Breeze Lake sits at over 9,600 feet in southeast Yosemite, just below Fernandez pass, which marks the boundary between Yosemite and the Ansel Adams Wilderness. There are lots of ways to get there, but this trip was a long loops that included three other major passes before going over Fernandez and dropping down to the lake. My wife Susan was leading the way, as usual.

Read More

For those who may not know, this image is titled The Walk to Paradise Garden. It was taken in 1946 by W. Eugene Smith, a photographic hero of mine since I saw his Aperture monograph in the late 1960’s. Smith was badly wounded in the Pacific during WW2 while taking pictures for Life Magazine. After something like two years recovering, this was the first photograph he made after being blown up.

Read More

People often ask how my 370° tree surrounds are made, and some even ask if I use a special video camera of some kind. Of course no such camera exists, but I think folks might appreciate the images more if they understood the basics of the technique. I’ll start with my first experiment with the surround idea, one that popped into my head while walking across Central Park in NYC, but first a little background.

Read More

My cousins, Tom and Jo Lewis, live in Menominee, MI, in the bottom of the Upper Peninsula. We visit every other year or so, and after reading so much about the UP in the novels of the late Jim Harrison (Legends of the Fall, etc.) we really wanted to spend some time exploring. So when we planned a trip for the the Fall of 2019, one thing they said we should do was take a boat tour to see the Pictured Rocks in Lake Superior.

Read More

“En plein air” simply means “in the open air” and was originally synonymous with the idea of creating paintings out of doors, in natural light, rather than in a studio. Although not new, the practice became very popular among mid-19th century impressionists, partly with the availability of oil paints in prepackaged tubes. Suddenly the artist’s studio became much more portable.

Read More

Most of my career involved some intersection between creative and technical things. During my years in marketing, we were constantly balancing the creative demands of partners like Matt Groening (creator of “The Simpsons”) with the realities of low-cost toy manufacturing in China and the business demands of clients like Burger King. Much of this was about problem solving but it was really just another process, albeit with more complicated variables. And during this very busy time my photographic work was mostly limited to recording family activities, gatherings and milestones.

Read More

Wikipedia says that panography is “a photographic technique in which one picture is assembled from several overlapping photographs.” If you’ve ever seen an image constructed from a bunch of Polaroid photos or like the one by Graham Dew at left, these are a classic panographs. I use the term because "panorama" has such a strong association with ultra-wide, narrow views of landscapes and other subjects, and I use multiple captures to create many of my images. 

Read More

As digital photography has grown in popularity, so, too, has confusion about the tools involved and their proper use. The image at left is an example of a heavily-manipulated image because it's the product of several images taken at the same time. While photographing a series of lotus blooms with a telephoto lens, I realized that the closeup views could not be in focus from front to back and I really wanted to feature the detail and texture of the individual petals. So what to do?

Read More

Here is a great example of how photographic techniques and terminologies can become so misunderstood that they take on a life of their own. The image to the left is a giclée, or at least a detail of one, from a great blog about printing techniques called The Print Guide by Gordon Pritchard. In a nutshell, giclée and "inkjet" mean the same thing. But the story of how the term came to be is more fun and interesting.

Read More

Some people think photography, especially digital photography, is a less-worthy art form than, say, painting. But this thumbnail, part of an image, Rhein II by Andreas Gursky, sold at auction for $4.3 million, a record. It is nearly twelve feet wide, and critics have raved about Gursky's work. One has said that Gursky's images have "the majestic aura of nineteenth-century landscape paintings."

Read More

In the early days of photography, not all that long ago, it was not viewed as a form of "fine art." While that quickly changed, digital photography still faces a similar stigma today. As discussed more in other posts, some people feel that because digital uses computers, this can't be art, particularly when anyone can buy a good digital camera and quickly learn to make competent images. But I think that's a good thing.  

Read More

Some would say yes, but I don't think so. And as you'll see, getting at the answer is a very complicated and technical exercise. I worked with film for many years and found that 35mm worked well for making prints up to about 11 x 14 inches in size. For much bigger prints most photographers would use large-format film like 4 x 5 or 5 x 7 inches, and some still do. But digital technology is catching up fast. Many of today's cameras can produce more detailed images than the best 35mm film cameras.

Read More

Both of these ways of finishing images have become very popular recently, and both are widely marketed by print labs, service bureaus and wedding photographers. A lot of the push seems to come from a need to find alternatives to classic mat-and-glass framing. Just Google "gallery wraps" and you'll see what I mean. But they work because they're printed on canvas and coated in a way similar to what I do.  

Read More

For me, the simplest answer is this: A fine art photograph is a work that originates in a camera and is intended for permanent display. This intention is a decision that the photographer or artist has to make, and with most photographs permanent display is not part of the plan. Of course to succeed as a fine art photograph, someone must also want to display it. 

Read More

There are lots of photographic print sellers on the internet, many of them offering good work. But you often see e-commerce solutions on these sites that were designed around traditional print sizes with prices tiered accordingly. All you can do is check a box. I decided early on in planning SPR Images that I wanted print sizes to reflect the aspect ratios of the images themselves and that I wanted to offer glassless, framed and finished work, ready to hang on the wall. Here are some of the reasons:

Read More