F/Stops

If you  have been wondering where I have been….well, I have been right here all along….watching my website statistics. I First put my website up in January of 2009 and the first two months I had  a total of 32 visitors. Since then I have watched those numbers soar into the thousands each month.

As was expected the  blog page has always been the most visited on the site but what I did not expect was the amount of spamming that would come with it. I use Akismet software to control spam and as a result I do not ever actually see it. It’s great to not have to manually go through and delete all those spam comments but the drawback is I no longer know how many of my visitors were people interested in my site and how many were simply robot spammers.

As an experiment I stopped posting blog updates. After a month the visitations to my blog rose by another thousand. As a result I know I am not getting the kind of traffic and increased traffic that I desire.  I am going to upgrade my site. It should work better for me and create a better experience for those of you who actually visit it for it’s own merits.

I want to say thank you to those that actually do visit my site with the idea that it may be worth poking around on. For those of you that are simply spamming blogs and forums looking for places to advertise your own garbage I say….Take a hike!

It is easy, when we are at a place like Yellowstone, to be overwhelmed by the enormity of the place, the grand vistas, geysers and wildlife.

Nature is like people. Each element has it’s own personality apart from the whole. When we are able to seperate one from the other, we begin to see it’s true colors.  It’s true beauty.

From afar, grassy foxtails bend in a light breeze creating a vision of serenity and calmness before the storm.

Up close, excitement and anticipation rein.

I consider myself an artist. That is, I dabble in the arts of photography and retouching.  Yet I am a fraud. Like those that create fakes of the great masters-Piccaso, Rembrandt, etc.- I am merely imitating the greatest artist of all.

I am a nature photographer.

A horse is a horse unless, of course,  the horse is a  National Park Service horse….

….Then it becomes an equine living in an ecosystem.

It was fall and it was late afternoon. The sun was warm on my face as it got lower in sky preparing to slip behind the mountains. The afternoon haze rendered the distant shoreline nearly invisible.

Good Afternoon

And, the golden leaves of the aspen trees positively glowed.

Once we move past the snapshot stage of photography we begin to shoot with more purpose. More often than not, as a photographer, I want to tell a story or convey an emotion…a feeling of the moment. True aesthetic beauty in a photograph come from the heart. There needs to be an emotional attachment to make it all come together, a need to share the vision and an understanding of why it inspires.

Moored

Colter Bay Marina in Grand Teton National Park is where I fell in love with the park and my wife.

A fellow member of  the PhotographyBB forums posted an image he was unsure about. PhotographyBB is a great site for photographers, pro and novice alike featuring a free monthly E-zine, forums, post processing tutorials and a ton of other information. Anybody interested in photography should take a look around.

Anyway, A fellow member had doubts about a photo. I have been there myself. Shoot a picture knowing there is something there, look at it and wonder where that something went. In his case it was still there. Here is the photo:

Original Photo by jlg759

A nice image of a nice place. It has a snapshot quality but there is something  more here when we take a closer look.

Cropped Version Photo by jlg759

The log in the river was well framed by the trees and foreground, a great compositional approach. Like a million photos taken by others, incuding myself, the photographer simply did not zoom in close enough to make a strong statement that that is the focal point. Once we eliminate most of the distractions around the perimeter and place the log according to the rule of thirds we got a pleasing, well balanced image that is worthy of a frame.

Special thanks to jlg759 for allowing me the use of this photo.

I am not one of those people that runs out and buys new software every time a company decides to upgrade it. It is too expenseive and, I find generally from version to version the upgrades are not significant enough to warrant that expense. Well, I just ordered Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended (A 2 generation upgrade) since I need it for a class I am taking. While I wait for it’s arrival (I ordered the disc and not the download) I went ahead and downloaded the trial version in order to get a jump on the learning curve. I like the feel of the new interface and some of the new features. It will take a while to really get to know the app but I look forward to it.

Here is my first self-assigned project.

Self Portrait

I had my wife shoot a picture of me and went to work on it.

I was browsing through my photo archives from summer and came across this image  of a white picket fence.

Painting The Fence

Did you even notice the fence needs painting?

Canon 50D f/3.5 at 1/500 sec.