MaineSight

A late, wet, February snow transformed the landscape into a monochrome wonderland. Photographed, processed, and posted from my iPhone 3Gs.

As I was walking my dog on this cold February day in Maine, I came across this icy stream. Unfortunately, I brought a monopod instead of a tripod, and was forced to do my best without a true stable platform. I attatched the monopod to my Canon G10 and braced the horizontally oriented camera/monopod against myself while taking this photo (1/4 sec, f/4, ISO 80). Not bad for 1/4 second. But what I’m not showing are the 35 pictures that didn’t make the cut. There’s one distracting element in this picture that bugs me; do you see it?

A cold and windy walk at Popham Beach at low tide lead to what looked like an old pier piling washed up on the beach. Canon G10, handheld.

On a Thanksgiving Day family hike in Brooksville I came upon this bend in the trail and realized while photographing that even at 24mm, I am not not going to get a sharp focus across the image (at least not without a tilt shift lens), so I set up my tripod and cable release and made two exposures; one with focus in the foreground, and the other with focus farther back in the frame.

Once home, I opened the two raw images using PhotoAcute and combined them using the focus stacking feature. This is the first time I’ve used this feature, and it worked remarkably well.

I was just working on some images making print ready files for sending to my printer (White House Custom Color). I’ve made a template in Lightroom’s Print Module that (when a properly cropped) makes a jpeg file ready to upload and print. However, the below portrait format print image was accidentally used with a landscape template for a 5×7 greeting card, and them I was left with the bottom image, which, after realizing what had happened, I instantly liked. This led to a good 20 minutes or so of making different versions and playing around with the crop. Freeman Patterson has a great exercise where he has you place your tripod in one spot and make a 10-20 images. Its a fantastic exercise in seeing, and not altogether different than my little cropping exercise.




Next time I am at Schoodic Point (the location of these photos) I will return with fresh eyes, inspired by a happy accident.

I’m getting ready to sell prints and greeting cards for the indoor Brunswick Market at the old Fort Andross Mill. This is one of the images I hope will sell; it was made this summer at Camden harbor while waiting to depart to Mantinicus Island. Handheld, with the 70-200mm f/2.8L IS at 200mm.

Tamaracks, Durham, Maine. Processed with Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta.

This was taken on a wonderful overcast day in Brooksville, Maine on some land recently donated to the Blue Hill Heritage Trust.

Unfortunately, I mistakingly left my tripod at home, and this image was handheld  ISO 800 for 1/30 second at f/10.

A former physics student of mine (Tony Lucchese) and his fiance (Sarah LaFore) hired me to photograph their wedding. They met on the theatrical stage and staged a superhero themed wedding in which Tony was Superman, and Sarah was Wonder Woman. The wedding party consisted of various super heroes and amazons. This photo is from the rehearsal the day before the actual wedding, but I liked the dramatic lighting. You can read more about the wedding at Tony and Sarah’s wedding blog at http://super-wedding.blogspot.com/2009_08_01_archive.html

I took a short sunset paddle tonight in Frenchman Bay. I’ve never photographed while paddling, but I decided to try to get over my inhibition about mixing salt water with photography. I’m still nervous while attempting to photograph while paddling—even though it was calm when I went out. I’m constantly paranoid I am going to drop the camera or capsize as compose a photo.