Otter Cliff and Granite Ledges at Sunrise, Acadia National Park.
It was my one and only trip to Acadia National Park. I can see why it is rated one of our best best national parks to visit in the fall.
The Milky Way, Acadia National Park. October 18, 2017.
My evening in Acadia National Park. I arrived after dark and created images of the night sky and the Milky Way. Then a car drove by and created these light streaks.
Fighting it out in the trenches.
When I photograph a football game, the local newspaper doesn’t want dozens, much less hundreds of photos. I usually select 6 – 12 images to send to the Lamoni Chronicle and they choose the ones they want to publish.
Korbin Nall (25) scores a touchdown on the first play from scrimmage.
As usual, when I photograph an event for the weekly Lamoni Chronicle, I create a lot of images and select about 6 to 12 to send to the paper. The paper usually chooses from 2 to 6 to publish. On really rare occasions a dozen might get published. If it is a slow news week, more of my photos get published so I always hope for a slow news week. The photos in this article are my “selects” from the October 7, 2024 middle school football game between the Lamoni Demons (red helmets) and the Melcher-Dallas Saints.
Lamoni’s Annual Fall Festival (LAFF)
Every year in the fall, Lamoni Iowa has it’s annual fall festival, commonly abbreviated LAFF. I wander the street that is blocked off for vendors and take random photos. Sometimes people specifically ask me to take pictures of them. Out of the dozens of images I create, I usually pick 9-12 to send to the local newspaper and they pick a handful or more to publish. Click any of these images to see a larger version.
iPhone snapshots. Click image for a larger version.
It is not too late too catch the spectacular fall colors in Southwest Colorado. All of these iPhone snapshots were taken on a September 29 trip over Marshall Pass with a side trip to O’Haver Lake. At each stop (there were many) I took a photo or two with my phone and I took a variety of images with a DSLR. I framed different parts of the overall scene and I often did horizontal and vertical versions. My photo excursion took 3 1/2 hours.
Cadence
We planned on shooting at midnight when the moon was high enough in the sky to do portraits, but we got clouds, lightning, and wind. So we went with it.
Marshall Pass is a beautiful fall color drive in southern Colorado, and still pretty much a secret. It does not turn up on most lists of the most beautiful fall color drives in Colorado. It is a beautiful drive with a lot of fall color photo opportunities.
Autumn, Upper Tahquamenon Falls, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
Fall color is sweeping the country. To make the most of it, you want to be at the right place at the right time. With some help from the internet, I will help you find the best fall color locations at the peak of the season.
Hallett Peak and Flattop Mountain, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado
What are the best national parks to photograph in the fall? Here are my choices, grouped by state and province from west to east. This list includes the favorites I have been to, plus the ones I most want to see based on the recommendations of the photographers I trust, like Tim Fitzharris and QT Luong. More about them later.
Headed for Colorado this fall (or any other time of year)? Welcome to my complete Colorado fall color photography and travel guide with 133 photos, 18 maps, and over 100 pages of information (if you print it all out). I cover some of the best known fall color locations in Colorado, and most of these locations look great any other time of year. Spend anywhere from two days to two weeks exploring the beautiful Colorado Rockies at a gorgeous time of year.
Great Horned Owl on the roof of Tess Morgan. iPhone photo from the parking lot.
Yesterday my dog and I were on our daily tour of our local lakes. We got an unusually late start and it was after sunset when we left the first lake. We were in a hurry to get to our second lake when I spotted something out of the corner of my eye on a rooftop corner of Tess Morgan, a college campus building. From a distance it looked like a vent pipe, but a vent pipe should not be located at the corner of the roof. To get a lot closer, I pulled into the parking for a better look. I am so glad I did. It was an owl (photo above).
Screen Capture: Adobe Bridge. Click to see a larger version.
When you are photographing a lovely and talented model (or anyone else) at an interesting location, create a lot of images. This is a screen capture of most of the images from a photo shoot with Anoush. If she looks familiar to you, I have shared images of her before (see the links below).
Bear Lake, Longs Peak and the Keyboard of the Winds.
Marshall Pass is a beautiful fall color drive in southern Colorado, and still pretty much a secret. It does not turn up on most lists of the most beautiful fall color drives in Colorado. It is a beautiful drive with a lot of fall color photo opportunities.
Headed for Colorado this fall (or any other time of year)? Welcome to my complete Colorado fall color photography and travel guide with 133 photos, 18 maps, and over 100 pages of information (if you print it all out). I cover some of the best known fall color locations in Colorado, and most of these locations look great any other time of year. Spend anywhere from two days to two weeks exploring the beautiful Colorado Rockies at a gorgeous time of year.
Dancer, Graceland University, Lamoni Iowa
20 years ago this evening I was photographing this dancer at an evening worship service at a church camp. I tried to capture just the right moments in her dance. I was particularly pleased with this image. I sent it to the media office of the church that sponsored the camp.
Ludington Dunes in the moonlight. Click the image for a larger version.
My primary camera, a DSLR, does not record the GPS location of my photos. Why does it matter? Some photo editors will not publish a photo unless you provide accurate GPS coordinates of the image location. Of course I knew I was approximately a couple of hundred yards up the beach from the parking lot, but not precisely where I was. Plus I am curious. Some of my photos are taken in less obvious locations and I like to know where I was when I clicked the shutter.
Burgess Corners Grocery Store and Filling Station
When I do photography workshops in Northern Michigan, this quaint, early 1920s grocery store and filling station is one of the stops on our field trips.
Anoush, Lake Michigan at sunset
It was a beautiful day at a Lake Michigan beach at sunset and the colors just kept getting better as you will see in the next image.
Anoush in flowers, Burgess Corners, Michigan.
I usually do portraits with a DSLR, but every once in a while I do a portrait with my iPhone just to see how it does. In this case, my phone did a pretty good job. We stopped at Burgess Corners Michigan because there is a 1920s era grocery store and gas station on the corner. (I will post gas station photos later.) After taking some photos at the gas station we decided to take advantage of the flowers on the other side of the highway.
Anoush Anou, Manistique River.
This is the latest in the “green towel” series. This towel lives in my car for whenever I am doing water portraits. It is also in my car for the times I need to dry off after I have to wade out into water to get the photo angle I want, or to dry off my tripod legs. There are more green towel photos here.
Sunrise at OSU’s Gibraltar Island, Lake Erie, Ohio. July 22,2011, 6:26 am.
July 22, 2011 was a very special day. Jeremy Bruskotter and I were leading our very first weekend photography workshop for OSU’s Stone Laboratory. Home base for our workshop was Gibraltar Island, OSU’s island in Lake Erie. We did this weekend workshop once every summer for several years.
Anna’s Hummingbird
We were visiting family in the San Francisco Bay Area and I noticed hummingbirds feeding at the Lantana bushes near the back patio. They were fast and unpredictable, feeding at closer blooms but mostly at farther away blooms.
Tiana, Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge
If you are out hiking and a beautiful woman asks you to take her picture, you should probably says yes! We should all be so lucky, right? Well, we didn’t really meet by chance. Tiana is a first class model and photographer living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Most of the parade photos taken with the Canon 7D Mark III and a 70-300mm lens. Click the image to see a larger version.
Why do event and assignment photographers take so many images? I am asked that question on a regular basis. For this year’s 4th of July parade I captured 138 images. 135 of them were taken with a pair of DSLR cameras and 3 with my iPhone.
McGulpin Rock and the Mackinac Bridge, October 4, 2006.
I stumbled (not literally) across McGulpin Rock in 2006 quite by accident. I was wandering the Lake Michigan shoreline and there it was. I did not know at the time that it is historically famous. Five years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, French explorers found McGulpin Rock in 1615.
Early Morning Snow at Bryce Canyon, April 25, 2001.
When I left home in the Midwest and headed for Northern California I had no intentions of being in Southern Utah. By the time I reached Denver, snow in the forecast for N. Utah, Nevada, and the mountain passes in N. California made a detour much more appealing than fighting snow on I-80, especially since I have never been to the spectacular parks and monuments in southern Utah.
Soleece, before and after Adobe Camera Raw.
Cameras, no matter how expensive, do not capture “visual reality”. In other words, what you see with your eyes is not what the camera captures when you click the shutter. The photo on the right is what my eyes saw when I clicked the shutter. The photo on the left is what my camera gave me. I used Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) to turn the camera image on the left into the image on the right. Plus I cropped the final image. The process of turning the camera image into the image you want only takes a minute or two.