  Hopefully, I'll get those posted sometime this week.

Enjoy!

Nifty Fifty

As promised, here are some more photos taken with the 50mm f/1.8D lens.  It's a very fantastic lens and extremely fun to shoot with.  I can't imagine a better lens for the price.

An interesting FYI, the sunflowers in two of the pictures were a surprise addition to our flower bed.  Apparently, the birds feeding throughout the winter on black oil sunflower seeds from our feeders aren't very efficient eaters.  We had several sunflowers sprout this spring and two of them are now about 4 1/2 feet tall.

Enjoy!

Happy Father's Day

Ok, two months since my last post is completely unacceptable.  But, it's been a busy couple of months (aren't they all?) and the summer is in full stride here in Northeast Kansas.  I've been doing a ton of shooting, but the majority has been around the house chasing kids.  In fact, I'm fairly close to eclipsing 10,000 pictures on my new camera, which is a cool little milestone.  I can only imagine how many images pro photographers take because I take a lot!

As much as I love shooting my children (they change so quickly!), I look forward to every opportunity to get outdoors to shoot the world around me.  It's even more exciting to see the world through a new lens, which is just what I've been doing the last couple days.  All praise be to Father's Day!

Nikon recently introduced it's newest 50mm lens, the AF-S Nikkor f/1.8G, but that's not the lens I got.  I am the happy new owner of the 50mm AF Nikkor f/1.8D, which is about $100 less than the new lens.  I jumped on the f/1.8D due to it's excellent price and outstanding optical performance.  My assumption is that the f/1.8D will be phased out with the introduction of the new AF-S version, so I wanted to get one while they were still available.

So, over the last couple days I've put the new lens through it's paces.  Again, mostly pictures of my kids, but I managed to turn the lens to one of my cats and got the capture you see here.  Everything about this picture I absolutely love: the sharpness, the color, the contrast, the depth-of-field, the composition.  It just works.  And, here's the kicker, this was shot through our living room window while my cat, Paris, napped on the bench that sits on our front porch.  Pretty impressive lens!

I will be adding some more photos captured with this lens in the next couple of days.  I went out this evening for about an hour and got several more photos that I'm very happy with and eager to share.  This lens will definitely be getting a lot of playing time in the future!

To finish, here are some photos I've captured with other lenses that I recently posted to my photo website.  Click on any picture and it will redirect you to the image on my photo website.  I hope you enjoy them.

Who cooks for you? Who cooks for yooouuuu?

I left work today thinking to myself, "It's been a while since I captured a good outdoor picture."  But, considering the day's weather was absolutely terrible (overcast, windy, cold, miserable) I didn't figure on having any photo opportunities arise on my drive home.  But luck has a funny way of popping up every now and then.

Rewind a bit to the weekend where we had to make a trip into Lawrence on both Saturday and Sunday.  On each trip, I saw a beautiful Barred Owl perched on the same exact fencepost just off the side of the rode.  Unfortunately, I was without my camera and, even if I had it with me, the likelihood of actually stopping for a possible picture was pretty slim for a couple reasons.  First, anyone who has traveled with young children knows that the experience can be extremely entertaining and pleasant or like being dragged by your fingernails through the depths of hell.  Our youngest (13 months old) absolutely hates car rides.  So, any additional time spent in the car could be just the ticket to push your blood pressure through the stratosphere.  Second, each time I saw the owl it was out of the corner of my eye at 65 mph, so any chances at photos would have required a U-turn and parking close enough to get a good view.  However, my track record of rolling up on birds carefully enough to keep them from flying is pretty bad.  So, the most I could do was file the experience away in my mind and hope that I might get a similar experience again in the future.

So fast-forward to today, there I was, cruising along, listening to conservative talk radio and wondering what the evening would provide once I arrived home.  Should I go to the gym?  What are we going to eat for dinner?  Yada yada.  But, any time I'm driving there's a part of my subconscious that is scanning the surrounding scenery for...anything...birds, deer, a grand landscape.  This drive was no different and my senses proved to be working great and my luck suddenly changed.  As I passed by the same fencepost from the weekend, my eyes caught the site of the owl sitting atop it and this time I got a really good look at it.  Gorgeous.  But, I had a car following me closely, so any attempt to pull of the road immediately probably would have ended in a wreck.  I had to try my luck at finding a place to U-turn and then slowly rolling up on the bird to put myself in position to get a decent picture.  Turns out, I U-turned twice because I didn't like the idea of trying to pull onto the shoulder on the same side of the road as the owl for fear it would fly off.  Turned out to be a wise decision.


I managed to pull off the road and began getting shots out of my truck window.  The owl was beautiful and didn't seem to care too much about my presence.  But, I also noticed something odd about this owl.  It's right eye appeared to be either missing or extremely clouded over, so it's fair to assume this owl only benefitted from one good eye.  To think, an animal that relies so heavily on having good eyesight, especially at night, in order to hunt to survive and here I find one with only one good eye.  Pretty tough bird.

I also couldn't help but notice that I seemed to be the only person on the road paying enough attention to even see this amazing bird sitting there.  Seriously, I was ecstatic to see it during the weekend and I was even more stoked that it allowed me another opportunity and this time I had my camera.  Even as I sat with my camera lens sticking far out of my window not a single car slowed down to see what I was taking pictures of.  Now, I know they're not rare or endangered, but you definitely don't see them every  day.  In fact, I know we have at least two flying around in the creek bottom behind my house because I hear them all the time when I let the dogs out at night.  But, I've never seen one when I take walks to the creek.  Here I find one in broad daylight and nobody else seemed to care that it was there to be admired.

Anyway, I captured several images and actually got within about 15 feet of it after getting out of my truck and walking to the opposite shoulder.  The owl made two final poses before finally deciding it had had enough of my company.  The picture you see here is my favorite and I think it shows just how beautiful these birds are.  The size, the eyes, the talons.  Amazing.

For those of you reading who are unfamiliar with Barred Owls, they are also commonly referred to as Hoot Owls.  Additional info, including a few sound bytes of their familiar calls can be found here.

Enjoy!

Finally!

Apparently, keeping up with regular updates on a blog is a bit tougher than I imagined. Not to make excuses, but the last 2 1/2 weeks have been quite busy. Obviously, since my last post I have had some time to familiarize myself with Apple Aperture 3. The transition was a bit bumpier than I expected mostly affected by my need to know exactly how something works (didn't I mention that in a previous post?). But, I managed to import my photos...at least 2 or 3 times before I finally settled on a library structure I am happy with.

As far as picture taking goes, it seems like the last month has been pretty slow. But, there's been plenty to occupy my mind: getting the kitchen ready to paint, researching chickens...and then buying some, researching chicken coops...still need to construct one, kids.

But, as I strolled across the parking lot last Friday to end my work day, I noticed the sky was filled with puffy white clouds. The light wasn't perfect, but it wasn't bad, either. Instantly I knew that I had to take some back roads home. My quest was in finding some landscapes where the final image(s) would be converted to black and white. Sounds easy, but it's not!

First, harsh mid-day light, in my opinion, can provide some of the best lighting situations for black and white photography. I don't think I'm the first to realize this, either. There's just something about the deep shadows, bright light, and available contrast that make it work. If you want an idea of what I'm talking about, go through any set of so-so, ho-hum landscape photos (color ones) taken during mid-day lighting and convert them to black and white. I guarantee they will take on a whole new look with far greater emotional impact. It won't instantly make them great, but most of them will be better. When I said earlier that it, "sounds easy," what I'm referring to is the idea that it IS very easy to take any color photo that wasn't specifically taken to be a black and white image and convert it to black and white and think, "Hmm, that looks a lot better." But, that rarely works when trying to produce really good black and white photos. Instead, finding landscapes where you already know you want black and white as the final output can be very difficult because you have to visualize the tones and create a pleasing contrast with those tones. Also, in working and visualizing black and white you lose a powerful design element in color. Instead, you have to rely more on other design elements such as patterns, lines, textures, and shapes to make the image interesting.

So, without further delay I present my first two photos edited using Aperture. Both of these photos were specifically taken with a final conversion to black and white already in my mind. I have to say that Aperture offers some great tools for black and white conversion and the ability to play around with those tools rather easily. I'm still getting to know the software, so the entire process took quite a while before I was happy with the final results. None-the-less, I think it's the start of a good relationship!

Enjoy!

New Software

I've taken a slight hiatus from any major picture taking this last week, simply because I've been busy organizing photos to import into my newly acquired photo software, Aperture 3. And, like pretty much everything I do, I couldn't take the easy route and simply import my photos. Instead, I've spent a great deal of time browsing the net reading about Aperture and the best way(s) I should tackle the future organizational structure of my photo library. Let me be the first to tell anybody, there is a TON of information out there (both good and bad!) and I've discovered there are almost as many ways I could go about accomplishing my task.

I set out thinking I would easily find a couple articles detailing exactly what I wanted. But, that wasn't the case. I think the first 5 articles I read, each author went about organizing their photo libraries in a different manner. So, the scenario went something like this:

Read first article thinking, "Yep, sounds good. This is what I want."
Read second article thinking, "Hmm, this sounds pretty good, too."
Read third article thinking, "Wait a minute. This is kind of like article 1, but different
and possibly better."
Read fourth article thinking, "Holy s##t, how the hell am I going to figure out what I'm
going to do?"
Read fifth article, "F##k!" (Yes, my favorite curse word.)

I'm now into day 3, or maybe 4, since purchasing and installing Aperture 3. And, I have yet to get my photo library imported, but I'm close. As I write this, I'm finally about 1/2 finished.

Some people might read this thinking, "What a waste of time! Just import the damn photos and be done with it." But, those people obviously don't know me. I like knowing exactly what I'm getting into. And I feel that the better informed I am, the better off I'll be if something goes wrong. And, my photos mean A LOT to me, so if something goes wrong and there's any chance of losing or corrupting photos, I want to be ready. Even before I started I made 2 separate back ups of my current library. And, once I finally picked a horse to ride I still wasn't ready to fully commit, so I did a test run on a small batch of photos spanning 3 years. Once that worked, I felt pretty confident with my decision.

The overriding issue I started with was that my existing library didn't have much organization to it. I've used iPhoto since first purchasing my iMac G5 back in 2004. I never upgraded the os past OS X 10.4.11, so my existing library is using iPhoto 6. Therein lied my first problem because Aperture 3 would not allow me to import an iPhoto 6 library. Instead, it asked me to update it to at least iPhoto 7, or maybe 8. Anyway, that bit me pretty hard and jumpstarted my internet search for other options. I actually thought about updating the iPhoto 6 library to iPhoto 9 (using a Macbook) and actually attempted it...and I guess you could say that it worked. But, it took over 24 hours to accomplish because I converted using my wifi network pulling everything from my iMac G5 (newly appointed file server). After the conversion, I was never able to really access any photos since iPhoto didn't seem to like the fact that the library was stored on a file server. It probably would've worked had I had a wired network set up.

Anyway, back to the organization issue. iPhoto actually stores things rather well, but using the default method, I had a very large amount of folders that were simply named using a "film roll" number. I didn't like the idea of having to remember some random film roll number if I wanted to quickly (and easily!) find some photo from the past. So, I set out to take my existing library and manually organize it. Yes, you read that correctly, MANUALLY. That wasn't a good idea because I spent about 7 hours manually pulling photos into folders, of which many I would have to stop to think about how I wanted it labeled (i.e., family, nature, vacation) and I managed to make it through about 1/80th of my library. Obviously, this wasn't a good use of my time, so, back to the drawing board I went...or, rather the internet.

I finally stumbled upon an article that talked about using Aperture to import files into a structure using the year and month each photo was taken. The cool thing was that I could specify where I wanted to store the photos outside of the Aperture library. Essentially, I could use an Aperture import to organize my files almost exactly how I wanted. Great!! However, there were a couple "gotchas." First was that the article was written for Aperture 1.5 or 2.0, so some of the options in Aperture 3 were a bit different. Second, I essentially would have to import all my files twice, doubling the amount of time. But, I was willing to try, so I set out to test the import method on a small batch of photos and it worked exactly as it should. That was last night, so the first chance I got this morning, I began the process on my entire library. It's now 11:18 PM and all my photos are imported and Aperture is processing them, which will probably take a few more hours.

So, it's been an entire week and the only pictures I've taken have been of my kids (not that I don't enjoy taking pictures of my kids, because I do!). But, I'm hoping tomorrow I'll finally get the chance to mess around with some photos in Aperture and start learning how this software is going to help me. And, I'm looking forward to a week where I'm not thinking about how to organize my pictures and get back to taking the pictures I love to take!

Browsing, Organizing, Posting

I finally took some time last night and added a few pictures to the photography website.  They can be found in the "Landscapes" gallery here.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the appearance of my website.  There are a few little things I still want to do with it, but my biggest priority is to get some more photos added.  I've realized that it's going to take me a lot longer than I first anticipated to go through all my photos to find those that I feel are worthy enough to display.  My current library is sitting at about 23,000 photos, of which probably 90% of those have been shot in the last 4 years.  I know that number is a far cry from what some professional photographers' libraries probably look like, but I'm assuming they have a lot more time than I do to go through photos.  It's their job!

It's a daunting task, but exciting at the same time.  It's giving me a chance to look at my photos more closely than ever before and I'm finding new favorites and some old favorites that don't seem as good anymore.  It's strange how your tastes can change and the more I take photos (and the better my "eye" becomes) it's interesting to look back to see how I've progressed.

Up to this point, I haven't been one to sit in front of my computer for hours on end using Photoshop or some other photo editing software to make my photos "better."  I really strive to get the photo as close to what I want as I'm taking it so that I don't have to spend a lot of time editing later.  I don't know about other photographers, but I'd rather be out taking photos than sitting in front of a computer any day!  But, I also know that the digital darkroom has it's place and it's an area where I would like to gain some more knowledge.  So, I'm also using my time going back through photos to mess around a little bit with editing.  Right now I'm using GIMP (I love opensource!), iPhoto, and LightZone (cool program!).  I've thought about purchasing Photoshop in the past, but I can't get past the price tag.  I've also given serious consideration to Aperture 3, especially after reading several good reviews.

My last goal in going through my photos is to better organize them so I can find a specific photo easier.  My current system isn't much of a system at all.  It's basically using iPhoto to import and organize everything.  I'm planning on abandoning any software's default organization scheme to create my own folder system.  Hopefully, it works!  My plan is to also incorporate a similar organization scheme into my website because that's one thing about my site that I don't really care for.  In my haste to get photos up for display, I didn't really give myself much time to consider how I wanted my photos organized.  So, that may be a change that people see in the future.