Monday, August 15, 2011

Long Time, No See...

Yep, I'm still here. And wow, it sure gets easy to put off posting once you get out of the habit of doing it on a regular basis.. before you know it, one or two months have gone by.
My regular commercial work and now,  running the new gallery, are conspiring to keep me from getting outdoors to shoot, but that should change in September, since my wife and I have booked a week-long trip to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington right after Labor Day... I hope to spend a lot of time photographing the lush, green rain forest and uniquely beautiful beaches up there.  That should certainly generate some interesting new work and will be kind of a fresh subject matter for me, which is always nice.


A couple of weeks ago, my old friend (from art school days, back in the '70's.. a long time!) stopped by here for a few days with his family, while on a north-south tour of California, visiting various family and friends along the way. He teaches art now at a private school in western Massachusetts, where we both grew up, and is a really fine plein-air painter... he works at that a lot during the summers while he is off from teaching. He of course wanted me to show off some of my favorite local scenes so he could take a stab at painting them and on the one session that I hung around while he was working, I couldn't resist to wander up the stream and do some studies with my trusty iPhone while killing time. Of course the quality is not there for any kind of printing, but it's sometimes fun to just shoot carefree with no tripod and no worries about quality... and see what you can see.


Since I don't have any new stuff right now and haven't had the inspiration to dig up and talk about anything already in the can, I thought I'd post a few of these just for a hoot.  All here shot with my phone. Notice the detail in the shadow area of the first one below. The iPhone has a pretty nifty HDR capability built right in; it takes two exposures, then blends them right in-camera and it works quite well... I actually had to tone it down some to make it look natural. I expect most digital cameras will have this feature in the near future.



4 comments:

betchai said...

nice to see you here again Mark, and best wishes on your trip to Olympic Peninsula, I love it there.

Mary Howell Cromer said...

You have been missed, yet I know life changes. Your upcoming journey is one that I want to take next year. We are headed to Montana about the same time you all head out. Look forward to some amazing photograh shares~

Unknown said...

I have never found that feature on my iphone but cool images and nice to see you Alan :)

desertsandbeyond said...

Beautiful! I love ferns. And, thanks for the tip about the Black Mountain lookout. I see there is a Red Mountain one, off Tripp Flats Road, up in Anza, by Cahuilla Mtn. I'll have to find that one sometime, too.
~~Cheryl Ann~~(desertsandbeyond)