Grand Canyon Railway & Grand Canyon

Throwback Thursday! the Grand Canyon Railway operates a steam train several times a year it runs from Williams Arizona to the south rim of the Grand canyon approximately 64 miles. It is a trip that takes you back in time as you travel to one of the seven natural wonders of the world....The Grand Canyon.

I have uploaded 16 images from the excursion to the canyon via the Grand Canyon Railway. they are located in  my new images portfolio. Take a journey in time to the south rim and check out the vistas from the canyon. http://www.phawkinsphoto.com/#a=0&at=0&mi=2&pt=1&pi=10000&s=0&p=0

Back Yard Nature Portfolio has also been updated. And many other changes will be taking place in the days and weeks to come, so be sure to keep an eye open for my updates.

Do not forget to check out my social media sites. You can Like my Face Book page at  https://www.facebook.com/pages/httpwwwphawkinsphotocom/157220331078?ref=nf

You can follow my tweets at @Phawkinsphoto.com Another way to see more of my work is  my photo-stream over  on Flickr http://ht.ly/oa3Uc

As always I welcome your input please feel free to be totally honest with your opinions, It will help me improve my work and website.

Similarities between Rifel & Camera

What do shooting a rifle and making a photograph have in common?

Assume that you are handholding the camera think wat is different than if I were holding a rifle, it's your wrist position. The rest of the mechanics are or should be exactly the same. Slow breathing, slowly squeezing the shutter/trigger. Not to mention your stance and posture.

A Simple Solution

The other day I was shooting a macro image of a rusty bolt and washer that I found in the desert and was some distance from my vehicle. While setting up the image I  knew I needed to add some fill to subject and I did not want to walk back to the car to get a fill disk. I thought what do I have on me that would work? I thought there must be something in my wallet that I could use. I found several cards that would work. I was able to use small stones to hold the card in place. 

Why does it take so long

Why does it take so long to see the photographs you just took, you are a professional? After all I took some photos too and I have all ready posted ALL of mine to Facebook and my blog.

As a professional I try to capture moments in time that are special and memorable, in order to do this I may make several hundred if not thousands of exposures during an event. Making the exposures is the easy part of the process and once that is finished the real work begins. The goal is to tell a story of the event with photos that excite the viewer, but not overwhelm them to the point where they get bored and walk away. 

The editing process begins, first you have to import all the images that you created into your image editing program. Now you have to find just the right ones (kinda like looking for the needle in the hay stack). The process of elimination begins, is this image technically good (exposure, lighting and composition)? If so it is rated if not it is rejected. 

Each image is optimized for exposure and color corrected to look its absolute best. Again these images are rated and the cream moves along to the next step.

Since most of our work now gets posted online in one way or another we need to make sure that one the image can be found by search engines, and that we (photographers) are properly credited for creating the imagery. In this step keywords and metadata are added to the file before it goes on line..

Now that the editing process is finished how are the images going to be shown to the client? Paper or on line, either process will take some time and has some variables that we have no control over. Did the lab run out of paper are they busy? Is the internet slow, bad connection? Sometimes things just go wrong.

The images will be available it is the end of a sometimes complicate process that can be interrupted by life.