Nature's Best Photography Experience - Denver

The Nature's Best Photography Experience is coming to Denver this coming April 9th! This educational seminar is being presented by Blue Pixel. Instructor Daniel Cox is a profesional nature photographer whose images have appeared in Nature's Best photography, National Geographic and has appeared on Animal Planet a number of times. For more info: http://bluepixel.net/naturesbest. Price for the full day seminar is $149 for on-line registration or $169 at the door.

Daniel was one of the keynote speakers at the recent NANPA Summit and his presentation on his grey spotted owl project was spectacular.

Balanced Rock Lightpainting

Here's a shot of Balanced Rock in Arches N.P. taken last Feb. where I seriously tried my hand at light painting for the first time. I used a $20 battery-operated spot light and set the camera for a 30 second exposure in manual mode with an aperture of f4. The white balance was set to incandescent. Notice the constellation Orion just above the rock. I swept the base of the rock to give a sense of "base".

With digital, it's so very nice to be able to check your shot immediately for these unusual lighting situations. It turned out that with a shutter speed of 30 seconds and sweeping the light constantly during that whole period, the exposure seemed just right.

One variation I'll try for the future is to leave the shutter open for 1 to 2 hours in order to pick up the "star trails". I think that would look very cool.

Try it some time!

Malaysian Sunrise

Here's a sunrise I shot out the window of my hotel in Palau Penang, an island just off the coast of Malaysia and a popular location for a lot of U.S. electronics manufacturers. I didn't fool with the color adjustments at all. These are accurate representations of what I saw. I believe the highly pastel coloring was due to the high humidity level. Both images were taken with the new Canon 5D with (believe it or not) a Tamron 28-300mm at around 200mm. JPEG Fine and manual exposure. There was so much water vapor in the air, you could literally stare at the sun without any problem. It was like shooting through a very dense "tobacco" filter. And yes, near the equator, the sun really does rise straight up and sets straight down! Enjoy, Ken

Images of Greatness

While perusing through my local Big Lots store (don't ask!), I came across the book, Images of Greatness - An Intimate Look at the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, by Official White House Photographer, Pete Souza. This is a classic coffee table book and portfolio of one of the photographic greats. This normally $35 book was being closed out at $1.99. It's worth grabbing.

"Golden River" image featured on NANPA home page

One of my two images accepted for the 2006 NANPA Showcase was selected to be displayed today on the home page of the NANPA website!