Steven April 22nd, 2011
One of Kenosh’s colorful trolleys that run a loop through downtown and the harbor area.
I decided to play around and make this look like a post card by adding the text to it.
This was all done on my iPhone.
Just out of curiosity, last night I made an 8×8 print of this photo. It turned out very nice. I’m so blown away by the quality of photos I’m getting from my iPhone 4 camera and the quality of the editing and filter apps that I’m using. In the future, I’ll have to do a post about these apps.
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Steven October 27th, 2010
Water is an amazing thing, it can be so peaceful and pretty, yet powerful and frightening. Simple raindrops turn into rivers that eat away at the land, creating deep canyons and gorges. The delicate beauty of a snowflake turns into the awesome power of a glacier that carves out awe inspiring mountain cathedrals such as Yosemite Valley and the high peaks of mountains worldwide. There seems to be an eternal battle of water against the land. It’s a battle that has created the unique landscapes of the Earth. Landscapes that photographers travel the world to photograph.
In this image of Miners Falls in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, MI, I tried to capture the spirit of that battle, the place where water and rock meet. Where rock fights for it’s life as water slowly chips away at it. I’ve also tried to show water’s delicate beauty and the awesome, landscape changing power working together in natural harmony.
I love water. I’m fascinated by it’s diversity and simple complexity. I never tire of watching it in all it’s shapes and forms.
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Steven October 18th, 2010
Two years ago we took a fall photo trip into the north woods of Wisconsin. While there we visited Marinette County and photographed a number of the waterfalls that are found along the Pike River.
As we were driving home from this year’s vacation, we once again found ourselves in Marinette County, so we decided to visit the Pike River again. This time we went farther downstream to Dave’s Falls County Park.
There are two small waterfalls at Dave’s Falls, a lower and an upper. While we did get some nice photos of the falls, I found this wonderful spot up stream from them.
I was on a very large granite boulder that jutted out into the stream and shot this from a very low angle, sitting on the boulder with my tripod as low as I could get it. I used my wide angle lens and had it as wide as it would go. In order to keep everything sharp, I shot at a very small aperture which then made for the very slow shutter speed that blurred the water nicely.
I love shooting stream images. It can be quite a challenge finding that perfect composition and even more of a challenge figuring out how to set your tripod up once you do find it. The rewards are wonderful though. There’s not many images that are as pretty as a nice stream shot.
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Steven October 16th, 2010
In my post More Tips to Improve Your Fall Photography, I talked about looking down at the forest floor to find interesting subjects to photograph during the fall. On our recent trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula I was able to put my advice to work and came up with some colorful images of leaves on the forest floor.
Leaves weren’t the only subject that were lower down though, we also found many mushrooms
growing on dead trees all over the forest. These mushrooms took many shapes and sizes, ranging from little classic mushrooms like you’d buy in the store, to very large pancake like ones growing up the sides of standing trees. One dead tree we came across was covered from it base up to six feet high in these fungi. It was a pretty impressive site.
While in another area of the woods, I used the exact opposite of my advice. Instead of looking down, I looked up, and found an awesome looking hornet hive high in the branches of a tree. Luckily it was a vacant hive and I was able to stand underneath it and photograph it with my telephoto lens. Interestingly, this hive was over a very busy trail, but no one seemed to notice it, even as I was taking pictures of it.
All of this goes to show that you’re head needs to be on a swivel while out shooting in the woods. You never know what you may see when looking down and looking up.
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