England Photos

Well, actually it should be Great Britain Photos since we traveled to England, Scotland, and Wales.  Anyway, here's the link to my photos: www.blackburnimages.com/albummaster.aspx?g=britain2008

You can also check out my recap of our travels at the following blog: pauluk2008.blogspot.com

Enjoy and leave me a comment if you feel inclined!

Europe photo kit

Going to England for 13 days and here's what I'm taking photo wise.  You can read about my travels at my UK 2008 blog.

I don't want to be bogged down with a lot of equipment or big backpack of gear as we'll be traveling mostly by train and having to carry everything to our lodging each evening from a train station.

Nikon D200 body (without battery grip)

Nikon 18-200mm VR lens - not fast, but a great "walk around" lens that covers the gaumut.

Nikon 12-24mm DX f4 lens - when I need a bit more than the 18mm.

Nikon 50mm f1.4 lens - for inside when I need the "speed" of the f1.4.

Nikon SB400 flash - nothing fancy, but small and light weight.

2 extra batteries (3 total) - Nikon EN-EL3e with a charger.

Compact Flash cards - two 8 GB cards and one 4 GB card.

3 sets of NiMH AA batteries (12 total) with charger.

All the above carried in a Lowepro Slingshot 200 AW bag.

Manfrotto 724B Digi tripod with ball head.

Laptop - Lenovo x61s with 320 GB 7200 rpm harddrive, Windows Vista Premium, Lightroom 2.0.  It seems to be a great travel laptop, but just wish it had a built in CD drive! Also will boot to Ubuntu (Linux) if I need a quick boot just to access the Internet.

16 GB flash drive that will be my backup drive.

I'll let you know later how it all works out!

Picture of the Week - November 30, 2008

"Wind" - I went for a hike at Radnor Lake State Park on Sunday afternoon and after spending some time waiting on the wind to die down to capture some nice golden leaves in the midst of the dark tree trunks I decided to join the forces of nature rather than fight them. I experimented with slow shutter speeds and random camera motions. This is one of the better images I was able to capture and it reflects some of the emotion that the grey, damp, windy day evoked during my walk around the lake.

Picture of the Week - November 5, 2008

Tree in Pasture

I've driven past this tree a thousand times in all kinds seasons and conditions. I'd finally decided this was the year to try and capture it in its fall beauty. I just happen to be driving past it around 3:30p and noticed the shadows hiding the background so I came back the next day and captured this image. I was lucky, 2 days later it rained and the leaves were mostly gone!

Picture of the Week - November 22, 2008

Fall Leaves

A cold, but still fall day lead me outside on an early Saturday morning. This shot was taken in the woods next to my house and is from down low looking up towards the sky. The early morning light was illuminating the remain leaves on the trees quite nicely and I liked how they were "highlighted" against the blue sky and barren tree limbs above.

Picture of the Week - new feature

Some photographers have a "Picture of the Day" (PAD) project where they try and create a photo each day. Needless to say, with my current schedule, that wouldn't be feasible, but I'm striving to post a "POW" or "Picture of the Week". Surely, I can come up with one photograph each week that I'm willing to share with others.

Also, I hope that striving for a "postable" picture each week will help keep my creative juices flow. I'm in such of a habit of seeing something and saying to myself, "someday...". Well, there is no better time than now.

I hope you enjoy some of these photos. I'll be "back-posting" some photos from throughout 2008 so please check back often!

Public TV series with Art Wolfe

I just happened to run across this series yesterday while setting the DVR to capture another TV show and I'm sure you find something inspirational (at least photographically) in it. Photographer Art Wolfe travels to some pretty amazing locations in the series Travels to the Edge. There is some pretty good insight into Art's artistic approach with just a bit of technical approach thrown to keep the serious photographers interested. In Nashville, the series airs on Sunday afternoons. Check out more info at http://www.travelstotheedge.com/series/ Enjoy!

Cool old building - Marathon Motor Works

I had the opportunity (as part of an organized outing with the Brentwood Camera Club) to go photograph the Marathon Motor Works building near downtown Nashville this past week-end. The building is from 1881 and it housed the Motor Works from 1907-1914. It's a pretty cool location - several photographers have studios in the main building that has been converted to offices, etc. Yazoo Brewing and Lightning 100 are also located in the building. I found a lot more photo opportunities outside than inside especially the backside with the train tracks and parts of the building in various states of decay. For some more info on the Motor Works see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_Motor_Works. And if you ever down around 13th and Clinton Street (just north of Charolette Avenue) check it out.

Lightroom sorting nusance

First, my complaint (or lack of knowledge on my part) about Lightroom… I'm having issues with sorting. My collection has both Canon & Nikon raw files (from a wedding shoot with two photographers) and when I sort on capture time it doesn't sort correctly even though the times show correctly in the library grid view. So, I took the time to manually order the images in the collection - I'm trying to create a slide show in roughly chronological order - and I thought everyone was cool. I switched to another collection that I wanted to see sorted differently so changed the sort order. When I came back to my original collection the order was all screwed up again and switching to user order did nothing. This is a nusance to say the least… Did I need to export the collection after I manually ordered the images in order to preserve my ordering?

Overall I'm still a big fan of Lightroom. It has saved me a ton of time cataloging and editing 1500+ images from this wedding shoot.

Thought I'd spend a few minutes searching on the web and seeing if there was a solution to my ordering dilemma. Found several posts, but a lot of them seemed irrelevant as they obviously were using version earlier 1.x version. Did 1.0 really only support ordering by rating or color??? Anyway, ran across this nice little utility software (freeware) that will rename files based on embedded capture time. It's highly customizable and will even create sequence numbers for images with same date/time. It's not super intuitive, so I had to back pedal and resort to reading the help pages. This will definitely help with the sorting if I remember to include this step in my workflow.

Check out Stamp (I got version 2.8) at http://www.snapfiles.com/get/stamp.html I hope you find this helpful.

Interesting photographer - Rod Daniel

I went to the Brentwood Camera Club June meeting and the main program was Rod Daniel. Rod is a Nashville native that went to Hollywood and became a successful TV anad movie director. He recently relocated back to Franklin, TN. For several years Mr Daniel would ship a Harley-Davidson motorcyle to the mid-west and then meet it and spend time traveling back to southern California. Along the way, without any set itinerary or timetable, Rod would photograph anything that caught his eye. His specialty is black and white landscapes. His images include many "rural" mid-west settings that no longer exist. I was inspired by Rod's presentation to try and do some B&W landscape work, digitally of course. Rod did much of his early work in medium format, but has switched to digital (Nikon) and touted the teachings of Carlan Tapp (http://carlantapp.com/) and the Santa Fe Photography Workshop (http://www.santafeworkshops.com/) classes.

I haven't been able to find a web site associated with Mr. Daniel, but he has several exhibitions that a Google search will find. Mr. Daniel's directing credits can be viewed on imdb.com.

I found the program very educational and would like to learn more about B&W conversions in Photoshop/Lightroom. Also many of the shots reminded me of scenes I saw on my trans-America bicycle trip in 1987. I wonder if a lot of those places still exist???

Adobe Lightroom Rocks!

I remember downloading and playing with Adobe Lightroom when the first beta was made available and at the time was impressed with the speed that it could open and display images, but didn't spend too much time exploring the other possibilities. I guess I was still gung-ho about learning all the tricks in Photoshop CS2 and thought that usingLightroom was "cheating".

Any way, I've done a complete 180!!! I had to edit some images shot with a Nikon D300 this past week-end and so I downloaded the 30-day free trial of Lightroom v1.1. (CS2 didn't recognize the new Nikon raw file format) WOW!!!! Holy !@#$, Batman!!!! I'm am a convert! I love Lightroom… plus it is fast. I've used it every night now for nearly a week and still find myself finding new cool features every time I use it. My latest treasure is discovering how to create Presets in Develop module and how much time that can save me. Plus, I really like the fact that you get a preview of the presets effect when you hover over each preset.

I've got 1600+ images from a wedding I shot last week-end and this is definitely my tool of choice now. I'm also really impressed how Adobe put a lot of effort into making the tools very intutive to use. Or, am I just becoming acclimated to Adobe's mode of software presentation?

Anyway, my only drawback is the fact that version 2.0 is now in public beta and looks like it will be released around August. Do I wait or spend the bucks now and then have to pay to upgrade in a couple of months?

Thanks, Adobe… great job with Lightroom! And, here's a quick primer (from Scott Kelby) that helped me get up to speed with the tool: http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=717555&seqNum=1

Wow, has it really been that long?

April 15th - Since I last posted to this blog! Amazing how time flies. It's my intention of putting at least one post a week up here, but it looks more like my track record is one per month!!! Sorry about that!

Anyway, lots has happened photographically for me since mid-April so I should have enough fodder for several postings over the next couple of weeks. Traveled to New Jersey for a shoot with Bateman Photography, shot a co-worker's wedding, learned how to effectively use multiple flashes (Canon EX 550 & 580), and started shooting with Nikon D200.

Stand by... more to come. SOON!

Great TN Air Show photography

The Great Tennessee Air Show was this past week-end at Smyrna Regional Airport (south of Nashville). I wasn't able to attend on Saturday, but went Sunday. My preparation for this event included renting a Canon EF 300mm f4 IS lens from www.lensrentals.com (more about this great service in a future blog). I wanted to see if shooting with a prime telephoto would produce more photos within my acceptance level than my previous air show experience with a telephoto zoom. Also, knowing the f4 was significantly less weight than a f2.8 lens was another appealing factor. The weather Saturday was partly cloudy with some good wind, but overall warm enough to be comfortable outside. I'd taken our foreign exchange student to the Nashville airport to catch her flight to New York and then went to observation area on off Vultee Blvd to practice with the 300mm lens. The lens performed satisfactorily, and I also included using a 1.4 teleconverter. I'd planned on using this combination (300mm with 1.4 teleconverter) at the air show on Sunday.

A serious cold front moved thru Tennessee on Saturday night and it was in the low 40's when I left for the air show at about 8:30p. The late news weather has forecasted this downturn in temperatures so I was prepared. The newspaper had reported 40,000 spectators at the show on Saturday, but I wasn't sure how many would show up on Sunday due to the cold and forecasted rain. We got to the air show at about 9:30a and staked out our spot to the left of center and I photographed some of the static displays waiting for the flying to start. The flying started right on time at 11:30a and though it was a cold wind, it never rained to any significant degree during the day. The complete overcast meant the light was flat and I didn't have to worry about light & shadow sides of the planes during their maneuvers. However, the sky was so flat and gray that lot of my images looked like they were shot in front of an off-white curtain. Later in the day I did find myself tracking the planes and trying to get most of my shots with them in front of the darker clouds. The wind did help clear out the smoke that the planes put out during their show. The crowd did thin out during the mid-afternoon and everyone left in a hurry as soon as the Blue Angels landed at the end of their show.

Overall, it was a fun day of photography and I enjoyed spending time with my son, James. He's really into airplanes and seems to enjoy himself so much at these types of events. I shot about 2400 images and after the first look am hoping for 30-40 "good" ones to make a web album. Don't think I got anything that is super dramatic, but who knows. I'm usually overly critical of my photos upon first viewing them. Sometimes, when I wait a couple of weeks to start editing, I'll surprise myself with what I can come up with a little adjustment in Photoshop.

As for the 300mm, it performed adequately, but I did miss the zoom for close up shots. Enough to warrant messing with a zoom at the next air show? Probably not, as I like eliminating one thing I have to worry about when I'm trying to photograph a 500 mph jet flying by. I was disappointed in the 300mm focusing when using the 1.4 teleconverter. It did a lot of "searching" when I was trying to focus on a far off plane. I found that by switching to all focus points worked best. I normally shoot using a single auto focus point. The few times I shot some frames with my 70-200mm f2.8 (with out a teleconverter) I was pleasantly surprised by the "fast" autofocusing.

Marathon photo events

Last week-end (April 5 & 6) I had the pleasure of photographing 89 performing groups in the Southeast Color Guard Circuit championships at Vanderbilt University. These groups included winter guard and indoor percussion performances with ages ranging from middle school thru college. Each performance was between 4 and 8 minutes. Needless to say that after 5.5 hours of continuous shooting on Friday evening and nearly 13 hours on Saturday I was pretty wiped out. Here are a few of my "essentials" that will help in marathon shooting sessions.

Good, supportive shoes - standing on gym floors for this length of time is hard on the feet. I wear some lightweight hiking boots, but am thinking about getting some of those clunky, black work type shoes with good support. Water and snacks - staying hydrated is a key to avoiding fatique and some energy bars (clif bars are my favorites) help me avoid the energy valleys. Something to sit on - one of those small folding stools would be great if you can't get somewhere to sit during breaks. Dress in layers - I've had to photograph in high school gyms that were 80+ degrees as well as outdoor soccer games in snow flurries and it is much better to be over prepared! Monopod and battery grip - I can't imagine shooting several hours with a 70-200 lens all hand held, or having to shoot mostly vertical shots with my elbow raised in order to get to the shutter release. ThinkTank belt system - I hardly ever carry a camera around my neck as it puts too much strain on my neck so I'll put my second body with a short lens in a bag on my modular hip belt system. I also carry spare batteries and compact flash cards with me in a bag on the belt as I always seem to need fresh batteries or a new card when I'm farthest from my camera bag. I also tend to take more equipment than I need as you never know when you'll be called upon to take some shots of an important presentation and need your flash or could get some cool "portfolio" shots if you have a super-wide angle at your disposal.

This is meant to be an exhaustive check list, but just some of the things I find important when doing a long photo shoot. Hope it helps!

Photoshop - relative placement of layer contents.

My friend, Keith, called yesterday and asked if I knew of a way to position a copyright on a photo (using Photoshop) where it is always positioned at a relative spot regardless if the photo is horizontal or vertical oriented. He wanted to write an action that would add a copyright as a separate layer and place it along the bottom edge of any photo he was editing. I recalled that I had "discovered" this very technique at one point when I was building some photoshop actions. After a few minutes with Google I found the answer and it just so happened the site I found was the very site that I had found when I researched the challenge a couple of years ago. Here's a link to the free photoshop tutorial/action: http://www.wildlifephoto.net/articles/emboss.html. The key to the specific challenge is in the "Creating an Action in Photoshop" steps #10 - 13. In case you can't access the site, here's a brief recap:

1. Select layer with the copyright.
2. Choose Select > All
3. Choose Layer > Align to Selection > Bottom Edges
4. Choose Layer > Align to Selection > Right Edges
5. Choose Select > Deselect
6. Select the Move tool (making sure the copyright layer is selected).
7. Use keyboard arrow buttons to move the copyright to the desired position.

I hope you find this tidbit useful...

Northern California photography - final part.

Final part of multi-part post about a short photo trek I took, with my brother Tom, in northern California in mid-March (2008).

After striking out on any early morning shots of Mount Shasta, we headed south on I-5 and took highway 89 planning to hit the north side of Lassen Volcanic National Park. Highway 89 is a Scenic Byway and I was hoping to find some good photo opportunities along its path. One good photo opportunity presented itself in the small town of McCloud. We found some nice views of Mount Shasta from besides the train maintenance yard in McCloud. Again, the mountain did not want to cooperate the peak was shrouded in white clouds. This location should be a nice position for either sunrise or sunset as you are looking pretty much due north at the mountain. The train yard would also provide some different foreground subjects for the mountain. Traveling west on highway 89, we found a small scenic vista that would also provide some nice views of Mount Shasta. This spot should yield some good views of the peak framed by dark green pine trees and looked like the most promising spot we'd found.

We continued on highway 89 deciding to take a stop at Burney Falls State Park. Our grandparents, residents of San Francisco, often spent the summers near Burney in their travel trailer, but neither of us had actually visited the falls. Wow, the falls are impressive with a flow rate of a 100 million gallons of water per day! And, the rate doesn't slow during the dry summers as they are spring fed. We spent some time photographing the falls - beware that the mist is a problem if you close to the falls - but I didn't get anything spectacular as we were they mid-day and the white sky was blowing out on all my images. The falls are a definite on my "re-visit" list!

Highway 89 loops down to the south and touches the northwest corner of Lassen Volcanic National Park at Summertown and Manzanita Lake. At this point, highway 89 continues through the park, but it was closed (as it is every winter) due to snow in the park. Highway 44 continues west toward Shingletown and from there we took Manton Road thru the town on Manton and eventually to highway 36 which leads into Red Bluff. There are some very pretty sections of road with steep changes in elevation on Manton Rd as you descend in the flat, central valley region. Once back to Red Bluff it is high speed highways 99, 70, and 65 back to greater Sacramento area.

Northern California early Spring photography - Part 3

Read my previous couple of posts about northern California photography to get the details before this event.

After Gray Lodge, my brother and I decided we wanted to try and get some sunrise shots of Mount Shasta. We figured that with clear evening skys and lots of snow in the higher elevations this year it might be a good chance to get some "golden light" on the mountain at first light. It is about a 2.5 hour drive from Gray Lodge to Mount Shasta via highway 99 (Chico, Los Molinos, and Red Bluff) and I-5 (Redding, Lake Shasta, Dunsmir) to Weed. We didn't get away from Gray Lodge until dark and a bright moon kept teasing us with nice clear views of Mt. Shasta once we got close. We found a cheap motel (Motel 6) in Weed and set our alarms for 5:00a even though official sunrise wasn't until 7:15a PDT. That's one nice benefit of the earlier switch to daylight savings time and a good reason to like winter photography - the sun rises a bit later than the middle of summer so you're not operating on 3-4 hours of sleep every day.

We woke up to very low clouds on Monday morning and cursed the weather. We decided to drive north on I-5 in hopes to get a view of a clearing mountain as we gained some elevation. None of that was going to happen as we drove I-5 and took the West Louie Road exit that leads to Gazelle. A quick gaunt thru Gazelle (can't be more than 40 or 50 residents) and we started heading back south on Old Hwy 99. No particular outstanding photo opportunities presented themselves though we stopped at one point and photographed a nice small volcanic cinder cone with a crown of clouds in the VERY gray light.

Mount Shasta seems to be a good photo subject with decent light and should be good for either sunrise or sunset. However, we did find some better spots on highway 89 (Volcanic Legacy Scenic Byway) that should prove more worthwhile than going all the way to Weed. I'll cover the highway 89 opportunities in another posting.

More on northern California photography

Spent a late afternoon at Gray Lodge wildlife refuge hoping to get some good closeups of waterfowl. This is an 8400 acres of wetland about 8 miles southeast of Gridley, California and approximately 60 miles north of Sacramento. The refuge enjoys the Sutter Buttes (worlds shortest mountain range) as a backdrop. I thought we'd be in luck as there was a white heron standing about 20 feet off the road when we turned onto the access road, but that was about as close as we'd get to any birds. We drove the auto loop and there were a good number of ducks, and tried walking down a side access path trying to sneak up on a heron and other water fowl. I was shooting with a 100mm-400mm zoom with 1.4 teleconverter and wished for more! The fading light soon proved that the f4.5 - 5.6 lens (with the loss of 1 additional stop due to tele-converter) wasn't going to work out. In the 90 minutes we spent stalking some birds we did witness some close fly bys of a heron, buzzard, owl, pheasant, and other fowl. I did get a couple of decent shots of the golden light during sunset, but was still pretty disappointed at my overall lack of any decent images.

Doing some more research on the web indicates that the best time to go to Gray Lodge is December - January during the peak migratory time. It was a pleasure to be there without a ton of other people and next time I'll want to check out the blind structures that I've read about that might provide a better (and warmer) place to photograph from. For more info on Gray Lodge check out http://www.dfg.ca.gov/lands/wa/region2/graylodge/index.html

Early Spring in northern California

I went to California on March 13th to help my brother, Tom, shoot an event. I spent a few extra days visiting my brother and sister and found some interesting photography opportunities. Hidden Falls Regional Park is a new park (formerly Didion Ranch land) between Auburn and Lincoln (Mt Vernon Road) in Placer County. The park includes 6+ miles of hiking trails. The Blue Dicks and Shooting Star wild flowers were in bloom and there is a couple of small falls to photograph along Coon Creek. The main falls, at the convergence of Coon & Deadman Creek are not accessible to photograph, but they are building a platform that will allow you to get closer to the falls. I applaud the Placer County Open Space & Conservation project that has allowed land such as this to be spared from the rampant developers that have drastically changes much of the California landscape of the past couple of decades. Here's a link to more info on Hidden Falls Regional Park: http://www.placer.ca.gov/Departments/Facility/Parks/hiddenfalls.aspx.

A way to fix sky in Photoshop

I've been away for a few days (weeks). Sorry... I'll try my best to catch up over the next several days.

I ran across this article in the latest (April 2008) issue of Popular Photography magazine and gave it a quick try with an image from a Colorado trip a couple of years back. It's a nice approach to subtly fixing over exposed sky in an image. I've always hated the "fringe" you get when trying to alter a sky in Photoshop. I like the way I can go back and alter the layer mask to change the adjustment. Seems like I'm always looking at images I've edited previously and wondered why I edited them the way I did. Anyway, here's the link: http://www.popphoto.com/popularphotographyfeatures/5168/how-to-fix-the-sky.html

By the way, it worked for me in CS2 as written.

Lunar eclipse photography.

I hadn't anticipated getting to do anything during the total lunar eclipse of February 20 (officially listed as the 21st GMT, but it was still the 20th in the USA), but the weather worked out in my favor. It had been completely cloudy all day, but when I looked out at 7:00p I could see the moon! A closer look out and it looked like the clouds were clearing out from the west.

I got my gear set up on my back deck and starting shooting images about 7:45p. It was cold and getting colder all the time, but I did manage to take photos until 10:00p. Thanks to the info on www.MrEclipse.com I was able to get close on the exposure and I was bracketing every shot. My goal was to shoot every 5 minutes, but the light clouds moving in and out kept me from any regular schedule.

The eclipse hit totality shortly after 9:00p CST and it the sky was cloudless by that time. I shot pretty continously for about 45 minutes with bracketing exposures from 1½ to 8 seconds (f8 with 200mm lens and 1.4 teleconverter). The cold forced me indoors as the light started to show on the moon again. I'm anxious to play with the images in Photoshop to see if I have gotten anything that will be worthy of additional work and printing.

Award Winning photograph

My photograph of the Yosemite Chapel on a snowy morning won an honorable mention in the Landscape division of the 2008 Southeastern Flower Show in Atlanta. And to top it off, someone bought that print during the show! At the very least I feel that I recouped my cost of entering the competition and printing/framing the three prints that were selected to hang at the show.

Christmas in Yellowstone

No, I didn't get to spend Christmas in Yellowstone National Park... but this is the name of the PBS Nature Special that I recently saw. This show features some of the different aspects of Yellowstone in the throes of winter and highlights a photographer, Tom Murphy, that spends 100 days a year in Yellowstone! The show documented Tom Murphy spending time in the backcountry (in mid December) carrying 70 pounds (a lot of it photo gear) and spending the nights sleeping in the snow under a plastic tarp! Check out the Nature show if you can catch a repeat (originally aired in 2005) and Tom's web site: tmurphywild.com

Camera test ride - Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50

My boss (Philip Storvik) graciously loaned me his new Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50 this past week-end. This is a 10 megapixel fixed lens camera with a 10x optical lens (35 - 420mm equivalent) and image stabilization. This is a pretty nice camera that would be nice for backpacking or non-photography travel. I don't care for the electronic viewfinder, but the live lcd screen seemed to be bright enough outdoors. I especially like the fact that this camera saves photos in raw format (along with a jpg), but wish you could turn off the in-camera jpg generation. Note: ACDSee Pro could not open this raw format, but Photoshop CS2 did not have any problems. My first impression of the images are that they seem to be a bit "noisy" at ISO 200. The close focus distance (even in AF-macro mode) seemed a bit "long". Here's the specs: http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/specs/Panasonic/panasonic_dmcfz50.asp

Great Photographer - David Plowden

Heard an interview this morning on public radio's Studio 360 with photographer David Plowden. I was intrigued how Plowden described riding trains (in the 50's & 60's) to the end of the line in places like Montana and the Dakotas and exploring the areas. He has spent years traveling the US documenting small towns and the people. His portraits of grain elevators in through out the midwest is some of his best recognized work. His latest book, "Vanishing Point" looks very interesting. davidplowden.com

Great Photographer - Howard Schatz

Another great photographer that I got to hear (and see his images) at Imaging USA is Howard Schatz. Howard is famous for his underwater photos of dancers and other athletes in motion. His vision and creativity is amazing. His dedication to his art is truly an inspiration... he took 3 years to refine his under water technique. Schatz has published several photography books. One thing I found amazing was, even with numerous books and high profile clients, Schatz still refers to projects he has to do to make a living. Howard Schatz web site.

Great Photographer - Ron Magill

Ron Magill was one of the featured speakers at Imaging USA in Tampa. I was privileged to hear
him twice - once at the Nikon booth and the other at his 90-minute evening presentation. He is so energetic and animated about what he does... his photos are amazing. I appreciate the fact that he honestly claims he is not a "trained" photographer. Check out his wildlife photos at his web site: ronmagillwildlife.com

Imaging USA, Tampa - Jan 5 - 8

Attended Professional Photographers of America's Imaging USA conference in Tampa, Florida. This is the third year I've attended this conference and am amazed how much it inspires me to want to do so many things with my photography. As in the past, I'm attending with my brother, Tom and we enjoy visiting with each other.

3 January 2008

Welcome!!! To my newly created blog...