Safety Harbor Beauty at Sunrise

Planning for consistent great morning photography.

Patience and persistence pay off in great photographs.  My strategy is to seize the beautiful light at the Magic Hour near sunrise for beautiful skies, great light, feeding birds and animals.  So, I am up an hour before sunrise and at my planned location in my small town for photography between 15 and 30 minutes before sunrise.  I travel with both a wide angle and a telephoto lens and generally use both.  Just click on the link below for a selection of photos that I have made at the Magic Hour.  Enjoy!


Safety Harbor Beauty at Sunrise

Travel - New Mexico - Billy the Kid Country

Recently, Lynn and I went looking for an interesting Wild West getaway for ourselves and friends.  We had been introduced to central New Mexico by friends who lived nearby a few years ago.  We decided on making our base Ruidoso, a small town of 7,000 high in the Sierra Blanca Mountain Range.  We would drive the Billy the Kid historic loop and also do the space industry museums in Almagordo and the UFO historic sites in Roswell.  I thought that you might enjoy this short video that I produced from our trip.  All photos were taken with my Olympus EM1-Mark, EM5-Mark ii cameras and my iPhone 7+... Enjoy...

New Mexico - Billy the Kid Country

Having Fun with Time Lapse Photography

Recently, while visiting our daughter in Colorado Heather decided to give the family a lesson in painting.  Our subject was a Wine Glass Still Life.  I thought that this would be a good time lapse photography project for my Go Pro 4 camera.

I took approximately 175 photos at 5 second intervals and combined them in Pro Show Gold at approximately 1/2 second each with virtually no transition time during the time lapse. I added a few still shots of the finished art from my Olympus digital cameras at the end of the two minute program.

You can see the finish product on You Tube at:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4Rk3BC-SwY&hd=1

My Favorite 2016 Photos Slideshow

Each year at about this time I review the thousands of photos that I have taken during the year to select my favorites and the most with potential for print sales, slideshows, You Tube presentations. This year I decided to put my favorites on a slideshow which is available here on You Tube. Enjoy!

Packing light for a trip to Cambodia and Vietnam.

Lynn and I will be leaving shortly for a two week trip to Cambodia including Angkor Wat and Vietnam.  We are extremely restricted on luggage, but I wanted to bring my best Micro 4/3 tools for the photography.

So, here is my kit.  My gear includes from the top left...camera strap, tiny flash (in pouch), iPhone earbuds (in pouch), Rokinon fisheye lens, Olympus 45 mm 1.8 lens, Olympus 17 mm 1.8 lens.  Bottom  row from the left...4 Olympus batteries in pouch, 7-32gb SD cards (in NANPA pouch), Olympus OMD EM5ii camera with Olympus 40-150mm 2.8 Pro lens attached and Olympus OMD EM10 camera with 12-40mm 2.8 Pro lens attached.

All of the above packs snugly in my Lowepro bag.  Total weight 8 pounds! In addition to the great sharp photos that I get from my smaller kit I love the compactness of Micro 4/3 equipment.  My similar Nikon gear would weigh at least 3 times as much.  I am a happy camper!

Monochrome or a hint of color?

Recently my wife and I toured the historic St. Augustine Lighthouse.  You can climb to the 200+ steps to the top.  I climbed.  Lynn stayed at the bottom.  I took this photo of the the cascading steps from the top of the lighthouse.  I post processed the photo into the monochrome that you see here in Nik/Google Silver Efex Pro.  The original photo with a hint of color is below.

A subtle difference, but I am curious which one you prefer?

Removing an ugly sign in Nik/Google Snapseed.

While on my daily walk today I spotted the beautiful Mercedes-Benz above.  I really should have positioned my body and camera to eliminate the offending sign!  In post I took out the sign with Nik/Google Snapseed's healing brush.  This is an app for the iPhone and iPad.  But, there is a trick that I just learned to getting it right without messing up the photo.  When working in Snapseed and after selecting the photo you need to select the Healing Brush.  Then you need to double tap on the image to greatly enlarge it.  If you just use the resulting photo without enlarging it for the edit I can guarantee that you will mess it up.  Then you just need to carefully brush your finger over the area that needs to be replaced.  And, voila...that's all that there is to it. That's what I did above.  Nice car.  How did I do?