ONLY IN VEGAS

The Sphere - Las Vegas

It has been a busy week and I spent it in Las Vegas, Nevada where the annual trade show of the printing industry took place. I’m not really interested in the activities Vegas is known for, however, while walking back to the hotel after dinner one night I found an unobstructed view to the SPHERE, the music and entertainment arena and the world’s largest spherical structure. I recorded some footage of the impressive display at night and I hope you enjoy it.

Photo and videos: Nikon Z6II, Nikkor Z 24-70, f/4 S

LIGHT AND SHADOWS

After another week of travel it was a pure pleasure to spend a few hours in and around one of my favorite places in Iowa’s capital, the Des Moines Art Center. It is home of a great collection of 20th and 21st century art. I have been there numerous times since 1997 and my fascination for the architecture of their three buildings and the art on display still continues.

It was a sunny day and I looked for opportunities to work with light and shadows that emphasize the architecture and art pieces of the museum’s collection. The visit inside of the art center was followed by a walk in Greenwood Park that surrounds the complex. And there I found more places enhanced by light and shadow. I hope you enjoy my selection of images that inspired me to press the shutter release of the camera.

All photos: Nikon Z6II, Nikkor Z 24-70, f/4 S

Zig II, 1961, David Smith (American, 1906-1965), Painted steel

Three Cairns, 2002, Andy Goldsworthy (British, born 1956), Iowa Limestone, lead, steel

MISSISSIPPI RIVER STORIES 2021 #12 - STUDENT OF LIGHT

Mississippi River at Mud Lake Park and Marina, Iowa

I found a book under the Christmas tree, “Light on the Landscape” by William Neill, one of America’s most respected landscape photographers. It is a coffee table-style book with 128 wonderful photographs and comes with lessons incorporating photographic fundamentals, like light, composition, or exposure, but also other aspects, including nature stewardship, inspiration, self-improvement, and others. I just started reading but I’m already fascinated. One of the chapters talks about becoming a student of light and in particular at your own favorite locations over a long period of time.

For me one of these locations would be the entrance to the little marina down at Mud Lake by the Mississippi River. I have published many pictures from this vantage point on a dike and wrote about in the blog more than once that the light is never the same. There are times when I’m not even bother to take the camera out of the bag and others when I run to the end of the dike with the camera after getting out of the car, because light can change very quickly. I go to Mud Lake Park with our dog Cooper at least once a week, but even if no pictures are made, I always try to analyze why some things work and others don’t.

Same vantage point as the photo above but looking south. The main channel is behind the dike on the left. The backwaters of Mud Lake are one of our favorite places to paddle the kayak during the warm season.

William Neill writes about becoming an expert on a particular location. This may not fit a description about me yet, but any time I’m there I study the lighting conditions that occur, and absorb the beauty of the mighty Mississippi.

Today we had a pretty uniform overcast with no directional light but the different patches of snow, ice, and water created patterns that reflected the light in different ways and that we can see only at this time of the season when the river freezes over.

Nikon Z6II, Nikkor Z 24-70, f/4 S

SHAPES IN ICE #2

Middle Fork Little Maquoketa River, Bankston County Park, Iowa

Here in eastern Iowa we have a good number of small creeks and rivers. They all have one thing in common, their water ends up in the Mississippi River. Unless it has rained heavily and a lot of runoff from the fields comes down the valleys, their water can be crystal-clear. The Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) stocks some of the creeks with trout at times and people like to come for fishing. 

The Middle Fork Little Maquoketa River is such a stream. Last weekend a little bit of light got reflected by the rocks at the bottom and made for some color contrast to the thin ice at the river bank.

SHAPES IN ICE

Little Maquoketa River, Iowa

Time to calm down after last Friday’s excitement about birds and wildlife. We don’t have any snow on the ground but temperatures have ben below freezing at night and hoar frost and ice started creating natural shapes along the shores of our rivers and ponds. Let’s see if we can find some light there…

PAINTING WITH LIGHT

During the last few weeks I watched several KelbyOne online classes by photographer and Nikon Ambassador Dave Black about painting with light. That is something that has interested me since a long time but I have never tried it before. If you are not living in the Midwest of the United States you heard it at least in the media, it was really cold here lately, thanks to a polar vortex, and I guess long cold winter nights are perfect for starting such a new photography adventure.

I tell you upfront, it looks easy when you watch the video classes but I had more than 30 attempts before I had results that reflected what I had in mind. I wanted to keep it simple and used just the turntable and a couple of my favorite vinyl records as a background for my first lightpainting project. The light source was a LED flashlight with a very bluish color. I wanted a cold light for this photo but it was a little too much and so I countered it by setting the white balance in the Nikon D750 to 10,000 Kelvin. I attached a little snoot, made out of paper, to the head of the lamp in order to give the light more direction and not spill it all over the place while painting. The room was pitch dark, the shutter was open for 30 seconds at f/20 and I started painting. It takes a little while to find out how much light every element in the frame needs and at the end there is no two photos that look alike.

The learning curve is steep and it is easy to make mistakes that ruin the whole photo. Sounds like a lot of work, but it was instead much fun and a very satisfying process. The possibilities for painting with light are endless and I’m sure even after this polar vortex has weakened, there is another cold winter night waiting for me to start another project…

Nikon D750, Nikkor 24-120mm / f4, Induro GIT 404XL tripod, RRS BH-55 ballhead, @ 48mm, 30s, f/20, ISO100

INGREDIENTS

Black-necked Stilt, Bolsa Chica Ecological Preserve, California, 2017

Light, gesture, and color are still the main ingredients for a photo that may not even get more than just one second of attention span these days on social media. Ok, nothing new here, but if a picture doesn’t even have at least one of the above mentioned, it goes down the digital drain without any notice. A good photo hardly ever needs all three ingredients, one just can make the difference.

CHASING CLOUDS

I have two photos for you today, both taken during my chase for some clouds and light this evening. We had thunderstorms moving out of the area and on the south side of Dubuque, Iowa, at the local airport, I finally found what I was looking for.

As some of you may already know, I like these images where the clouds are actually the subject and the horizon line gives you just a hint where the photo may have been taken, and otherwise giving nothing but a sense of scale.

Both images: Nikon D750, Nikon Nikkor AF-S 70-200mm, f/4G ED VR

THE STORY ABOUT AN “ORDINARY”

Red-winged Blackbird, Green Island Wetlands -------   

I’m still smiling about my first sighting of a Short-eared Owl yesterday and just a few days ago I finally made some pictures of a pair American Black Ducks, as the avid reader of my blog may recall. It looks like I have already a good bird watching year. But more often we come back from a trip with photos of wildlife that is native to the area, stays all year long, or shows up in large numbers for the breeding season. Canada Geese, Ring-billed Gulls, Mallards, and of course the Red-winged Blackbirds belong into this group here in the Mississippi Valley.

So, how can we make the photos of the ordinary creatures special? First, they have to be sharp. If we don’t nail sharpness at least on the eye of a critter we can try it again and again. The “ordinary” birds are a great subject to improve our shooting skills. Second, light and color should play a role. Nobody wants to see, not even on Facebook, a photo of a gull, sitting still on a sheet of ice that reflects the gray from an overcast sky. This rule can be broken if there is a good story telling gesture involved. Gesture is the third ingredient to make an image of a bird that everybody knows more interesting.

I hear the photo-purists saying, Andreas, why didn’t you move a little to the side to get the swaying dried up plant out of the frame? Well, I did, I moved the “mobile blind”, as I call my car, a couple feet back. It was all good, sharpness, light, and color. The only thing missing in all the other shots was the great gesture of the male Red-winged Blackbird, when he spread his wings, called, and told all competitors around, this is my territory! For my friends in Germany and those who are not familiar with blackbirds, the appearance of this species in late winter and early spring is a good indicator that the warmer season will arrive soon. They are here probably by the millions. The males claim a territory and wait for the arrival of the females. This picture may not make it into a field guide about birds but I think it tells the story about what’s going on out in the wetlands, at the Mississippi River, and along the roads here in Iowa…

Nikon D750, Sigma 150-600mm / f5-6.3 DG OS HSM Sports Lens, @ 600 mm, 1/400 s, f/6.3, ISO 200

WHEN LIGHT BECOMES THE SUBJECT

At Lewis Mountain campsite, Shenandoah National Park, Virginia

Ok, I’m jumping back and forth between actual photos, like the Tundra Swans from yesterday, and little stories and images from our tour through the mountains of West Virginia and Virginia in October.

Photography is all about light and how we use it to bring out the subject in our pictures. During an early morning walk around Lewis Mountain campsite in Shenandoah National Park I tried to work with backlit subjects, like ferns and grasses. With every minute more warm light from the low sun was pouring in and putting out some real magic. All the backlit plants are still in the frame but they play only a small role in the story. Suddenly the light itself, hitting the forest floor, became the subject. Not a bad way to start a day…

Nikon D750, Nikkor 16-35mm / f4, @ 35 mm, 1/25s, f/8, ISO400,

BUNNY VS. COOPER

Eastern Cottontail ------    

An Eastern Cottontail is a good critter to practice wildlife photography and to study how different light effects the fur of an animal. Even if they sit relatively still, it remains a challenge to get a sharp image of the face because they chew grass and other plants and their muscles are constantly in motion. I approached the bunny step by step, moving forward with the tripod very slowly, stop, shoot, move, stop, shoot… This was fun to do last weekend on the farm and ended only abruptly when the terrier instincts in our little dog Cooper made the cottontail run for the bushes. Cooper is a fast dog but against the bunny he had not a chance at all…

ESSENCE OF THE SEASON

Giant Swallowtail -------

Summer seems to be in its zenith and I try to catch the essence of this season in light and colors. The good old Sigma 150, f/2.8 macro lens is still a perfect tool for this kind of shooting. To get the best out of it I shoot wide open most of the time, rendering the background with a nice bokeh. Focus has to be on the spot (eye and body) due to the shallow depth of field at f/2.8 or f/3.2. The butterflies have never a quiet moment and continuous-servo autofocus is the only way to get a sharp image.

VEGAS AT NIGHT

The most interesting time in Las Vegas is at night, with all the lights, shows, glitter, and glamor. The strain of sensual perception is hard to deny. Joan and I had a great time the night before the wedding, just walking around, having a drink here and there, and shooting some pictures... I didn’t bring a tripod for proper camera support and wasn’t able to experiment with real long exposures, but I had fun chasing the light at night. It helps to use a lens with vibration reduction, and except for the picture with the light and water show in front of Caesars Palace, all photos were made handheld. Exposure times were between 1/4 s and 1/60 s and in most cases I took multiple shots, sometimes leaning against a wall to stabilize the camera. You can click on each image for best viewing.

LIGHT AND COLOR, BUT NOT WILDLIFE

Why is this post not filed in the category of wildlife photography? Good question, because most of my blog posts circling around wildlife. Why not, especially if my #1 “most wanted” bird, the Belted Kingfisher, is in the frame? The distance between me and the bird, and the water of the marina at Finley’s Landing between us, would have resulted at its best in a documentary shot. I make a lot of those, just to keep track about times and dates when I see particular birds during a year. This helps me later to draw conclusions about another photo opportunity, maybe in better light, at a later point in time.

This shot was taken not too far from sunset and it is the composition, the subtle light, and the colors that make me like this photo. I admit, I concentrated on the kingfisher but my subconscious level of attention took care for the rest. The almost identical angle of the slanted roof of this boat dock and the hill behind it, the wild flowers in the lower left corner, and the luminosity of the gravel road and the roof, reflecting the remaining day light, it all comes together in this photo. I think the picture would work somehow without the bird but the appearance of the graphical bold kingfisher puts the icing on the cake…

LIGHT, GESTURE, AND COLOR

Nikon D300s, Sigma 50-500mm / f4.5-6.3 APO DG HSM

I went on a wildlife scouting trip today. The temperatures went up above freezing but there is plenty of snow still on the ground. The Green Island Wetlands were snowed in and it was very very quiet. I saw a couple Horned Larks and some Song Sparrows but that was all.

The last stop of my little trip along the Mississippi River was the well known lock & dam #14, just south of the bridge where Interstate 80 crosses the big river. I was late but still early enough for the best light. Seven Bald Eagles were sitting in the trees and at least new visitors had a chance to see them relatively close, maybe for the first time in their life. This is good and this is why this location is great for everybody, not just photographers.

Some photographers, that came long ways to #14 for shooting pictures of the eagles may have been not so happy because the lack of action. Means the eagles didn’t hunt for fish in the river. However, more than 25 American White Pelicans and numerous Common Mergansers made up for the inactivity of the eagles.

When I arrived at 3:45PM many photographers carried their gear already to the parking lot. At 4:30PM most of the people were gone. Big mistake IMHO! It was the time when the magic unfolded. 

Although the gates of the lock are closed during the winter, there is still plenty of water flowing through the lock chamber. This is where the pelicans go for the fish. The light of the low sun got reflected from the doors of the lower gate onto the water in front of it. This made for a spectacular golden color. These two pelicans face the warm sun light directly and from all the reflections around. In addition they lifted their wings simultaneously, which gives them the little gesture that makes it interesting. It doesn’t always happen but today it all came together, light, gesture, and color…