We’ve had a crazy schedule these past few weeks with a lot on our plates, ending with a winter storm fouling up our plans to see Michael Kenna at the Portland Japanese Gardens last Saturday.  So what do you do when events try their best to stop your photography - you print!  So on Sunday we warmed up the Canon and made some prints!

As I mentioned in the “Breaking Up is Hard to Do” blog post, I was hoping to use the importing into Capture One process as an opportunity to revisit some of my images.  And while I haven’t really been able to take the time to review the images as they’re being imported, images have occasionally caught my eye and I’ve flagged them for future development.  Earlier this week, as I opened up Capture One to get images for another blog post I was writing, the 2016 catalog came up and I couldn’t turn away from the image that was displayed on my monitor.  So I decided to work on it.  Not once, but twice!

This past weekend Ann and I pretty much had to get out and do some photography - we were going stir-crazy.  Even if we have been working a lot on images lately, developing images (and the whole import into Capture One thing) is not the same as photographing.  It had been way too long since we’d been out to photograph.  Thinking about where we could go for a quick excursion led us to one of our usuals - Brice Creek!  

It was about time to run prints through the printer again . . . while it sometimes interrupts with other plans, needing to print to keep the printer operational in top efficiency has its advantages - it gets me up off my butt to think about printing.  There is something lovely about having a tangible print in your hands that gives a very different feeling to  one’s images.  And since we’ve been making the effort to become familiar with Capture One, it was time to go through the printing settings and variables with a bit of forethought to see if they all make sense (not totally).  So I chose a couple of images to first, develop them from scratch in Capture One, and then to print them.

As you’ve already seen, Ann made some interesting images of me while on our Death Valley trip.  And while the previous shooting the shooter showed off Ann’s composition skills for leading the eye, this one takes a very different approach and takes advantage of photography’s technical potential.

This has been a long time coming, but Ann and I thought it best that we make the announcement to everyone at the same time.  Ann and I are breaking up . . . with Lightroom.  Lightroom has served us well these past few years, but as I’ll explain below, it was time to call it off and move onward with our lives.  It wasn’t an easy decision to make, nor has it come without costs, but we’re convinced it was the right one.  We remain friends with Lightroom, but as we move forward in our photographic journey, our organization and image developing tool will be Phase One’s Capture One.  

One of the things that many landscape photographers will tell you they dread the most is clear blue skies.  As much as they offer incredible pre-dawn light in certain places (such as the coast, or the desert), clear blue skies are, in a word, boring.  Which means the skies are often pretty much framed outside of the picture when they’re totally blue.  Landscape photographers will opt, hands-down, for partly cloudy skies.  Many such as myself will even prefer the soft light of overcast skies.  And certainly that is why, in part, we go out in adverse weather conditions.  It’s not that we like being wet, or cold, or both, it’s that weather gives us amazing conditions of light and clouds.  That’s one reason why Ansel Adams’ Clearing Winter Storm is so amazing.  Well, the one thing we really didn’t have during our December adventure was plain old blue skies.  That meant that the skies above presented some rather incredible photographic opportunities! 

Ann and I spent a couple of hours at the Ibex Dunes.  As I said in my post of the trip, I had a blast.  Ann had less of one given that it was harder for her to avoid the footprints that tracked throughout the dunes than it was for me because of her wider, landscape approach to image making.  So she continued to photograph anyway and wound up doing what she often does, which is to start including me in her landscape photographs.  Which always leads to the inevitable shooting the shooter question - what in the world was Dan making a photograph of?

Ann and I spent part of New Year’s day printing photographs.  We printed some images for friends, and also were testing a new program we’ve acquired to work on our images.  Most importantly, we took the time to work on a couple of images from our recent trip to Death Valley, which leads us to this installment of Printing the Image.  

The next morning found us up and early driving down 20 Mule Team Canyon Road by moonlight.  Given that it was a full moon and the moon was out (unlike when we were driving around in the Alabama Hills), we could actually see where we were going and, more importantly, whether we wanted to make any stops before we hit our GPS pinned photo locations.  It was like driving through an alien landscape, simply incredible!