Making Interesting Photos in Boring, Small Town America (Part 2)

So you live in boring, small town America, and don't know what to take pictures of? How about... The American Flag! 

American flags can be found just about anywhere in small town America: Parks, cemeteries, schools, businesses, homes, etc. From a photography standpoint, the American flag is a great subject -- it's colorful and can be captured in a variety of 'poses' (folded, waving in the wind, etc.) Perhaps best of all, the American flag is a symbol that evokes all sorts of emotions in viewers, which is oftentimes a goal that photographers are trying to conscientiously achieve with their photography. 

The picture below is from a park in a neighboring town, where I captured this image of an American flag waving over a gazebo in a park. 

(08/20/13, Sony NEX-7)

Next is a vacation photo, from my walk through a military cemetery:

(10/08/13, Mackinac Island U. S. Post Cemetery, Sony NEX-7)

Taking a picture of these flags in the foreground, I later noticed the flag on the white house to the left and then, off in the distance toward the middle of the image, yet another flag waving in the wind. (10/08/13, Mackinac Island, from the balcony of The Inn on Mackinac, Sony NEX-7)

Making Interesting Photos in Boring, Small-Town America (Part 1)

"Hi! I live in boring, small-town America, where there is absolutely nothing to take pictures of. I don't have the opportunities to travel all over the world like those famous, big shot photographers, who get to make the really cool pictures of mountains, waterfalls, skyscrapers, and famous landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, etc." I would imagine that most of us have either thrown or been invited to this 'beginning photography pity party' at one point or another.

So, let's say that the above scenario describes your photography situation. Let's say that you live in small town America. To make it even more challenging, let's say that you live in one of those locales where they warn drivers to prop their eyes open lest they blink and miss everything that there is to see! Of what interesting things can you possibly make photographs?

1. If you're living above ground on planet Earth, the sky is the limit. By this I mean that you have opportunities to take pictures of whatever you see in the sky: Think sunrise, sunset, and any other sun pictures. (Legal disclaimer -- sun pictures are taken 'at your own risk'. Camera damage or destruction, fire, blindness, and death are no doubt possible.). Or think: Clouds, which are another favorite. And chances are, if you are living in boring, small-town America, you have a view of the evening sky that is not hindered by city lights; you can get some gorgeous views of the nighttime sky (stars, moon, etc.) that are not available in other locations.

(09/10/13, Sony NEX-6)

(09/22/13, Sony NEX-7)

F-stop: f/1.8

Exposure time: 30 sec.

ISO Speed: ISO-800

Exposure bias: 0 step

(+ a little bit of photo-editing in which the green was turned up way too high...)

(09/26/13, Sony NEX-7)

(09/26/13, Sony NEX-7)

(09/30/13, Sony NEX-7)

The Rocky Canadian Islands of Lake of the Woods

On this Thanksgiving Day, I'm thinking again of our trip to Canada this past summer. I'm grateful for the opportunity to have gone and to have spent time with family and friends.

Looking back through my pictures, I am reminded of how struck I was by the fact that many of the islands in Lake of the Woods (realizing that this is a generalization, and that generalizations can only go so far...) seem to simply be 'big rocks' sticking out of the lake. The island where we stayed (Spruce Island) seemed to be a typical example. By 'big rock sticking out of the lake', you can see what I mean in the pictures below:

(09/16/13)

(09/16/13, one of my typical 'selfies')

(09/17/13)

I realize that the following picture has way too much color in the rock along the shoreline (and in the trees), but I really liked the way that the sky turned out...

(09/20/13)

Happy Thanksgiving Day (U.S.) everybody! 

You and Me Go Fishin' (For Pictures) in the Dark

Here are a few more sets of nighttime photography in Canada. I did not edit the first pictures on my computer at all, except to convert them from RAW to JPEG. (The second two pictures were tonemapped on Photomatix.) They aren't the best pictures, but I am fascinated by (1) the fact that it was possible to take such pictures in the first place (all around 10 pm; sunset around 7:30 p.m.) and (2) the deep blue color that you can pull out of the sky at night.

ISO: ISO-100
F-stop: f/5.6
Exposure time: 20 sec.
Exposure bias: 0

ISO: ISO-100
F-stop: f/1.8
Exposure time: 5 sec.
Exposure bias: +1 step

Night Fishing (for Pictures) in Canada

This past summer, the family and I went up to an island in Lake of the Woods -- Spruce Island, to do a little fishing. The trip was very instructive for me on several levels, especially as my camera was still new (to me) and I was continuing to learn all sorts of things about my camera (stumbling into all sorts of new (to me) things that I could do with my new camera, etc.).

While everyone else was sleeping, I would get up early (or go out late) to take pictures. (My theory was that I would try to take enough pictures, so that when they were all ready to go out fishing, I could put the camera away and actually be of some help to them with the fishing.) Shooting under these low light conditions, the camera would automatically use a longer shutter speed to take in more light in order to actually achieve a picture (which, was something new to me).

The following picture was taken at 5:30 a.m. (sunrise was around 7 a.m.) First, you see the RAW file converted to a JPEG without edits:

(9/19/13, Sony NEX-7)

And here it is, rendered with a little help from the editing programs:

The Dragon of Crosby

While at a meeting a week ago, I ducked out during the lunch hour and took a stroll through town where I found... this really cool dragon. It is located in the city park, which was absolutely deserted at the time (with the exception of me and a gaggle of geese).

I took my Sony NEX-6 along with me, expecting it to be a cold day of shooting outside. (Weather.com said that it didn't get above 28 degrees. The sky was completely overcast.) I did the whole 'stuff your camera in a plastic zipper bag before you bring it indoors' trick in the hopes that I wouldn't get condensation inside. Anyways, here are a few photos of the dragon of Crosby:

 (11/18/13, Sony NEX-6)

 (11/18/13, Sony NEX-6)

(11/18/13, Sony NEX-6, Double-tonemapped on Photomatix 5)

Reflections in the Water

There's something pleasing about water photos, when you can capture a 'mirror-effect' in the water. (It took me two or three times of going through the "It's a Small World" ride at Disney World before I realized, "Oh. I wonder if I can catch some water-mirror-effect images???")

Living in Minnesota, the land of 10,000 (+) lakes, it's fun to go around making all sorts of water photos. The one that follows is from Lake Charlotte in Long Prairie:

(09/13/13, Sony NEX-7)

The White Outhouse off the Walking Path

While on vacation this past summer, we followed the "Rails to Trails" Walking-Bicycle-Horse Riding Trail. At one point along the way, I saw this white building in the trees (probably not an outhouse, but, who knows?) The picture is fused and perhaps overdone on the color, but I liked the purples so well that I kept it. (I did make another, toned-down version, but this one was my favorite.) The second image posted here is another view along the same walking trail. (10/03/13)

Blue Sky Project at Harmony Park (Part 2)

Here are the other installations in the Blue Sky Project up at Harmony Park here in town. The first two pictures here are of the s-shaped bench piece which was intended to represent 'the present'. The third piece is a planter that is shaped like a crown, intended to represent an optimistic view of 'the future'. (They do add a bit of color to the area.)

(08/24/13)

Blue Sky Project at Harmony Park

You can read all about the Blue Sky Project at Harmony Park here: http://www.mnartists.org/article.do?rid=267654. In the words of the artist who helped to direct the project, this is "public made public art" -- with design and assembly input from the community. (The project was completed before we moved to the area, except for the 'wind-powered fountains', which have yet to materialize.)

These pictures are of the first installation, a piece that is intended to represent 'the past'. I like the blues and the reds in this piece:

(08/24/13)

Bonus Post: Updated to Photomatix 5

Initial thoughts on Photomatix 5 (from a self-professed post-processing newbie):

It looks a like like Photomatix 4, with some noticeable exceptions:

1. After loading my bracketed photos, I am presented with a "deghosting options" window. On the sunset image above, there were some really weird purple black holes at the end of the reflection of the sun in the water; by sliding the deghosting option up (eventually to strong), those little purple black holes simply disappeared. (There is also a 'brightness' and a 'zoom' option on this page, so that you can better see what exactly it is that you are deghosting.)

2. Once I am happy with my deghosting options and click the button to move on, I am back to the familiar 'preview page' from the previous iteration of Photomatix. The few differences that are immediately noticeable to me in the presets bar are filters like "vibrant", "enhanced 2", "interior" 1 and 2.

3. Moving right along, I click the button and eventually find myself transported to the "finishing touch" window, where I notice new buttons in the workflow shortcuts: "Save Final Image" and "Double Tone Map".

Verdict? Why would you ask a newbie for a verdict? What do I know??? I'm simply going to keep playing around with Photomatix 5 and see if I come up with more images that I like. I've already got posts lined up every day to take me through November (where most if not all of the photos were processed in Photomatix 4), so it probably won't be until early December that you see more of what I do with Photomatix 5.

Green! Green! Tomatillos Growing in the Community Gardens

My cousin tells me that these tasty green plants (or maybe the fruit?) are called tomatillos, and that they are the main ingredient in most green salsas and in green enchiladas. (Since I have not sampled green salsas or green enchiladas, I guess that I'm missing out. There's a new Mexican restaurant in town that my family has been planning to try; I'll have to see what I can find.)

I am reminded of a story that I was told about our local Community Gardens. Apparently few years back, there were some children who had been caught with grocery bags, going through the gardens, picking out some samples here and there from the different plots. As the story goes, their mother had actually sent them with a 'shopping list'; she thought it was a 'community garden' -- meaning that the community was welcome to come and harvest whatever they wanted. (This perhaps also explains why some of the plots at the garden have since been fenced in with 6 foot chicken wire, etc.)

Anyway, here are the promised tomatillos:

(08/23/13)

Fishing and Feeding Ducks on the Mississippi

On one of my earliest outings with my new Sony NEX-7 camera, I stopped in Little Falls at the Mississippi River just south of the dam. The scene is here calm, with a fisherman standing part-way out into the river and a boy tossing food to the ducks. It's a deceptive calm, as I have driven by this same spot at other times, when the dam has been open and the river has been allowed to roar through this whole area (no doubt flooding the area where the rocks are showing below).

(08/18/13)

I just HDR-ed a Cabbage!

Sometimes, when photographers are new to HDR, they fall for the temptation to try to HDR everything. Yet, there's an old saying -- that not everything is meant to be rendered in HDR. Somethings just don't look right (for example, people pictures often don't turn out well).

As I put up this picture, I'm kind of torn on this one. While walking around the Community Gardens with my Sony NEX-7 camera, I saw this cabbage and felt obliged to take its picture.

Reasons to HDR a cabbage: Cabbages are an easy subject to catch in multiple exposures. (They are fairly stationary. Unlike other subjects, they don't move much.) It also looks pretty cool when you are able to make the veins on the cabbage really stand out.

Reasons against HDR-ing a cabbage: It's a cabbage. Who wants to look at an HDR cabbage?

(08/23/13)

Under the Raining Umbrella Statue

Of the early HDR (high dynamic range) images that I made, this was one of my favorites. (I slightly tweaked the image below from an earlier iteration to get rid of some of the darkness that had appeared under the umbrella.) I love the blues that fill the entire image and the pink of the girl's dress. The picture reminds me of a children's story, or of something that would appear in a children's story book. The statue was in place in a park in Sauk Centre back in August; it has since been removed -- no doubt for the winter months, lest the water freeze up and the statue shatter into a million pieces (a storybook ending that would make the Grimm Brothers proud).

(08/20/13)

Wind-blown Sunflowers

Continuing on the sunflowers theme (from my local community gardens), I pulled out this photo of some windblown sunflowers. With HDR photos, I usually blend together 3 images on the Photomatix program. While Photomatix does a good job of removing 'ghosts' (objects that are blurry because they moved -- like, windblown sunflowers...) -- sometimes it just seems to work out better to run one photo through the Photomatix program, like the windblown sunflowers below:

(08/23/13)

This second set of windblown sunflowers was situated in a planter not too far from the Community Gardens:

(08/24/13)

Sunflowers at the Community Garden

Sunflowers seem to flourish at our Community Gardens. Here are a few from this past summer:

(08/24/13)

(08/24/13)

(08/23/13)

Kiss the Dragon (Graffiti)

While taking pictures at a riverside park in Sauk Centre back in August, I saw this dragon painted on the wall near the bridge. Graffiti? Obviously. Cool image? Absolutely! So -- I took a picture of it. Only later in post-processing did I notice the pair of lips on the bottom step, which made me think of those word art puzzles where you get a series of images that make up a common saying. The message of this graffiti: Kiss the dragon? (That sounds like a Jet Li film.)

(08/20/13)

Summer Flowers at the Community Garden

Our town here in Minnesota has a Community Garden, where the locals can rent a plot that is roughly 10' x 10' for... gardening. In our case, we rent a plot, because the yard at our house is so infested with squirrels and other wildlife that nothing that grows survives. (We tried planting peas one year, only to find the plants eaten and uprooted. Another year, we planted tulip bulbs, which were pretty for a while... until something came along and chewed the tops off of the flowers. Our raspberry plants have managed to survive, and they do produce a handful of berries each year, yet I don't think that they are producing to their full potential, because they don't get the sunlight that they really need. At least, that's my theory.)

Back to the Community Garden: The Community Garden is also a great place to take pictures, as you find a whole variety of plants and flowers. Here are some of the floral pics from the Community Gardens, that were among the first that I took with my Sony NEX-7:

(08/23/13)

(08/24/13)

Colorful Saint Petersburg

Back in 1994, I was part of a group of thirty people who went from my Lutheran high school to Russia as part of a 10-day sister school relationship-building tour. Somehow, I had convinced my parents to let me take their Nikon N5005 with me. This was huge for me, as the cameras that I had been using up until this point in my life were the far cheaper variety, the kind where one-third of your pictures were in focus and the other two-thirds looked like some impressionistic nightmare.... I was absolutely delighted by the N5005, mainly because the autofocus feature meant that closer to 95% or better of my roll of film would come back acceptable. (The other 5% were misfires and other technical issues that rendered one-third of the negative unusable.)

The following image is from one such "unusable" negative, in which something happened to the first third or so and the rest was salvageable. (For twenty years, I didn't even know that this negative was bad! I hadn't actually looked at the negative until yesterday. The film-print shop had simply cropped the image in and printed out a decent image for me.)

This picture was taken in April 2004, from my hotel room in St. Petersburg. I couldn't tell you what these buildings are, but when I worked my computer photo-editing software magic, they sure turned out to be quite colorful.

(April, 1994)

Abraham Lincoln Died Here?

On the night of April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot in the head by John Wilkes Booth. The dying President was removed from Ford's Theater and taken across the street to Petersen House, where he remained in a coma for nine hours before finally dying.

These photographs at the Petersen House were originally taken on a class trip to Washington D.C. in 1991. The original bed and other items from the room were purchased by a collector and are now (reportedly) on display at the Chicago History Museum, and replicas have replaced the originals at the Petersen House. The pillow with the bloodstained pillowcase, however, are the originals that were used by Lincoln.

I scanned the negatives of these photos at a variety of light levels and merged them together in Photomatix for HDR effect.

(May, 1991)