Monthly Archives: July 2024

Great Blue Heron: iPhone vs DSLR at 130 Yards

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Great Blue Heron at Lake LaShane

I was driving along a country road at one of my favorite local lakes and spotted a Great Blue Heron straight north of me near the shoreline. I got the crazy idea to do comparison photos between my DSLR and my iPhone. The heron was too far away to get a high quality image with either camera, but I decided to do it anyway.  I also wanted to check on the quality of the iPhone’s built in digital zoom versus cropping the original image and resizing it later in the computer.

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20 Years Ago This Evening

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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.

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“Where exactly was I when I took those photos?”

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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.

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Anoush in Flowers

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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: The Green Towel

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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.

OSU’s Stone Lab Photo Workshop, July 22, 2011

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Morning field trip. Photography workshop at OSU's Gibraltar in Lake Erie, Ohio.

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.

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Tiana

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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.

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Great Places in the U.S. to Take Pictures

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A while back I wrote about all of the people that like to go take pictures at the same spot where Ansel Adams created his image “Tetons and the Snake River”.  I was curious about other places people like to take picture so I did a Google search for “famous us photo locations”.  Google came back with “Most photographed places in the U.S.”

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Why Take So Many Photos of One Event?

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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.

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4th of July Parade, Lamoni Iowa

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The color guard with the U.S. flag leading the 4th of July parade.

Each year for fun I photograph the 4th of July parade in Lamoni Iowa, and I send photos to the local newspaper. Here are some photos from this year’s parade, along with a few parade photography tips.

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The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

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Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale, 1800Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale, 1800

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

From the Declaration of Independence, signed July 4, 1776. Written by Thomas Jefferson (1762-1826). 3rd US President (1801-09).

More images (including Thomas Jefferson’s original draft) and the complete text of the declaration are after the break.

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Photo Location: Thorne Swift Nature Preserve in Northern Michigan

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Thorne Swift Photo Collage. Click the collage for a larger version.

Thorne Swift Nature Preserve is one of my favorite photo locations in Michigan and it is well worth visiting from spring through fall. It is just 3 1/2 miles north of Harbor Springs in northern Michigan via M-119, the Tunnel of Trees, and Lower Shore Drive. Directions and maps are at the end of this article. It is one of the field trip options for my nature photography workshops in Northern Michigan.

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