This lovely young lady happens to be my niece. Kind of makes sense that she’d ask her photographer uncle to shoot her senior portraits, doesn’t it? I picked her up in the morning and spent the next few hours doing her “black drape” studio portrait, then we headed down to the Shockoe Bottom area of Richmond to find interesting backgrounds.

This portrait session also gave me the chance to play with some new lenses I just picked up: the legendary Canon 24mm f/1.4 and 35mm f/1.4 prime lenses. Wonderful glass! Can’t wait for my next wedding to use these hunks of glass during the reception!

The first image above is a simple setup near the Tobacco Row condominiums. The second image is under the railroad trestle near the canal. We had a blast walking through the area, taking pictures as we came across interesting areas. I remember baby sitting her when she was, like, four years old. Now she’s a senior on her way to college. Sheesh, I’m getting old!

The rim of this canyon is an interesting study in various shapes and textures of sandstone. This particular image was made with a Canon 5D using a 70-200mm lens at 200mm to utilize the telephoto compression that such a lens produces. This “squishes” the foreground and background together to make it seem as if what is actually in the distance is right up on top of the foreground, thereby giving this image a layered effect of the many different directions of the lines within the sandstone.

This image was taken just after sunset, which brings out the warm colors of the sandstone. Just a few minutes earlier and the texture and colors of these rocks had looked completely different; much whiter with greater contrast.

Apparently, this only works temporarily as evidenced by my own kids who will do just about anything to vacate the area when they see Daddy coming at them with the camera. Oh well. For them, I’ve found that ice cream is a pretty good bribe.

Created by water over centuries, the sandstone of the area has worn away to form what is known as a “slot canyon” with narrow, steep walls. Unfortunately, because everyone who sees it (like me) says it should be on everyone’s “to see before I die” list, it seems like everyone tries to see it. On the same day.

When we were in Upper Antelope Canyon, there must have been well over 100 people trying to walk around each other in spaces barely 5 feet wide in places. Some areas open up to cathedral-like “rooms” (well, they feel “cathedral-like” after squeezing between narrow spaces for a while), but much of the canyon is narrow and really can’t support that many people at one time. At one point I joked that the canyon wasn’t formed by water after all, but by the backs of tourists rubbing against the sandstone. The reason the canyon gets packed is that there are only about 2 hours in any given day when the sun is in just the right position to send light shining down into the canyon. Everyone trying to see the canyon before they die, tries to be there in that same two-hour period of time.

Consequently, the vast majority of the images I made in the canyon were taken with the camera pointing up, over the heads of the horde of people widening the canyon with their backs. 

Upper Antelope Canyon is generally shaped like a pyramid in that it is narrow up top and wider at the bottom. This means the light comes through a narrow slot and casts deep shadows throughout the canyon. Consequently, the contrast range is rather high in Upper Antelope Canyon, making the use of a tripod and multiple exposures to capture the full tonal range a must.

And to those tourists who were using a flash from their dinky point-and-shoot cameras, ruining many of my shots 25 seconds into a 30-second exposure: may your memory cards get mysteriously wiped clean before you get home. When you visit, turn off the flash!

I’d never shot a wedding at the Elk River Touring Center in Slatyfork, West Virginia before, but I made the most of it! This place is wonderful and has it all: great grassy field for a terrific background to the wedding? Check. Fantastic food? Check. A stream to cool your heels (well, freeze your feet off) after a long bike ride through the woods? Check. Wonderful rustic barn and completely rusted wheelbarrow perfect for a quick portrait? Oh most definitely check.

This wall of the barn and the rusty wheelbarrow are the first things I noticed as I pulled up in my car the day before the wedding and I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it. Since the bride and groom were being traditional in that she didn’t want the groom to see the dress before the wedding, I knew I’d have to do this shot after the ceremony, but before the couple got too involved with the reception. I also knew that the sun was going to be behind the wall when I’d have the opportunity to shoot this image, so I also planned the lighting in advance. (It helps to know where to expect the sun at a given time of day!)

This was a simple shot to set up: I knew I wanted the bride looking at the groom. In my imagination, I pictured her more face-on to the camera, but with her head turned. When I suggested she look at her new husband, she turned her body and I knew I liked the reality I was seeing more than what I had pictured in my mind.

The light is coming from not from the sun but from a single flash unit mounted on a light stand off-camera to the right and triggered by a wireless remote.

Interesting tidbit about the making of this image. When I first saw this wall, the wheelbarrow was leaning against it exactly as you see it in the picture. It was so rusted, I thought it was really a prop set up by the location to enhance the look of the site. Turns out they really use this wheelbarrow and it was missing when it came time to do the shot! A quick search discovered it not too far away and I was able to put it back, but I have to admit, I got worried for a second! The thing’s so rusty, I couldn’t imagine anyone actually using it without breaking it!

Turns out it was sturdier than it looked. I even did a picture with the groom pushing the bride around in the thing later! (We put a towel under her to protect the dress).

Oh, and the picture has been processed using a modified black-and-white conversion technique I’ve been working on. I like it. Toned black-and-white with hints of color under it.

This kind of image is known as a “near-far” composition. Find an interesting scene with an object in the foreground and fill the width of the camera frame with the object, letting the background and compositional “weight” of the foreground object draw the viewer’s eye to it. In this scene, the area of greatest contrast, the bright reflection of the sun-lit rocks in the river in the background, initially draws the eye of the viewer. The s-bend of the river and bottom-heavy composition of the image then draws the eye down the image to the tree. I purposely left some rock to the right and left of the tree to prevent the branches from “breaking” the frame and drawing the viewer’s eye out of the image. Hopefully I’ve succeeded.

As with last week’s Horseshoe Bend image, this one is also a composite of four exposures to have detail from the bright sky all the way into the shadows of the canyon.

While shooting the exposures for the above image, I got to really like the contrast of the colors around that island in the river. The golds of the reflected light from the rocks and the deep blues of the sky’s reflection really attracted me. With my Canon 5D with the 16-35 lens on the tripod to photograph the tree, I grabbed my 40D with a 70-200 lens to capture a detail of the river scene. This image was made using a single exposure since I was hand-holding the camera and lens (which makes accurately stacking multiple exposures very difficult).

Horseshoe Bend is just three miles or so south of Page, just off the highway. It’s an easy half-mile walk from the parking area to the canyon. If you’re ever in the area, I highly suggest stopping to see it. 

For some reason, most images I see of Horseshoe Bend are taken later in the day, when the sun is high enough to shine directly in the canyon. I don’t think this is the best light in which to photograph practically anything, much less something as majestic as what you see in this image.

Dawn is really the time to be taking pictures here. Most people have previously avoided photographing here at dawn because the contrast difference between the sky and the bottom of the canyon is so high it is very difficult to keep detail in both highlights and shadows. Even though digital photography has pretty much made such high-contrast photography incredibly easy, the participants of the workshop I was attending were the only people present at the bend at sunrise. Others began to walk in by the time we were leaving, by which point the best light was already gone.

The image here is a composite of four images: one exposure for the sky (to keep some color in the sky), one for the sun-lit rocks in the background, one for what I call the “dark mid tones” and one for detail in the shadows. The final image was not assembled using high-dynamic-range software per se, but was instead the result of stacking the four images in Photoshop and using masking techniques to utilize the best parts of each separate exposure. Shot with a Canon 5D, 16-35mm f/2.8 lens and a tripod.

Oh, and if you do end up going to see Horseshoe Bend, please stay away from the edge! For this image, I’m not as close to the edge as you’d think: the tripod was fully extended and the camera was looking down from a high position. The sandstone cliffs around Horseshoe Bend wear away in such a way as to cause the surface rock to hang over the edge like a diving board hangs over a swimming pool. The weight of a person is all it takes to cause the rock to break off and it’s a long way down. I’ve seen pictures of people sitting on the edge; please don’t do this.

This image, titled “Verga Over Rock” is the result of an axiom in landscape photography: always look behind you. The workshop participants were situated at a location near Lake Powell to photograph the sunrise over some buttes near the lake. My primary camera was seated on my tripod and I was dutifully snapping away as the sun rose over the buttes.

Then I looked behind me and saw this amazing scene. Verga is rain that evaporates before it hits the ground and a beautiful cloud of it was positioned just behind this sandstone rock about 100 yards away. Leaving my primary camera on the tripod, I quickly grabbed my backup camera and a 16-35mm f/2.8 lens and began shooting this scene.

I’m really glad I turned around, because I like this image so much more than the sunrise pictures over the buttes!

Over the next few weeks, I’ll post more images from this amazing trip.

The father of the Bride, this bull of a man with muscles on his muscles, the kind of man you would go out of your way to make sure never got mad at you, broke down into a sobbing mess while dancing with his daughter.

I have to admit that this isn’t the sharpest picture I’ve ever taken, because I was busy blinking away tears myself to pay much attention to where I was focusing.

Before this wedding, I’ve never had so much of a hint of emotion come over me; I’ve been all business and too busy capturing the action to get too caught up in it, but not this time. When I saw this… wow. Just wow.

I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house, so at least I was in good company!