I went down to a friend’s farm to shoot the eclipse the other day, along with Hudson Henry and his eclipse workshop students. We had a blast hanging around all morning, waiting for totality, which was so worth getting up at 4:30 in the morning for.
(I posted this on Instagram and Facebook, but those sites really compress photos, so I decided to repost it here. Click on the photo to see it larger.)
Six posts here in all of 2014. Maybe a bit shameful, but I was clearly preoccupied with many things, including the wholesale building of a new life.
I’ll have more to say this year for sure, but to kick off 2015, here is a shot from October’s “Great Alford Desert Adventure,” which was one of my favorite trips of last year. (Which, given last year’s travels, is saying something.)
It was 30° when I took this shot, but I really didn’t notice.
More later. I promise.
Matt Kloskowski, Hudson Henry, Brian Matiash and I drove out to the Oregon Coast yesterday to photograph Thor’s Well, a well-known landmark (part of Cape Perpetua) that is spectacular at high tide. We had hoped for an epic sunset–which wasn’t to be–but we still had a great time. I’d go into more detail, but Hudson has an excellent recap on his blog about our exploits here, so pop over there for more photos and fun.
It was quite a day. We started out at Oneonta Gorge with wetsuits and dry bags to shoot the lower falls, and then high-tailed it out to the coast for sunset, getting back home and to bed after 1 a.m. I’m still working through images, but it felt good to be back out with a camera in my hand. (I see that Matt has already posted his keeper from the Oneonta shoot; mine will probably go up in the next couple of days.)
Hudson and I went shooting in the fog on Sauvie Island this morning, along the Multnomah Channel. I’ve been shooting this scene for years: every January, the fog comes in for a few weeks, and it’s just a glorious place to shoot.
I’m still working through all the photos we shot, but this one jumped out at me pretty quickly. I love the three cormorants on the pilings, all aligned in the same direction, and I just got lucky with the bird flying right above the water. (Check it out full size to really see all the detail.)
[Check out Hudson’s blog: one of his Denali shots is on the cover of this month’s Sierra magazine, which is pretty friggin’ awesome.]
Another shot from my recent jaunt to SF…
The Sony RX1 rarely disappoints me. I might wish I had different lenses for it, but it’s an unbelievably wonderful lens/sensor combination. This was handheld, in the wind, and it still came out extremely sharp. Granted, it was at 1/2000th of a second, but I’ve got a bunch of shots taken at that shutter speed in similar conditions that exhibit shake.
I have had a camera with me constantly for the past few months, but it’s not going to surprise anyone that I haven’t felt a creative spark at all. I look through the few shots that I’ve taken, and there’s absolutely nothing there.
This is the first shot in a long time where I actually looked at the scene as I drove by; made myself stop and backtrack to the location; and actually took the time set up a shot. It might not be great art, but it sure felt good.
I didn’t get a lot of great shots in Maui this year. It wasn’t for lack of trying, but when I go over my library, I have some great snapshots, but little else. Lee and I did have a lot of fun with our daily Instagrams, and I think that was really my photographic focus when we were there.
This one, taken on one of our last days on the island, was a ‘quick, turn off the road’ shot. What you can’t easily tell is how windy it was — I squeezed off about 20 shots, but I was so buffeted by the wind that, even with a fast shutter speed, I ended up with few usable images. Had it been a little bit calmer, I would have moved around more, gotten the tripod out, and been more careful about composing.
As such, this photo gets the ‘revisit‘ tag…
When Liza and I got back into Oregon, after five days on the road, we decided to push on a bit further than we had done on any other day, ending up driving nearly 800 miles.
That last, 80-mile push turned out to be the best decision we made on the whole trip, because we happened upon the most beautiful sunset we had seen over the entire 3,000-mile journey, and a wonderful “welcome home” from Oregon to Liza. It was the only time during the entire trip that I pulled out the tripod and shot with the 5DMkII (although I did take a few pictures “on the go” with it).
