I like shooting flowers. Maybe that is because I am a gardener. But it may be more than that. I love the bright colors and beautiful images you can create. My flower photography definitely took a big step forward when I took a Better Photo course from Tony Sweet on Fine Art Flower Photography. I highly recommend this course, the techniques used apply to much more than flowers. I have included a couple recent flower images on this blog. Hope you enjoy them.

The first image is simply a unique blue thistle I found at the nursery sitting by our bright orange Adirondack chair. This created a great color combination.

The second image is of three yellow lilies from the garden sitting in front of some pink peonies with an sheet of textured glass in between the camera and the lilies. To create the sharp stamens for the point of focus I shot a second image without the glass and used Photoshop layers to create the image.

I have had a little time to play with some of my recent images from Washington state. Specifically a little HDR processing. As I have noted before I use Photomatrix for processing my HDR images. One of the things you can do is use it with most of the sliders max’d out is to create a more illustrative look. This it turns out can be done with images shot for HDR (multiple exposures at different EVs) or with simple single exposure images. I have put one of each here in the blog. This first is of the Mt. Rainer train steam engine. This is a single exposure image that has been passed through Photomatrix’s tone mapping multiple times. The second is an HDR shot of an old Chevy truck it was also processed multiple times. Fun look.

My wife and I like to take road trips for our vacations. We have a small T@B trailer we hitch to our pickup. We pick a general area and direction and go explore. The past two weeks we explored more of eastern and central Washington state. This included the Palouse, Spokane, Rosevelt Lake, Leavenworth and Mt Rainier areas. As usual I get up early and photograph. I have found that my success in generating strong images on the road is mixed. Not knowing the areas well it takes sometime to find good subjects at the right time of day, etc. Sometimes I feel too much pressure when trying to photograph. This is especially true when I visit some photographic hot spot for first time (Glacier NP, Yellowstone, etc). I find this eases when I get to spend at least three days at a location. It is even better if I get to return another time altogether. So I have found that I actually enjoy my morning photo sessions better when I am just out exploring some obscure place.

Has this been your experience?

I have included a couple of my trip images. The top image is classic Palouse and the bottom is a Mt Rainier reflection.

One of my favorite HDR nature images is one I took late last fall (early winter) of a tree surrounded by frosty blue-green grass. I have gone by that tree a couple times since. Finally I went by a couple weeks ago while the trees were blooming. The top blog image is a new HDR of that tree with spring colors all around. The second image is the original image shot in the fall. I find that I really like both of these images. As I noted before, good subjects are worth revisiting many times.

On my way to Silver Falls State Park here in Oregon (a beautiful park by the way) my wife and I stopped at the Wooden Shoe Tulip farm. The tulips were not quite a peak yet but some sections were in full bloom. The weather was actually pretty good at first – mostly cloudy with sun breaks. Unfortunately it turned to full sun before I would have liked. Flowers look best under diffused light 99% of the time. I did take some advantage of the direct sunlight and did a couple backbit images – one is included here. The final image is a pan of some the mult-color tulips.

Top image: For this image I got the camera down low to the ground (taking advantage of the fact that the tulip were on row mounds) . I set up the on camera flash for a little fill light(-1.0EV) and composed the shot keeping it a bit on the diagnal. In post processing I darkened some of the ground debrie and cleaned it up as needed.

Well it is time to submit images to calendar companies for the 2011 calendars (until June). I learned a bit about this in Jim Zuckerman’s “Making Money with Your Photogrpahy” course through BP. While the Photographer’s Market has a few companies listed, the better source of publishers is found via the web or at your local bookstore (later in the year though). Anyway, finding publishers for your type of work appears to be the trick. So far I have found going to calendars.com and finding calendars with my type of images in them is the best way. I would also advise keeping a record of the companies you find along with pertinent info. I am using a spreadsheet for this. Once you find a company you can generally find their submission guidelines buried on their site – I record this as well. I can tell this is going to take some work. Next will come selecting appropriate images and sending them. It is important to make sure the publisher’s markets and you images are a good fit.

Image: I found this driving along the back roads where I live. Hard to resist those colors. This should make a good calendar image. They like bright colors and you need to be able to crop it to a square if necessary.