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.

As you probably have noticed I have used HDR on several occasions now. I am slowing getting a sense of when to use HDR and when not to. Besides the obvious high contrast situation where the sky in a landscape would be blow out without some intervention – split ND filter, double processed RAW or multiple manually merged images – HDR when processed with Photomatrix has other advantages. First, if there is a lot of detail in a subject, the detail enhancer can really bring that out. For example, the tractor picture I published in an earlier blog. Or the image included here. As you can see there is a lot of stuff that grows on the trees in Oregon besides leaves. Generally I have not found straight photography does it justice, but HDR brings it out nicely. When shooting interiors, HDR is good for keeping hot spots from burring out – sun on a rug as shown in the second image. Finally HDR is good when you have an image that includes both interior and exterior subject material as seen in my earlier blog post on covered bridges.

As part of my continuing skill improvement I am taking another BetterPhoto course. This time from William Neil. As I was preparing my initial photographs for review I went back to a set of images I took at Glacier NP this past year. As I was going over the images, I found the ones that hadn’t really captured my attention in the past. There are probably several reasons for this. One, I can look at them with fresh eyes and two, I can now better visualize them with some additional post processing and/or a different treatment all together. The first example shows a color version of a storm rolling in at Glacier. It is pretty much in its RAW form with only standard settings. Clearly I exposed this image for the bright highlight in the sky. After some processing in Lightroom (burning in the sky highlight and dodging the mountain plus sepia toning) the image ended up feeling much more powerful and conveys the ominous feeling I felt at the time. There are several more images from Glacier I will be revisiting. They should be showing up on my website down the road.

Conclusion: It pays to revisit older images with new eyes.

I have been sick for a few days with the bug that has been going around. I am finally starting to feel better today. As I walked around the house I noticed the bouquet of daffodils my wife sat on a cube in a room we recently painted. The daffodil’s were stunning against the blue paint. Needless to say I had to take several photos. The image included here is the one I first saw in my mind as I walked by.

I have included another shot I took on Monday at lunch before I was sick. This last image has had some diffusion applied to accentuate the pink buds that are ready to blossom. As you can see, spring has sprung on the northwest. Hopefully it is coming your way soon if it hasn’t already!

Image: I had noticed a week or two ago that the local buffalo farm looks pretty good at sunrise on a foggy morning – at other times of the day the setting along the highway is just not that picturesque. So a couple days ago I noticed the conditions were right and drove by the farm. This is my favorite image. Notice the buffalo cooperated and formed a nice repition of three into the fog.