I am a three-eyed monster. But, somehow, people don’t flinch when I come close. That little box strapped to my forehead with the shiny round eye — the GoPro camera — doesn’t seem odd to them.
No pencil can draw it, no colors can paint it and no words can describe the magnificence when it fills the sky with dancing colors. The aurora borealis, or northern lights, electrify the sky, creating a dazzling spectacle to witness, but a challenging phenomenon to duly capture in photographs.
I still remember how I felt as I launched my DJI Phantom 4 drone camera for the first time — eager, giddy, euphoric — but over these feelings lay a blanket of terror and anxiety.
Perhaps you recall exchanges with Looney Tune characters Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig in which the delineation between human and cartoon was blurred or even nonexistent. Who can forget the image of the tin man, cowardly lion and scarecrow skipping arm-in-arm with Dorothy down the yellow brick road toward Oz?
A photo of a person shooting a shotgun into the sky looks pretty boring unless there is smoke and fire coming out of the barrel, or perhaps a shell caught in flight after it was ejected out of the shotgun.
A photography enthusiast since grade school, I’ve taken classes, attended workshops and picked the brains of countless photographers as I’ve worked to improve my technical skills through the years. Yet Ann and Rob Simpson still managed to teach me a few new things during their pre-conference photography workshop in July in Billings, Montana. Here are the new lessons I took away from the workshop.
Joan Miró once said, “You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”
My fascination with marine life started when I was 6 years old on my first fishing trip. I spent hours watching fish in home aquariums, trying to glean the secrets that would allow me to outsmart them with my rod.
It was an opportunity for the shot of a lifetime: a polar bear swimming the Churchill River in northern Manitoba.
