This week marks the beginning of a new feature here on the site. Each week, I’ll bring to light an image that is now available through my sales site on Yessy.

This week’s image is Memories of Fall. I travelled to Lone Elk State Park in autumn to take a look at the bison and elk herds that roam the hillsides of the park, and found a hill of trees next to the lake, all displaying magnificent fall colors. For some reason, the little grove of trees at lake’s edge grabbed my imagination, and I decided to set them off by taking the color away from the rest of the image. To me, the simple image reminded me of an old black and white image that had been hand-tinted to restore the color to the grove.

Memories of Fall is available in a variety of sizes, with an unframed print matted at 11×14, and framed images at both 18×24 (single mat) and 22×28 (double-matted). Please visit my sales gallery on Yessy if you are interested in purchasing Memories of Fall.

If you are a photographer reading this blog, I strongly urge you to evaluate your response to the recent move by the city of New York to restrict public photography. The full text of the regulation is here (PDF file). There’s a group called Picture New York who has their response to the new regulation here, and have provided an e-petition to sign if you’re so inclined.

I did.

This is the second time this week that a story has floated to the top of my newsreader concerning photographers being either harassed (Arlington VA) or muzzled by regulations and insurance requirements (New York). To my view, the right of a municipality to regulate when and where I can use my camera in public spaces — especially in places where there is a reasonable expectation of a desire to photograph and document landmarks, architecture and events, based on their uniqueness, newsworthiness, or popularity — is absolutely not permissible.

I know that in the post 9/11 world, anyone who isn’t doing exactly what someone expects them to do is automatically considered one of the bad guys. This has unfortunately allowed a land-grab of so many opportunities taken for granted before that date. However, turning this great country — that I served during the tail end of the Cold War in the 80s — into a police state is doing nothing more than letting the bad guys win… by eroding the very freedoms so many government agencies at various levels say we are protecting by inhibiting the reasonable exchange of free speech, in this case, photography.

When they finally outlaw photography, only outlaws will practice photography. Don’t let this happen. I strongly urge you to be active, and sign the petition. If you happen to be a voter in a place that’s either passed or encouraging the passage of similar legislation, vote with your camera, and make changes at the ballot box that will once again help make this country free and restore this particular freedom of speech for its citizens and visitors.

I was reading through my RSS feeds tonight, and found one linking to very early (pre-1910) color photographs taken in Russia. I had no idea that there was any color photography from that era, and in browsing the photos, I’m amazed at the brilliance of color. If my friend, the Internet, hadn’t told me they were close to 100 years old, I would’ve believed they were shot yesterday… except for the clothing on the models!

Take a peek at this — this is a very unusual exhibit!

Amy at Framations has created a video tour of my gallery show — it beats the stuffing out of mine! You can watch it below, and you’ll need flash to see it.

Enjoy!

For the second morning in a row, I’ve been treated to a temperature right around 60 at sunrise — a huge departure from typical July in these parts, where temps at sunrise can frequently be in the 70s. Along with great temps and beautiful sunrises was really dense fog in the valley and along the river. When I crossed the river coming to work, the scene was stunning, but at 60mph and on a bridge that’s barely wide enough for the car lanes, there’s just no opportunity to capture that scene while driving.

Or is there?

I’ve been contemplating rigging the passenger seat of Smokey with some kind of removable camera mount, quite probably a tripod with the legs adjusted to wedge it in place. I’ve got a cable release for my 20D, so it’d be nothing to fire shots out the passenger window while toolin’ down the road. That’s the correct side of the road for my bridge sunrise, and I suspect the implementation of something like that to be pretty easy to pull off. There’s vantage points being up on the bridge that just can’t be replicated, and two mornings of beautiful sunrises viewed from it certainly fuel me wanting to do something to capture these fleeting views.

However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg that floats in deep waters within me, hunting for my own personal Titanic. The real impact of mornings like this is that once again, the fire gets lit within me that makes me ponder just how I might get to where I can spend my days behind the camera rather than in a cubicle, outdoors rather than inside. Of course, a tremendous session like that we had with the elk on Sunday is only another log on that fire. These are real challenging waters for me. I can see the place I wanna land my virtual boat, I just can’t get my brain around how to get my oars to move me from here to there.

Obviously, me and thousands of other folks are trying to figure out how to escape the cube farms, and how to chase their dreams. For some, they’ve saved enough that they can step out on that limb and give their dream career a real attempt without the distractions that come from trying to follow their path on a part-time basis, yet still pay the mortgage and the tax man. For others, it’s a leap of faith. They believe enough in their skills and their dream that they begin walking that tightrope without a net, and simply work hard, hoping for the best. I think there’s still others out there that make lifestyle changes that allow them to chase the dream: drop the big mortgage and big car payments, and move into a more modest lifestyle that can be supported by the proceeds garnered from the chase of the dream.

And then there’s me. I don’t really fit any of those categories. Basically I’m a big coward at heart — ok, not really, but I do like knowing when, where and how much I’ll be paid. I also thrive on not having bill collectors screaming at me daily. I’ve been there, long, long ago; I didn’t like it then, and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t stomach it now.

I don’t know the answer, and unfortunately this isn’t the kind of question for which you can peek at the answer key in the back of the book. I certainly think I have the skills and drive to pull off doing my own thing with photographic work, at least on a scale where I could survive. The question is really how bumpy the road is between local artist and surviving artist. And to me, success at survival is defined as being about to support my family — I don’t need fame or name recognition on the big stage, although I think a little bit of that probably comes by the time someone can support themselves on the proceeds wrought from hanging art in folks’ homes and businesses.

There’s been a few good articles about this sort of thing lately…. I’ll try to get to those a little later….

On a rather lazy Sunday, Beck reminded me today that I needed to go photograph. Sio was kinda telling me that a few weeks ago when she reminded me of how much she enjoyed going out and helping when I shoot. I think I get a different sense about me when I’m behind the camera. I get focused — really focused — on something I enjoy so much, and I’m sure that comes across in my demeanor.

So Beck whisked me off to Lone Elk Park, a place I hadn’t photographed in easily a year. The last time I remember us being there, we a great encounter with a big elk herd. Apparently, the elk must like me, for we had encounters with two chunks of the herd, accounting for about 20 head of elk.

Our first encounter was with a field of mommas and babies — over a dozen of ‘em. That was a serene scene, and we must’ve hung around for an hour watching them lie in the shade, and just enjoy being elk. Very peaceful and tranquil indeed.

Your Humble Author
(Click to enlarge)

Our second encounter was with three bulls that kept approaching closer and closer. Eventually, they came within 30 feet or so of us. Quietly, I just stood there, firing shot after shot. I’d never been that close to the elk in the park, and since they didn’t seem to mind me being there, and they were walking up on me and very aware of my presence, I just stayed put and watched them scratch their backs with their massive racks, grazing on leaves on the ground, and reaching up into the trees for tasty morsels. I’d never seen them reach up into the trees. I almost got the impression they would reach up higher by standing on their hind feet. Dunno if they can do that, but to go any higher, they would’ve had to.

Majestic is the single word that comes to mind in watching these giants gracefully walk by, giving me a great opportunity to enjoy them in a relatively typical environment. It was indeed a wonderful time, and I’m so very thankful that Beck reminded me of how I should better spend my afternoon!

And, before culling anything, I ended up with over 800 images from the park. Enjoy going through all those!

(BTW, my script for processing my freshly shot images started failing! I thought it was because I’d installed Lightroom, or some other more insidious thing. As it ends up, setting the image quality to 16-bit from 8-bit in Camera RAW apparently disables saving RAW files as JPGs — a necessary piece for my current web libraries. Ahhhhh…. Live and learn, I guess!)

I’ve got a gazillion other things to write about tonight, and I’ll probably get ’round to them before the night’s out, but I wanted to first write about podcasts.

Now, I’m (at times, and arguably) one of the sharper crayons in the box — not as sharp as that crazy crayon that’s been rotated incessantly inside the whirl-o-matic-o-sharpening on the back of the 64-pack, but not as dull as that crayon that practically requires a roach clip to be colored with in any meaningful fashion. But tonight, my ascent up Podcast Hill was more a downward spiral into Podcast Hell.

I’ve been wanting to take the audio tour material from my show at Framations, and turn it into a podcast. No real reason for doing that, other than the cool factor.

My first inclination was to use Garage Band, a part of iLife on my Mac. And while that looked reasonably easy, I had all kinds of trouble importing the sound files. I finally got them in, finished creating the silly podcast, only to find out….. my iPod won’t play it. It’ll start playing it, but the audio will die, the podcast continues on, and eventually the audio comes back for the next image. Weird.

Then I tried iMovie HD, which was a horrible tool for syncing audio tracks to still images. I don’t know what the deal was there, but that was just about the most frustrating thing I’ve tried on my Mac. I mean, I thought this podcast stuff was easy on a Mac….?

The final solution? Take my iMovie piece, export it as a QuickTime movie, then in QuickTime, export it as an iPod file. That seems to be working.

So now, should you care to take a listen, you can find the podcast for the show here. It’s an m4v file, so you’ll need to pull it to your desktop (for iTunes) or iPod before playing it. If you want to just watch the QuickTime version, it’s here.

Enjoy!

As I’ve had some pieces sell from the show up at Framations, I needed to take up a new piece to them last night to fill one of the “holes” in the display, as well as moving around of some of my wall hangings to handle the other holes. As soon as I got there, I took a look to see if anything else had been reserved or sold. Nothing additional, but I’m confident that other pieces will fly from the walls before the show ends on August 5th.

The thing that was earth-shattering news for me was Amy and Sarah inviting me to become a resident artist at Framations! This is a very cool step for me, and a very big one. Essentially, that means that I’ll have some of my pieces on display at the gallery day-in and day-out in a 4′ W x 12′ H (approximately) space. There’s some other benefits from this, and I’ll hit on those once things get a little more firm. Watch this space, along with the Colin Wright Photography site, for more details about the my involvement with the resident artist program at Framations as it unfolds.

For now though, I’m trying to plan out the usage of my space, and exactly what to put in the shop. To say I’m excited about this is an understatement — I’m pretty sure my feet didn’t touch the ground the whole way home last night!

I saw something on one of my news ticklers today that talked about a new product from Symantec called Anti-Bot. On the surface, this seems like a good thing — increase the ability of the end-user to figure out if their machine’s been compromised, and avoid it if possible.

However, the implied message from the press release from Symantec is that if your machine is being used as part of a botnet, you may be implicated in anything from spam to phishing. All because your machine is compromised…?

Now IANAL, but spreading that kind of FUD almost seems like a scare tactic. Is there legal history for someone whose machine has been compromised getting drug into court to defend the themselves against actions they weren’t party to or aware of? In the real world, there’s a certain responsibility you carry — if someone slips near your pool and drowns, even if they weren’t supposed to be there and you weren’t home, you probably still bear some responsibility.

In the virtual world though, the slippery slope is much more…. slippery. While it may be a good practice to construct a virtual fence around my machines, there’s no law that says I must. And frankly, just how effective that virtual fence is might vary on any given day. As the bad guys write more (and different) bad guy code, the fence has to change. The fence around my pool (in the real world) doesn’t have to change day-to-day — the thing it’s protecting against doesn’t change.

So, “boooooo” to Symantec for taking an otherwise good idea, and wrapping it in fearmongering in order to drive sales. I appreciate the intent, but I really don’t like the method!

At my gallery reception on Saturday, one of the things I think I was asked the most was how much and what kind of retouching I do to my work. This question usually came as soon as someone found out I was shooting digital. Fair question, in this day and age, I suppose. For me, the answer is white balance, maybe some contrast or brightness, and some sharpening, and that’s about it. I may tweak a twig or a spot from my camera sensor, but what you see on my prints is just about exactly what I saw in the camera.

Now, to be clear, I have no problem with folks adjusting images. Sometimes you need to, especially as the craft starts heading toward high dynamic range images — cameras just aren’t built to capture light across the broad spectrum of an HDR image. And of course, there’s other kinds of tweaks, I’m sure.

However, there’s a limit to what I’d do. For some folks, that appears to be a little less the case. Check out this article detailing a photo of Faith Hill, and what happened to it in the hands of Redbook magazine. Read the article, read the link about why they hated Redbook doing this, and see what you think.

I think they hit the nail on the head. The image was retouched to make a 40-year old woman look like a 25-year old woman, taking away so much of the humanity that was in the original image. I guess that’s what passes for editing nowadays: a distortion of the truth. Ya know, that’s one of the things I love about photography — the bare-naked truthfulness of the image through the lens — and I just hate to see that go out the window for the sake of making a lot of folks buy a magazine.

Alas, a mountain out of a molehill (or a FaithHill), I’m sure, but sometimes ya gatta call ‘em like you see ‘em!