The desert has been getting some good rainfalls over this winter. I just hope that it has happened at the right times for a good spring wildflower season. I will be monitoring it closely now as the flowers could start in the next couple of weeks and hopefully what happened last year dose not this year, a sudden heat wave burnt most of the plants and they never bloomed so pray for a gradual warm up.
I have said how important it is to plan what and where to shoot in order to create an photo with impact. Well most of the time that is true. I also believe photographers should always have a camera close by if we’re not carrying one.
Several years ago my wife and I were on a weeks vacation at a cabin on lake One (partially in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area), Our mission that week was total relaxation which meant NO WORK. We had this cabin for seven days and we were doing nothing but enjoying our time. The cabin had these white plastic chairs and each cabin at the resort had it’s own dock, So we had taken two of the chairs down to the dock so we could take in the different moods of the lake over the week. Well our time went by and we were packing up to leave and we remembered that the chairs were still on the dock so I went to get them and saw an image I just had to make. I ran back to the car and grabbed for a camera and started making images only to realize that I had my wife’s camera I thought for a moment about switching to one of mine but I decided not to because the fog was lifting so I just kept making images, after all we were shooting the same film that summer.
The resulting image has been one of our top sellers year in and year out since then. I’m not convinced that if we had tried to stage this image or do variations with the chairs it would have worked very well. Some times there is a great merit in the grab shot and I try to encourage people to keep their camera’s close by at all times.
I find the more I visit a location the more I find to photograph or perhaps on subsequent visits I am seeing the location from a more personal perspective. Some of my favorite images have been made at places were I have been several times. So while it is gratifying to check out a new location it can be very productive to check out those familiar locations as well it just might sunrise you!
The other day I was asked how do you make the water blurry like that? Well man years ago I was reading a book by Les Blacklock ( a well known Minnesota photographer) and he made the answer really simple. To the human eye a water fall is equivalent to 1/60th of a second. So if you want a nice white waterfall that shows a lot of movement you’ll want to slow your shutter speed down. If you do this you will need a good tripod and cable release.
In the case of my example photo instead of a water fall the water was moving through a stretch of rapids along the Temperance river along Minnesota’s North shore of Lake Superior.
Knowing your subjects behaviors can lead to making the unexpected image an expected image. I have photographed the Common Loon for years and knew that toward the end of the preening process the birds would et up and shake their wings out. With this knowledge and a bird that was use to having boats near by I was able to create this image which I call Wings.
