Quick entry as I am in Death Valley leading a Phase One PODAS workshop. It is a great group of people and we are doing a ton of photography. On Monday we visited the Race Track. More on this great place in future blogs. But for today enjoy the photograph. Please excuse me though for the shortness of this as I need to be up in four hours so we photograph the dunes. More soon.
Somedays you just hit it right. Today started off as a beautiful day in Death Valley. Great light and clouds. Then it just became windy and I mean thundering windy. It’s like standing in a giant hair dryer. The valley was covered in dust storms as far as you could see. Death Valley is apparently famous for this wind and heat. Anyway I am not big into sunrises like this but today is an exception.
I met up with one of the attendees of the PODAS workshop in Vegas today and we went to the Neon Boneyard. It was a hot 100 degree day. Funny as it was in the 30’s when I left Indy. In any case we had a fun time shooting the old neon signs of Vegas. Lots of colors and such. So, I decided to take the color out and make an image that might make you take a second look. Hope it works. I like it.
One of the benefits of traveling to Antarctica so many times is that you get a large library of Penguin Images. My library is huge. Penguins are very cool and very funny. If you sit on the ground there they will come up to you and sit with you They are every curious and they are always busy. I love watching these little guys as they are always on a mission or a honey do list. But, they also find time to love. Here’s a cute couple.
Don’t forget the next ten days I’ll be in Death Valley. While I will try to post images here, you can follow the workshop activities at www.podas.info
I leave on Friday for a ten day trip to Death Valley. This is one of the most beautiful National Parks there is. It’s deceiving because you drive into it and you see just desert, but it has it’s surprises. Before I head out to Death Valley I’ll be stopping in Las Vegas, and picking up a friend from Australia and we are going shooting in the Neon Boneyard. This is a photographers paradise. This is where they all the old signs from the hotels and casinos in Vegas. It is rich in texture and color and just about anyplace you point the camera is a good shot. I will be shooting with my small GH2 camera and doing 5 exposure HDRs. I have shot medium format here before and just have some amazing shots. This time I have ideas of what I want to do with the final images and they will not be big prints. After this little excursion I”ll be headed to Furnace Creek Inn where I will be leading a Phase One PODAS workshop for a week. We have folks coming from around the world to try out the Phase One camera systems in this marvelous landscape. You can follow the event on the PODAS blog by Clicking Here. I’ll post a new shot here tomorrow and if all goes well on Friday night I’ll post a Neon Boneyard shot.
Ahhh…Antarctica…..I have a love for this place. It’s a life changing environment with natural beauty and a light unlike any other place on earth. It’s a dynamic environment, especially for photographers. It can’t be clichéd. An image taken one day won’t be there the next. This iceberg was huge. I have hundreds of iceberg images. This one stands out. You can’t imagine the size of some of these. They are as big as cities they float aimlessly around the oceans and eventually melt away or break into smaller pieces. So, you take one of these beasts and then throw light on it and you get images like this.
I have been to Buenos Aires several times and like to take walks where the normal tourist doesn’t go. come to find out that many places I have visited on these walks are quite dangerous. I guess I have been lucky to have never been bothered. This image is along a dock in the harbor. There is a long line of ships docked along a pier that look like they were docked there 20 years ago and forgotten. Buenos Aires is full of rust. I have posted some other rusty ships previously. This ship just had the skeleton left as anything of value was stripped off of it. I took my chances boarding this ship and walking on very rusty and rotten floors to get into position to shoot this shot. It has everything I love – rust and peeling paint and nice geometry. Look for more rusty ships in the future. My son being the soldier he is insists that next time I take him as my PSD. That is not short for a file extension but for Personal Security Detail.
One of the garden spots for great landscapes in the US is a little know area called the Palouse. I’ll be leading a Photography Workshop there this fall with a well know shooter. The area is rolling hill, fields, open skies and landscapes that reach to the horizon. Stay tuned for more information.
This has been a weird few days of weather here in Indianapolis. We had 70 degree weather and 24 hours later we had snow and ice. While not significant it got me thinking cold again. So, today I present purple ice. This is an iceberg shot in Antarctica. The sun didn’t really set when I was there, it just kind of change to this magnificent purple – orange glow and lasted for a few hours. A totally incredible things to witness. Hope you enjoy this shot. You can see more of my Antarctica images by CLICKING HERE.
Today was one of those dramatic days in Indianapolis. We just had a tornado warning. Fun – fun! Anyway I was driving back from doing some errands this afternoon and saw the dramatic sky behind the Performing Arts Center. So I stopped and took out my iPhone and did a 30 image pano with stitch. I then over dinner worked some iPhone fun on the image. So here it is. All in all it was fun and isn’t that what taking pictures all about.