From the Heart

Walking around to today I felt the heat of the sun on my brow. Felt like the first time in a year, haha. Spring is coming. Another year of renewal and birth, of fresh ideas and fresh starts. I'm about to embark on a big trip down to New Orleans, a first for me. While I've been many places in the last few years, the Big Easy isn't one of them.

I'm a country boy. I grew up in the forest and generally my idea of a good time is embarking on a journey to places in the wild.  Yellowstone was a great adventure in 2008.  The last few years though, I've been observing the urban jungle, or at least the suburban jungle.

The scenes are completely different, but the feel is somewhat of the same. It's still an exploration of something unknown for me. The nature feels a bit contrived, but it's still there.

There's even something else that is fun to capture in cities; people.

They give an added dimension to the photos that would otherwise be missing. I love working them into nature scenes as well when possible.

I like people. They're fun to work with. Each and everyone of them responds differently to the camera.  For the last few years, I've studied Henri Cartier Bresson, Paul Strand, Albert Eisenstaedt, André Kertész, Margret Bourke-White and a personal favorite Galen Rowell. It's a similar process that I've gone through in Jazz. You listen to others so that you can build your own vocabulary. And that's what I've been doing with my photography; building a language so that I can express myself. Express my views of the world.

I speak with my photos so I can capture a moment; I want people to see what things look like from my point of view and hopefully take advantage of the things around them. There is power in the everyday, in the normal as long as we take the time to look for it.

That's all for now folks, take care.

Snow Days

Snow and Ice. It's the great equalizer for a day.  The white blanket evens out dips and rises in the landscape, and creates a sense of equality to a scene.

It's also a pain in the butt to shoot in. Your camera is a simple instrument, even for the $8,000 Nikon D3x.  They're all just a light tight box made for capturing an image. In snow, most camera meters will underexpose. They see the mass of white in front of them, and they try to make the scene 18% grey.  It's not the meter's fault; it's what it is designed to do.  With traditional centerweighted or spot meters, you need to over expose by about 2 stops - i.e. go from 1/1000th of a second to 1/250th of a second for a shutter speed.  My Nikons are a bit better with their matrix metering - I usually only need to adjust about a stop to get my whites white again.

   

Your best bet in this type of situation is to bracket the shot - i.e. take a photo at your best guess exposure, a stop above and a stop below.  With digital, you can check the histogram afterwards and see which one looks best.  You want to make sure you haven't clipped any important highlight areas, or lost a lot of shadow detail.

   Street photography gets a bit tough in the winter; people tend to hunker down inside during storms, and in the cold weather. Your options become a bit more limited.  But there's always someone out having fun.

 

Embrace the cold though, and go get some shots.  It's a fun world in the snow. I find that I tend to shoot more black and white in the winter, the starkness of the atmosphere seems to call for it. But if you can find it, the juxtaposition of color in the shades of gray of a winter day can make a shot really stand out.

Take Care for now, and enjoy the rest of winter! Mud Season (some like to call it spring I'm told) brings its own joys to photography.

Watch out for that Knee!

Been a while since I've posted, but here's a new one for y'all.

It's a very important thing while working (especially at a show with thousands of people and stage antics galore) to pay attention to your surroundings. A lot of photographers get tunnel vision while shooting - we focus on our main objective. But for safety's sake and for finding different shots, keep an eye out. You never know what is coming. Here, I wasn't paying close enough attention. During a show with a well known musician, you get two options - 3 songs or 15 minutes, depending on the artist. Sting was the worst - only allowed to shoot for 2 songs, from 100 + feet away :/. Paisley was better, but you had to fight a crowd of people to get your shots, even with a press pass. The only way to get a clear, full body shot was to shoot from the ego stage (a long, narrow stage that sticks out into the audience). While I was doing that however, I failed to notice his fiddle player coming right at me. He missed, but I felt the woosh of air as he passed. This was the shot I got as that happened.
So. Stay alert and have a good time shooting!

Cheers,
Eric

p.s. you can see more photos of the shoot from here - http://ericjenks.zenfolio.com/paisley