Frozen

Recently my friend Karen Rexrode gave  a presentation to our camera club and one of the topics was freezing flowers.  I was intrigued and the results are certainly unique.  With daffodils starting to bloom and no other plans to make pictures this weekend, I thought I would give this a try.  I learned a few things and had a good time in the process.   I’m just getting started and hope to do some more experimentation over the next few weeks.  If you’re interested in learning how to do this drop me an email and I’ll send you instructions. 

Work in Progress

A lot of my friends are playing with Textures these days.  I never felt like this was something I wanted to pursue until this past summer.  While in Iceland Tony Sweet showed me how to save a soft image with the use of a texture overlay.  I have been using a lot of textures with my Android Photos, but until now I really have not used them on the photos taken with the big boy camera. 

Urban Exploration II

I wanted to share one more shot from my recent trip to Baltimore. This one is easily my favorite.

Urban Exploration

About a 3 months ago I got an e-mail asking if I wanted to come up to Baltimore and do a little urban exploration. Naturally I jumped at the chance. The place in question was an old distillery. We never got to see any of the distilling equipment. I’m not sure if the equipment was still on site or disassembled. Essentially old warehouse space at this point. Still a great trip!

Mount Storm

Perhaps the title makes you think I should be talking about a mountain? Mount Storm is a coal fired power plant in West Virginia. I have driven past this plant on my trips to Canaan Valley. I have always thought it might make a nice picture at night, but I never wanted to wait several hours for night fall just to take one picture. During a recent trip through West Virginia I happened to be in the area after dark. An interesting fact is that I had heard about Mount Storm many years ago when I was into scuba diving. The water from the power plant keeps the lake warm, thus this is a popular location for divers in the winter. I never got the chance to dive here, but on the cold night that I took this picture there was a fair amount of steam coming off the water.

Tulip Farm

Or perhaps I should title this post Tulip Factory.  Manassas Warrenton Camera Club recently took a trip to Tulips USA.   It was one of the best attended club trips I have ever been on.  I think all of us had visions of a greenhouse full of tulips in bloom!  The reality was quite different.  This facility has multiple rows of greenhouses,  all of them at least a football field in length. The tulips are grown hydroponically and are picked just short of blooming.  After all, they need to be in bloom after the customer takes them home.  The owner of Tulips USA gave us a complete tour of his facility and then turned us loose.  We had free reign to shoot anywhere in the facility, very generous on his part.   As I recall this facility ships about a million tulips a week.  It was a very impressive operation.

While I think most of us showed up on Saturday morning with a vision of rows of tulips in full bloom, it took me only a few minutes to readjust my expectations.  I always try and embrace what is right with the world, at least in regard to making pictures and this was a great place to spend the morning.  I think most of my fellow club members felt the same way.

Winter Wonderland

A few weeks ago I took a day trip with my friend Greg Daily to Swallow Falls State Park. As I recall the temperature never got above 20 degrees, but we managed to stay warm and spent the better part of the day exploring the park and just having a good time in general. The falls in the park were frozen solid and there was about a foot of snow on the ground. Part of being a landscape photographer is about enjoying what you do. While I always wish for a productive day, this day was not one of my better ones in that regard. I did see a lot of opportunities but I had to consider my safety. The water was high, it was flowing fast and the ice was thin. This limited my ability to get into key positions to craft the type of images that I think would have shown the beauty around me. When I look at some of the pictures I took that day I find them lacking. But in the end that is fine, just because I was unable to fully capture the beauty around me does not mean that I did not get to enjoy the beauty. It just means that I’m not able to fully share the experience.