For the last few years I’ve flown out to visit my family in Southern California in the middle of January as a nice escape from the harsh winter in Minnesota. This year I made a plan to visit Joshua Tree National Park  for a quick 1 day excursion (One day down, drive back the next). My co-pilot for the trip was my father. We rented a car and took off for Joshua Tree once we found a couple free days.

I had grand visions of showing up middle of the afternoon the first day and shooting until sunset, sleep, and then wake up for sunrise and shoot till 11… then drive home. That pretty much happened except that it took a few hours longer to get there than I had expected (stupid maps always make it look closer than reality). We arrived right as sunset was happening (also sooner than I expected because of the mountains and elevation). The visitor center was closed, but we were able to obtain a park map and set off from the southern entrance towards the town of Twenty Nine Palms (Home of a Military Marine Base) on the northern side of the park.

I had my dad drive so I could keep my eyes out for places to stop. Very quickly I had us pulled off to capture the setting sun since things were changing so quickly with the light. It may not have been the best spot if I had had time to investigate more of the park, but I put on my photographers eye and made the best of what was in front of me. I panned the sky for panoramics, zoomed in on desert fauna, and tried to study the landscape quickly as the light went down. We moved on from that first spot once my shots became repetitive and set off for something on the map called  “Cholla Cactus Garden”. By the time we got there it was night, and all we could see was what the headlights illuminated. I had my dad turn off the lights, and I hoped out with my tripod and 580EXII flash unit. I was going to do some light painting.

I had NO idea what the cactus garden really looked like, I could only see a few feet ahead of myself but I set up my camera on a tripod, set the shutter to bulb, and I fired off the flash unit to illuminate what was around me. I of course blinded myself with the flashes, but what I saw on the back of the camera was exhilarating. The whole area was filled with beautiful cacti of various shapes, colors, and texture. I probably spent 30 minutes firing off different shots using my flash to paint the landscape. As long as I positioned the light right, I wouldn’t capture myself or the flash in the shot. Very fun!!!

We settled into a hotel for the night after a long days drive and a short 2 hours of shooting so that I could wake up for sunrise. I was NOT happy waking up that morning, but I forced myself to get moving since I spent so much energy getting there and wouldn’t be back anytime soon….. You can always sleep later.

It was refreshing to see the full variety of landscape now that there was plenty of light. Once again I fired off some panoramics and explored the textures of the desert around me. I was able to catch a few interesting sunrise photos, but mostly it was obscured by clouds that were breaking up. I decided we would make it to “Jumbo Rocks” campsite for the finishing minutes of sunrise. There I found the most beautiful rockscapes I have ever seen and made one of the most stunning panoramic shots that I have ever made. It’s a 1 to 5 ratio, so a 10 inch high print is 50inches long… MASSIVE The next few hours were spent roaming the various scenic spots and finding the perfect “Joshua Tree” photo and discovering lots of interesting desert compositions.

All in all, it was a fantastic quick trip. Well worth the lack of sleep and hours of driving.However, I really need to figure out a way of spending more time relaxing on my vacations… these mini super trips are really not long enough to soak in the full splendor of the places I go.

Every year I’ve lived in Minnesota, I’ve made an effort to explore winter through photography. This year I planned a trip up north to Ely to photograph a different kind of winterscape than years past (past few have focused on Lake Superior north of Duluth). A group of us, photo-enthusiasts, rented a cabin on a frozen lake just south of Ely for a nice 3 day winter photo adventure.

As I had learned in years passed, a winter photo trip is only as successful as you plan for. You want a warm jacket with tons of pockets but not overly bulky or heavy.  You’ll have to dress in layers that can easily adapt to changing conditions depending on what you are doing or weather changing. If you are hiking for a long period of time, you might work up a sweat that can turn frigid once you stop for a while photograph. Something I specifically struggle with is warm headwear that doesn’t cut off my field of vision too much. I also recommend some type of double glove…. a thin tight fitting glove that can provide plenty of dexterity when fumbling with your camera but cut the wind from directly touching your skin, and a nice warm outer glove that your inner glove can slide into for protection when you are walking or using your hands to interact with snow. Lastly you need proper footwear to keep your toes warm and waterproof. I use insertable hand and foot warmers to provide added warmth, but if you don’t prevent snow and wind from getting inside your shoes, it wont do much to help you long term. This year I added snowshoes and snowpoles to help walking in the snow or testing the depth of snow.

We Stayed at Bear Island Resort overlooking Bear Island Lake just 15 mins south of Ely. One of the wonders of winter in Minnesota is that lakes freeze over solid in most places so that you can walk, or even drive on them. Its still unnerving for me to walk on a frozen lake, but I get more accustomed to it every winter. The first day we woke up early and set off walking across the lake towards Bear Island to watch sunrise and investigate what there was to photograph on the islands in the middle of a frozen lake.

We never made it to Bear Island itself, but we took full advantage of being on a frozen lake to capture a beautiful sunrise. We stopped off on some mini islands along the way, but mostly they were inaccessible because of the snowshoes and steep rocky boulders. Overall tho, I felt that this excursion was the highlight of the trip for me. I thoroughly enjoyed shooting panoramics and soaking in the quietness of the early morning.

The next day we ventured to an old growth pine forest management area. While it was interesting to see all the trees planted at the turn of the last century lined up in rows, the repetition made for a lot of similar photographs. I got a few I liked, but for some reason I just wasn’t feeling in tuned with the landscape like the day before. We ventured on to an area north of Ely that had falls below a Dam. I again struggled to get any compositions that i was pleased with, but I still enjoyed the adventure of exploring the area in the deep snow.

One highlight tho was when I decided to venture off on my own above the Dam to explore the frozen lake….. (We each had a walkie Talkie just in case we got into trouble). I stumbled upon a wolf tearing apart an deer out in the middle of the frozen lake.  (the lake was about a quarter mile across, and I had just stepped out of the woods onto the lake) My heart stopped, I stood still, The wolf stopped eating and we stared at each other for a brief moment. I’m not very brave, but I AM stupid…. I slowly tried to reach for my camera, but the wolf decided my fate and ran off towards the opposite shoreline and into the forest. Why I didn’t reach for the walkie talkie first is a mystery to me, but I did the exact same thing with a brown bear 15 years earlier in the mountains of northern New Mexico…. And a rattle snake in South Dakota. All I can say is that holding a camera brings down your IQ in dangerous situations.

I don’t think I took a breath for 3 minutes, all I could hear was my heartbeat as I strained my eyes to find if it was still watching me from across the lake. Nothing but pure winter silence…… no movement, no sound, no wolf….. and then I exhaled. I snapped off a few shots of the dead carcass with my zoom lens and came back to my senses. I radioed to my buddies to tell them what happened and where I was. I still didn’t move for at least 10 minutes until a buddy found me. We walked back to where we had parked and called it a day. No real great shots came from that little encounter, but the intensity of that brief moment seared an image of winter into my imagination. I will say, wolves are much larger than you expect. It was defiantly not a dog.

The moral of the story is, you’re never prepared for everything.

Every fall, I make a trip to Dallas to see my family for Thanksgiving. Usually I fly direct, since the older I get the more I hate driving, but this year I made the decision to drive from Minneapolis in order to cross something off my bucket list. Cadillac Ranch. For those who arn’t familiar with it, Cadillac Ranch is a public art installation on a piece of farmland right next to Interstate 40 in Amarillo Tx. The Installation has been moved 3 miles from its original location to accommodate the expansion of the nearby city, but its still on private land owned by Millionaire Stanley Marsh the 3rd.

Since its installation in 1974, by the art group Ant Farm (Chip Lord, Hudson Marquez and Doug Michels… Wiki – Cadillac Ranch), the upturned classic Cadillacs have taken on an air of legend (and graffiti). I first remember hearing about them in a ‘Texas History’ class in Elementary school. Even though I grew up in Texas, I never made an effort to visit the installation, but it always lurked in the back of my mind to see it some day.

Normally the drive down takes about 15 hours straight. In order to tolerate the long haul, I implored my buddy Andy Birkey to be my co-pilot for the voyage with the promise of free thanksgiving feasts, some vacation time away from the cities, and a chance to see these mythic upturned desert Cadillacs. In my mind I thought the detour west on I40 out of Oklahoma City would only add a couple hours to my journey…… A few hours turned into an extra 6-8 hours total. Just a tad more than I expected.

Was it what I expected? No, it was rather static and pedestrian (and smelled of cow a bit, as many things do out in that part of Texas), but to be fair the life long myth of a place rarely lives up to ones own imagination. I dutifully popped out the camera to document the place. Dumping my emotions and expectations and trying to see the installation for what it was and for what my memory would think of the place once it was evaluated by my imagination later. I find that photography can see the rawness in a subject and leave a vacancy for imagination and fantasy to be brought to an image through the viewer. Not all photographs are this way, but many landscapes often rely upon this underlying structure.

Looking at the photos from the Ranch is somewhat disorienting for me…. The place feels much more vacant and lonely in the photographs than I remember. I believe this has to do with my efforts to minimize the houses, people, and cars from my compositions in order to make the subject the focus, but partly it has to do with the absence of my journey to get there. In my mind, I remember all of the driving, the searching through city streets for my exit, plowed farm field (which is surrounded fairly closely by urban shopping centers and housing… I wonder if they will have to move it once again in the near future). Whatever the reason, I’m happy with the photos esthetically, but I still puzzle in my mind how I feel about the installation itself as an art object.

Is it art? Sure, Why not. Did I enjoy it? Sure. Did I leave my mark on it? Yes, and I suppose thats part of experience. I’m not sure I have any reason to see it again. (Thats partly due to the remote nature of it). Its a hell of a drive to visit such a tiny dot on the map, but worth the drive once since I had avoided it for so long. I did stop off at “The Big Texan”, home of the 72 ounce steak challenge, where I polished off a meager 8ounces of steak, bought a pair of real Longhorns to mount on my truck and set off for Dallas.

Cadillac Ranch….. I’ve been there.

I’ve been teaching some classes on lighting and composition lately for the Twin Cities Photography Group, and in preparation for my next class I went scouting for locations to do an outdoor lighting class. I settled on a space down by the Mississippi river on the Saint Paul side across from the Shriners Hospital. Down by the river is a flat area with lots of tall trees and low vegetation along some walking paths that seemed perfect for what I had in mind to create an etherial ‘Wood Nymph’ shoot.  I was using a set of 4 alien Bee’s with a portable battery pack (VagabondII) as my power source. It took some trials and testing to get the right look I wanted, But i settled on one 1600w alien Bee pointed directly at my model without an umbrella, two 800w Bee’s with large umbrellas pointed at the trees to light up the background, and I placed the last 1600w bee with a large umbrella in the distant back of the scene to give the scene some depth.

My model for this shoot was Megan Bridges, a spectacular dancer that I’ve worked with many times before. She has an uncanny way of seeing my vision for a shot and executing it perfectly…. plus she has a great sense of humor to let me do a shoot where she would be tossing pounds of flour in the air as she jumped through it. By the end of the shoot, her face and hair were covered in flour.

Some o fthe surprising things about the shoot were: 1- how long the battery pack lasted (nearly 3 hours),  2- how green the vegetation still was along the “forest floor” and 3- mow hard it was to get the flour to disperse in the air. I’m going to be doing some dispersal tests before the I offer the class to see if baby powder, powdered sugar, or something else will offer a better dispersion for the shoot. Regardless of the difficulties with the shoot, I’m VERY pleased with the results.

So I’ve recently been augmenting my photography adventures with something a bit more artistic. By creating my own pinhole lenses to place on my Canon 5D MarkII, I’ve been able to do some experimentation without having to buy film. In the old days of film, you would create a pinhole camera out of an out-meal box or a make something out of wood. Then placing a sheet of light sensitive paper (usually 4”x5”) inside, you’d walk around making exposures and running back inside a darkroom to develop them. Thus, many pinhole photographs are done within a short distance of a darkroom.

By turning a digital SLR into a pinhole camera, you can take shots anywhere you want. You can also see instantly an idea of what the shot will look like on the camera’s LCD. For those not familiar with pinhole photography, the principals are easy to explain. The camera is nothing more than a dark box where the sensor (or film) sits waiting to be exposed to light. You place a lens in front of it and expose it. The only difference is that a pinhole lens is usually made from a thin sheet of metal with the tiniest of holes pricked into it. The smaller the hole the sharper the image, however the hole will never be as sharp as engineered lens glass. The light that goes through the pin-prick reverses and projects onto the sensor (or film) and makes an exposure.

Most pinhole photographs have a certain look about them that’s caused by the irregularities in the material used and how perfect the round hole thats created. Thus many images have a soft halo or blurry look in pinhole images. Many pinhole photographs also seem to vignette around the edges.

This photograph was a nice surprise when I took it. Since the ƒ-stop is so tiny on these lenses, most of the exposures have to be longer in order to get enough light. I decided to take some shots while I was going for a walk to see how that would affect the shot. Like a pastoral landscape, this exposure has lots of color, but soft undulating lines that give the whole thing a watercolor effect. I’m happy with it.

Here are a few more shots I took at night and turned into B&W artistic interpretations:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/scubecreative/sets/72157625240602084/

I’ve been a big fan of night time photography for years, and always wanted to learn how it’s done. I recently started listening to a podcast called “Night Writerz”, hosted by Chad Clark (blog.thenightwriterz.com). It really inspired me to go out and start shooting night scenes. I highly suggest anyone who is interested in night photography to give his podcast a listen. Very informative, inspirational, and loads of helpful tips on how to shoot, settings, and where to find other photographers who are working in this genre.

I wont say I mastered “night photography”, but it was a very gratifying first experience. Around 10p, with my photo friend Michael Hubbard (www.captsures.com), We set out to find some interesting places that might have graffiti, or crumbling infrastructure to make our subject and happened upon some railroad tracks (I know it seems common but it was very easy to access). Michael was working with Nikon cameras and lenses and a manfrotto tripod with vivitar strobe flashes and I had My Canon 5D MArk 1, couple lenses, manfrotto tripod, and a speedlight 580exII.

We would find a spot that looked interestingly lit by streetlights, headlights from traffic going by, or ambient mixes of lights. I had issues with focusing tho, since it was so dark at times, my auto-focus was not able to find enough contrast to make an accurate read, so I had to do it manually through the viewfinder and my eye. It was not easy, and I’m not entirely sure they are all sharp. I think next time i will bring along some high powered flashlights to do spot focusing with. Michael’s Nikon had a focusing light that assisted him, but even he had troubles getting it to see at certain distances.

Originally we had anticipated going to 3 separate locations to take night shots but lucked out and found some stationary cargo train cars on the tracks and ended up messing around for 3 hours in just that one location. Sometimes we’d make just ambient light exposures, and sometimes we’d run through a scene popping off flashes from our strobe lights to “paint” the scene. I also had a low powered flashlight that helped at times. It was a good thing we went as a pair, since it was slightly dangerous to be lurking around abandoned train cars at night where no one can hear you if you scream. I usually like photographing alone when I’m working on fine art type captures, but in this instance i highly recommend working in pairs or more to stay safe (also smart to have someone there in cause you twisted an ankle or injured yourself climbing around big train cars).

We plan on going out regularly to do more night adventures, and are open to small groups going out with us (safety in numbers). If you are interested, just contact me at s3photo@mac.com or find me on twitter @S3Photo and we can work something out. Would love to hear about other possible locations to go lurking about.

Earlier this summer I was hired to do some campaign photos for a guy running for city council in Minneapolis. As so it happens, I got another political gig by referral. A friend of the city councilman saw the photos I did and wanted me to work on portraits for his campaign too. He is running for a city wide seat on the Minneapolis Park Board.

We worked all over the city to find portraits that could be used in different local papers and flyers and showed different aspects of the vast Minneapolis park’s system. On one of our last days doing headshots, we debated taking a shot on Calhoun beach with the sunset in the background. I as apprehensive about them turning out well without really bad blown out highlights. After hemming and hawing for a few minutes, we decided to give it a go and see if anything turned out.

So there on the sand, I set up the tripod, light stands and my Speedlight 430’s. I composed the shot and started working on adjusting the strobes. I took a range of exposures since the sunset was so bright that I couldn’t tell exactly what was going on on my LCD. I had no idea they turned out as well as they did until I got home and started working on the digital negatives.

I’m very happy with the end results. Even though its not perfect, I have been looking to duplicate this exact lighting situation that I’ve seen in Portraits in other peoples portfolios. So I’m happy that my attempt turned out as well as it did. Really enjoyed working with him.