Against the wind

The only thing I like better than photographing people is photographing people doing something they love to do in the environment in which they love to do it. Suzanne was kind enough set aside some time to model for me. More than once. Unpredictable weather canceled more than one scheduled session. We finally wwere able to connect on a chilly spring day to get the picture above. Several times running around the bend. Sun in her face. Wind blowing like crazy. But she loves to run. She loves to help others. By posing for me, she got to do both.

Against the storm

The lighthouse at Wind Point, north of Racine Wisconsin, set against a backdrop of turbulent skies.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Snowbird

Black and white conversion of a color photograph.

Have a great weekend. Stay warm.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Cape Neddick lighthouse

Every once in a while, I have a reason to dig into my archive of negatives and slides to hunt for a picture. I received an e-mail from a gentleman in Iowa looking to purchase prints of lighthouses. He supplied a list of the specific ones he is looking for and I happen to have photos of five of the lighthouses on his list.

The one I had to work hardest to find was this one. It's the lighthouse at Cape Neddick in York, Maine. This shot was taken in August of 2001 during a trip through several New England states. I was still learning the intricacies of exposing film properly, and had the courage (or foolishness) to shoot the entire trip on slide film, which leaves little room for error.

After examining the scanned hi-res file, it looks like the rookie did OK. This shot was a tad overexposed, but it works. Actually, the photo above is a black and white conversion from the color transparency. The color version can be seen here.

Back then, I was about three years into following something inside me that made me want to learn everything I could about photography. I have to say that nearly nine years later, the fire is still there, continuing to push me onward. It's nice to go back every once in a while and take a look at some of the mile markers that have been passed along the way.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Against the storm

Racine, Wisconsin.

Kitchen sink processing -- five-image HDR from a color RAW file, conversion to black and white (figured out what a blue filter can do) with sepia filter applied. Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Getting my black and white on

I finished my first season as a gallery artiste recently. I've had several photographs hanging in an art gallery in Door County, Wisconsin since May of this year. A few brave souls even found it within themselves to part with some money to be able to take my work home with them.

The gallery is now closed for the season and it's time to start making plans for next year. I'm refining my black and white digital processing techniques to put a higher level of visual impact in my fine art photos.

Things I've learned so far (and didn't necessarily know going in to my first season as a b&w fine art photog):

Always convert color files to b&w. Yeah, I know digital cameras come with a b&w mode. Don't use it. Why?

Because back in the days of film (you remember those days, don't you?), serious b&w photographers would use color filters to translate what they saw in the chromatic world into an image comprised of shades of gray. They used red filters to darken the sky, yellow or orange filters to play up foliage and green filters to enhance skin tones. Blue filters? I don't know. Maybe if you were shooting someone wearing an Oakland A's uniform. Indoors.

Today, image editing programs like Photoshop allow you to run hundreds (nay, thousands) of possible color filter combinations over your color file before locking it in to b&w. You don't necessarily need to know the difference between what a yellow filter does as opposed to a red or green filter when converting a black and white image -- a couple of adjustment sliders will display an infinite number of variations -- just pick the one that looks good to you and you're good to go.

This image of gingko leaves was shot as a color RAW file. In Photoshop, the image was converted to black and white by way of two Hue & Saturation adjustment layers. One changed the color image to b&w, the other acted as the filter that enhanced tones. Below, you can see the difference that filtering makes.

On the left is a straight grayscale conversion of the color image file. On the right is the "filtered" version. The tones across the leaves are smoother and richer and there is more detail in the shadow areas.



I finished the photo at the top of this post by adding a slight Orton effect and then applying a green color filter at 25 percent strength to add a silver gelatin print effect to the image.

Can't wait to have another go at the gallery stuff.

Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

In storage

An old truck (just barely) protected from the elements. Seen near Viola, Tennessee. Black and white conversion of a color photograph. Created a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer in Photoshop to adjust gray tones.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Cana Island Lighthouse

This was taken last October during the same trip to Door County in which I made contact with the owner of an art gallery in the village of Gills Rock. This photograph and several others of mine will be on display (and hopefully sold) from May through October of this year.

This was taken about 5 o'clock in the morning. The moon was just a couple days past full. Exposure time was about three minutes. The weather was just about perfect. Clear enough to see some stars (six of the seven stars of the Big Dipper can be seen in the upper left), just enough mist to catch the light beam from the lighthouse and a few clouds drifting behind the lighthouse.

The only adjustments I made to this photo (aside from the conversion to black and white) were to remove a telephone pole to the left of the lighthouse and fix a light spot in the lower right corner which was caused when I accidentally shone my flashlight into the lens while checking the time on a small kitchen timer I bring with me on night shoots.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

The dark side of Door County

Nearly three years ago, as I began exploring photography after sunset and by moonlight, I hatched an idea. Why not photograph one of my favorite places on earth in the dark hours? Door County, Wisconsin is a place of rugged beauty, and there is something about being out and about under the cover of night that enhances that ruggedness and invokes memories of days long past.

So over the course of the next three years, I slowly built a collection of images taken between sunset and sunrise. Some are lit by the fading light of day, some by the reflected light of the moon. Most of the subjects are familiar tourist stops, but when viewed in darkness are cast in an entirely different light, so to speak.

A visit to Door County is not complete until my wife and I have stopped at a combination coffee shop and art gallery in Gills Rock. The coffee is superb, the baked goods are mouth watering and the artwork in the adjacent gallery is always a visual treat.

On our last visit in October, I struck up a conversation with Charlene, who runs the gallery (and provides bakery items for the coffee shop, operated by her husband Dewey). We talked about how she goes about selecting artwork - what types of art she is looking for, timeframes for submissions, etc. When she mentioned that she would be reviewing artists between November and January, I pitched my collection of "Door After Dark" images. She encouraged me to submit some samples for consideration and handed me some printed instructions and information.

I mailed a CD of images to Charlene in November. This week, I received a letter informing me that all ten images I submitted have been accepted. I'll deliver framed prints in April and they will hang in the gallery from May through October of this year, along with the work of several other artists.

So if you're passing through Gills Rock this summer/early fall, stop by Charlene's Gallery Ten for a cup of coffee, a slice of pie and some visual art on the side.

Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Classic

Hey, I'm not getting older, just getting more classic by the day. This vintage piece of American automotive manufacturing (made when the U.S. auto industry was seeing better days, i.e. no competition, which they addressed in a woefully inadequate fashion when it started eating their lunch, leading to their current problems - don't get me started) was spotted in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a place with classic vibes of its own.

I'm meeting up with Roger this morning to find some abandoned automotive relics for purposes of photography. Should be fun.

Stay tuned.

Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2008 James Jordan.

Bursts

I'm beginning to like how black and white pictures strip photography down to its basics - composition, form, tone. There's no hiding behind flashy colors or fancy post-processing. A photo either works or it doesn't. As I go through my photos choosing candidates for black and white conversion, I'm sadly finding photos that don't work in black and white. That only means that they don't work in color, either. Time for Mr. Delete Button to do his stuff.

This photo does a couple of things nicely. I like the complete range of tones from black to white throughout the picture. The photo also merges the natural sunburst created by sun and clouds with the technological sunburst of the sunlight bouncing, pinball style, off the many interior elements of the camera's lens. The act of photography itself is an imposition of the technological on the natural. Most times, the trick is to disguise the imposition as much as possible. Sometimes the trick is to embrace it.

Photo tip: When photographing the sky with a visible sun, meter on the sky above the sun with the sun just out of the viewing frame. Then recompose and shoot.

Click on this post's headline for image EXIF data. Click on pcture to enlarge. Photograph © 2008 James Jordan.

Fallen

This photo takes me back to the very early days of my photography - developing and printing pictures in the darkroom at my high school. This was the look that I was after - grainy, contrasty, cool. I could never get that look for some reason. My pictures tended to come out flat and dull.

Fast forward a few decades, add a dash of understanding of how to get those tones in a darkroom (thank you, Ansel Adams for publishing how you made some of your pictures), couple that with digital technology and voila! The look - only without the smell and the messy trays of chemicals.

Photo: Poplar leaf on the dried mud of a riverbank. Color desaturated in Photoshop, highlights and shadows boosted 25%, film grain filter added. Vignetting applied. Click on post's headline for image EXIF data. Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2008 James Jordan.

Taking my own advice

Yesterday while raking the leaves from my yard I had the chance to reflect on being jobless for the third time in my life. I suppose after the first two times, I should have seen number three coming, because there are some interesting similarities between all three companies that let me go.

Each one faced dire enough circumstances that casting off employees became a necessity. Each one blamed everything except itself for its problems. None made any wholesale changes to the way it operated after casting off talent. Each one put a focus on little things when big things needed to be examined first (one company passed an edict that all paperclips had to be removed from paperwork that was being filed, then returned to the front office to be reused. I’m sure that held off bankruptcy for about … two minutes).

I admit I wasted a lot of time yesterday revisiting the sins of companies past. I then decided to apply the same standards to myself. Am I at fault for what happened to me? To be honest, yes, I could have done some things differently. I’m making some wholesale changes to the way I operate and it’s already paying off. I’ll go into some of those later this week. I’m taking time to focus on big picture items, though some may say I still have some improvements to make – things like family relationships, my own work skills, getting out of the comfort zone, etc.

Not that it’s necessarily a big thing, but ever since I started my photo hobby ten years ago, I’ve been about color. Intense, saturated, rich, deep color. With nearly two thousand photos published online, I don’t remember more than one or maybe two that I posted that are black and white. Here’s a challenge – try to find them in my archives here. If nothing else, it will boost my page view count (mwah hahahah).

Anyway, for this week at least, I’m going to look at the world in black and white. I have a backlog of photos to process and I’m going to play with the color desaturation button a lot more than I have previously. We’ll see if anything interesting happens.

Stay tuned.

Click on this post’s headline for image EXIF data. Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2008 James Jordan.