Zion National Park in October is really beautiful. The crowds are gone and the roads are open for cars. As much as I enjoy shooting in the park I also love to wander the back roads around the park. It’s not uncommon when doing this to come across some really nice scenes like this image. This image was close by the park and was different from all the cliche images made in the park. I am driving to Zion this fall and look forward to doing a lot of backroads along the way.
As you may know, if you are a regular reader, I am big on rust and big metal things. This is an image from the waterworks pumping station in Buffalo, NY. This place is very interesting. Kind of a steampunk kind of place. Big pipes and pumps. The pump house takes water from Lake Erie and was built around 1920. It’s a great place to shoot images. This image was made with an iPhone.
Many times as photographers we get stuck on seeing the big scene. yet, under our feet or in front of us is art and we just need to train our eyes enough to see this art. These images today are abstracts found in a bigger scene. One image is a wall where numerous posters have been applied and torn off. The other two images are from peeling paint on rusty truck found near the Palouse region in the state of Washington. I’m always looking for abstracts whether it is man-made or natural. You need to keep your eyes open and always be looking.
Ladders are cool. Back in my firefighting days, I was the first to line up to climb ladders. The 50 foot and 100-foot ladders were the best. I’m not or maybe when I was younger wasn’t afraid of heights. I now have a slight fear of heights. Maybe because I have gotten a tad smarter in my old age. These ladders were shot on Deception Island, Antarctica. They are attached to what were old Whale Oil tanks. There is something about the repeatability of pattern and of course the rust that works for me in these images.
Michael Reichmann and I had many adventures. This was made on one of them as he and I spent several days exploring some of the deepest non-nnglish parts of Mexico. This was a farmer watering his horse by a flooded plain with birds flying into the shot.
Sorry, it has been a little while since my last post. I was away for a few weeks running a workshop and then in major catch-up mode. Today’s image was made in Chicago a few weeks ago. I love this classic shot but maybe not the big letters spelling TRUMP on the beautiful building.
I will be posting a lot of rust pictures from Antarctica this is part of a project for a small book I am working on. Hard to believe there is so much rust there. Read about this more under the articles tab.
I had the opportunity this past winter to visit Lofoten, Norway. It’s an amazing place. Almost like a fairy tale. Tall mountains, big skies, and gorgeous coastlines. I won’t lie to you, but it was crowded with photographers. Plus it was hard to photograph there. There aren’t pull offs on the roads and there is no shoulder, just gullies. We saw a lot of people who slid off the road into these gullies.However, if you didn’t mind walking and parking a bit of a hike away you could find locations like the one in the picture above. I did a 35-second exposure for this shot. It blurred the sky and smoothed out the water. While I really loved the location I probably won’t visit there again as the crowds of photographers makes it hard to enjoy.
I love cities for a lot of reasons, especially for all they offer a photographer in subjects that can be photographed. I take walks on the streets early in the morning and shoot people, buildings, light and shadow and even elements like door knobs. I usually work with long lenses. These were taken with a Fuji XT2 and a 100-400 zoom.
I see some cool things and places in my travel. This image reminds me of a secret base in a James Bond movie. It is a water intake facility stuck out on Lake Erie. We took a Buffalo fireboat to get here. It is really a cool place and old. It is the intake for the city’s water supply. I shot this with a wide angle lens. I had lots of fun exploring this structure.