Absolute Photography: January 2010

Photographic Categories Assignment 1.

Ok so back to school!
The following was the assignment. I will post the "Journal" here once it is finalized.
Week One Assignment: Wildlife / Nature Photography
Mission Park Greenway
1 – Macro
Mid-Field
Horizon

Expectations:
Keep photo journal
Pre-shot notes: expectations, location decision
In-field notes: equipment, observations, experience, approach or strategy
Post-production notes: process, technique
Follow-up: actual experience compared to pre-shoot expectations
Elements I'm looking for: composition, originality, creativity, general photographic quality.

Believe it or not the below photos were taken IN Kelowna. Yup. Who knew! Although the Canyon was beautiful I wasnt able to capture the vast impressiveness of it. However I am happy with these details along the way :) Enjoy!

Our photographic categories class has begun. So far we are one instructor short, but I am told that will be resolved as soon as possible. Our first discussion was on wildlife and nature photography. This is an area of photography that I have always enjoyed, but one that I have not taken the time to refine. Since starting school last July, I have put more focus on this type of photography; simply because I am in a new town and haven’t created a large network of children to photograph here (my favorite subject). I have, however, had plenty of time to wander around on my own, discovering the small wonders of this place.

For this assignment I chose to visit the Mission Park Greenway. On Sunday morning I went online and did some research. Much of our class discussion was on planning our shoot, and as I am unfamiliar with this particular site I figured the best place to start was Google. I was in luck. As it turns out, the Mission Park Greenway is an almost 20km creek side path that winds its way through Kelowna. The wilderness in our backyards. Literally. Studying the trail maps I found interesting sounding areas such as, “Scenic Canyon Regional Park”, “Canyon Stairs”, and my favorite “Layer Cake Mountain”. Someone had even posted a photo of the “beware of bears” sign at the entrance of the Scenic Canyon Park. I immediately thought “I better find a friend to come with me”, and with a quick chat conversation on Facebook with Kaylyn, our plans were in place.

Google map in hand, we headed out to find the park. In my pack was my Pentax K20D, my new lens (Pentax 2.8 16-50mm), my old faithful (Tamron 28-200mm), spare battery, memory cards, mittens, and of course some snacks. Kaylyn and I both have Manfrotto tripods so we had her boyfriend lug hers along. It was cloudy out, but a warm -1 when I left the house.
Aside from my fairly informative online journey that morning I wasn’t sure what to expect. As I find the cloudy winters here depressing I knew I was in search of color, and more specifically, a macro shot, a midfield shot, and a horizon shot.

Our journey started out rocky, my Google map was not accurate in its specific directions to the parking lot. Luckily I knew the intersection we were looking for, and Kaylyn’s boyfriend was more familiar with the area. Once in the park we knew we were in for a treat. After walking less than 5 minutes down the trail towards the creek and the canyon, I was practically skipping along. Silent except for the snow falling off the trees in the warm weather and our chatter this area is a gem within Kelowna’s City limits. Even though I had only been there a few minutes I was already planning my next trip back in the spring.

Right away we knew we would have to look very closely for any sort of color. With snow still on the ground at that point it was a world of white. We did find some very green moss and that got us hopeful that Mother Nature might have other colorful treats for us along the way. We spent a couple of hours meandering our way through the forest, along the creek and partway through the canyon, snapping photo’s the whole time. As it turned out, the treat that Mother Nature had for me was snowballs falling out of trees and onto my head, not more pretty colors. Aside from that we had a quite enjoyable walk and I was confident I had accomplished my photo goals for this small expedition.

Once home with the photos uploaded onto the computer I began my post production process. I have a fairly specific workflow these days, although I am sure it could use some updating. At any rate, my current workflow starts in bridge viewing all the photos. I use the rating system available here to determine the “keepers”. These are rated as 4 stars. Then I filter everything else out and go through again. In this case I was only looking for three photos. I selected two for each category (macro, midfield, and horizon/landscape), and rated them as 5 stars. Next I take these selections into camera raw and begin making slight adjustments. I should note here that I always shoot in RAW not JPEG. The RAW files provide more information and thus more latitude in my digital darkroom.

The one thing about super cloudy days is it makes for properly exposed photos without much trouble. This means that I didn’t have to do much at all as far as white balance, exposure, etc in Camera Raw. One thing I did do was move over to the “HSL/Greyscale” slider and adjusted the hue, saturation, and the luminance of my greens. That moss in real life was almost fluorescent! I knew the information was there, but it was looking a bit grey out of the camera. With a couple of quick adjustments the green moss had life again. While still in camera raw, I selected my macro shot and also adjusted the sharpness slightly. I then imported all 6 photos into Photoshop. Some minor cropping and a quick “levels” adjustment to each photo and this exercise was complete.

When I was first given this assignment I was not super excited. When I heard that we were doing wildlife and nature my thoughts immediately turned to all the beautiful areas that I am familiar with back home. I had thousands of ideas and small plans starting in my head. But wait! I am not at home. I am in a valley that seems to spend all winter wet and cloudy, and I am finding it depressing. However, with a little research my excitement was renewed. On top of that I was able to face the challenge of entering an unknown area and I left there with three solid shots.

On my trip home over Christmas Break I of course had my camera handy! I tried out some of the new things learned last quarter and for the most part just had fun taking some photos of the familiar for FUN. Not for homework or for a client.. neat concept ;)

These were shot between Valemount and McBride on my way up North.

Christmas Morning at the Cabin. I was half done opening gifts when I looked out the window, dropped everything and headed out with the camera!

Santa was wonderful this year too! I found a new lens under the tree - so the first of these are taken with my "old faithful" fave lens of all time and then anything (except the cabin pic) from here on in this post was taken with my new SWEET probably soon to be new favorite Pentax 2.8 16-50mm! Enjoy.