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Something Small From Something Big

This is an image at the bottom of one of Iceland’s largest waterfalls, Seljalandsfoss.  I have been to this location dozens of times.  I have photographed from every angle.  Because it is so big as a photographer, I usually try to get the whole waterfall in.  I do my blurry time exposures.  I get it with morning and sunset light.  I go behind the waterfall and get low and sometimes climb the hill to get a high short.  But, am I seeing it all.

In the last few years I have been putting on my 100-400mm Sony lens and now looking for the picture in the picture.  In this case, there was something beautiful going on, as the waterfall would turn into a mist and gently land on the tricks at the bottom of the fall.  There was a whole other landscape taking place here.  The delicate moss, the miniature waterfalls flowing through this moss, and amazing detail you could never see unless you looked at it through a long lens.

So, next time you are out, look at the big landscape and then start looking for the smaller landscape inside the shot.  Picture in a picture.  I have a 24×24 inch print of this hanging in my hallway.  It always stops people as they explore all the detail.  Print it out.

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Japanese Owls

Owls, Hokkaido, Japan

A few months ago I visited Hokkaido, Japan to lead a small workshop of photographers.  it was a great experience and I have to say Hokkaido is an amazingly beautiful region.  I look forward to returning someday in the future.  This image was made with the Fuji Xt3 and 100-400mm lens with a 1.4 extender on it.

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Saturday Night At The Fair

Shot at 1250th of a sec, ISO 2000 with 400mm on 100-400mm lens F/8

Debra and I went to the Indiana State Fair on Friday night. It’s a yearly tradition to spend a day at the fair and we watched the weather forecast and headed to the fair on a partly cloudy day with 80-degree weather.  There’s a lot of walking at the fair and we both were loaded with our camera gear.  Debra was shooting with a Fuji XT2 with 10-24mm, 18-55mm and a 55-200mm lens.  I was shooting with the new Sony a9 with the 16-35mm and 100-400 G Master lenses.

I’m taking the Sony setup to Greenland later this week and Debra has never shot with the Fuji before so it was a good chance for her to get familiar with it.  Needless to say, we had a great day and shot lots of images.

We took a break to sit down and watch the monster truck show.  There was some motocross as part of it.  The Sony a9 has the ability to shootm20 frames per second and the 100-400mm lens is so fast focusing that with this combo it was hard to miss a shot.  So, this image is one of the hundreds and most likely I’ll post more that I did during the show.  I was blown away by it.  the sun was setting so we had warm light coming from behind lighting things perfectly.  You gotta admit that it is nice when everything just comes together.

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Penguin Love

Penguin Love, shot with a Fuji XT-2 and a 100-400mm lens

Over the last 3 weeks, I captured 12,000 images as part of the Luminous-Landscape South Georgia and Antarctica adventure.  I have managed to narrow the collection down to 2400 images,  The rejects sit in a separate folder off on the server just in case I ever need to refer to them.

Now that I am in major editing mode and have started to output some of my favorites images, i thought it would be good to share them.  I’ll also be doing an article on LuLa soon with many more images.  Today though I thought it would be great to share with you an image of what I call Penguin Love.  Penguins are incredible creatures and they do the most amazing things.  I loved the way these two showed their affection with each other.

Shot with a Fuji XT-2 and a 100-400mm lens.  The Fuji never let me down on this trip.  The 100-400mm with great IOS let me hand-held exposures with the equivalent of a 600mm lens.  And, it focuses close enough to get images like this.