I was teaching a workshop last weekend: The Business of Outdoor Photography at the Cascade Center of Photography and then had a chance to run up to Sparks Lake in Oregon and do some shooting. There is a beautiful mountain there hidden by the clouds and as you can see, and the light is horrible.

So I bracketed for HDR which once processed makes the white clouds have lots of detail. Since the color was poor as well, then a B&W made for a more interesting image.

In Photoshop I punched up the blacks a little more and then lightened the center of the image a little bit more to draw the eye.

Last weekend I co-taught a workshop with Christian Heeb and David Cobb on the Business of Outdoor Photography which was held at the Cascade Center of Photography in Bend, Oregon.

While I was demonstrating wireless strobe lighting outdoors, something important to outdoor photographers, I asked David to stand in as my model.

As you can see by the expression on his face, he was very excited at the invitation to model for me.

For the technical aspects read on….

Every once in a while a cool project or assignment comes along. That is what happened when a client of mine asked me to go photograph at one of the sites of The History Channel’s Ax Men TV Reality Show. How could I refuse?

I have photographed logging, the timber industry, and paper manufacturing for companies like Georgia-Pacific, Westwood Corporation, and International Paper, so I am familiar with working in the woods and safety issues.. While I always enjoy getting into the woods with anybody including these guys, the fact that this assignment was a TV reality show certainly raised the ‘coolness factor’.

My wife and I however, have a closer connection to the show than this assignment. My wife’s family; my mother in laws side in particular, are from Vernonia, Oregon, where this show began. In fact, one of the historic buildings in town is named after my wife’s grandfather. The first two seasons I think were exclusively filmed in Vernonia before the production company branched out across North America to film other crews.

The wildflowers are emerging!

We really had a strange spring in the Central Oregon Mountains. It snowed 3″ last Thursday and that’s after some days that were almost 80 degrees.

While it can snow anytime of the year here, it looks like the warming is here to stay and with that comes that summer wildflowers. We don’t really have spring wildflowers. They arrive in June and leave in August depending where they are located.

Canon 5D 17 - 35 mm lens at 20mm

The back of my property has Shooting Stars all over the place and I plan to photograph them shortly, but thought I would share some images form wildflowers along the Deschutes River from last July.

These are starting to show and I hope to get there and see what’s out and hopefully photograph in the next week or two.

Here are some more shots as well: