Conclusion of Sequence As a Story Blog

I really gained a lot from writing this blog and researching photographers that interest me. I am really drawn to nature, wildlife, landscape, pattern, water, and time-exposure photography. I think that I got a lot of inspiration for my own work by looking at the artists I have written about here. My goals are to try to experiment a lot with time-exposure photography on different types of water. It is so easy to get stuck in the automatic mode of a camera, and I forget sometimes to change it up and shooting on manual.
For my projects,
I enjoyed the documentary the most. I really am happy with the topic I chose and I had fun going out exploring, and shooting. I hope that my images are beautiful, striking, intriguing, concerning, and action provoking. I want to get across the message that the environment is a beautiful thing and we need to protect it. And right now, we need to do a better job of it.
I am happy we got to work in groups this semester. I think that group thinking is good for brainstorming and team work. I like working and collaborating with classmates and seeing what their ideas are, and making things happen.
For my blog,
I want to travel to all of these National Parks and photograph. But it makes me wonder if I would be able to get anything relatively close to what these photographers have captured. I mean, you can't get better than that! I think that photographers have to find their own style because in landscape photography, it can be easy to duplicate works.

My ultimate goal in the future: I am going to China after I graduate college. I am going to photograph giant pandas in the wild. It is really difficult to do though.Firstly because they are extremely endangered animals. An estimated 1,600 live in the wild. I could just photograph them at the reserves, which I probably will end up doing for a bit, but I want to go hiking in the mountains and really capture and observe them in their natural habitat. This has been a dream of my since I was a little kid. Before, I just wanted to go and see them in the wild, but now I want to photograph them. I think this is really unique. There are a large amount of photos out there os pandas int he nature reserves, but very very few of pandas in the wild. I have been talking to a zoologist who is trying to find wild pandas and put radio collars on them to study their behavior and natural living. She has been going for 5 years and has been unsuccessful in finding one in the wild. This is not promising for me, but I will not be discouraged. I want to purchase more professional camera equipment including a longer telephoto lens and a dslr sensor camera. I am staying with canon forever. I will also need a tripod, a mac, a lot of memory cards, and a really good camera bag. I know it will be expensive to do. I am paying my own way and I am proud of it. There is still a lot of research to be done for my trip, and maybe the first part is researching wildlife photographers so I can work on my own projects.
I am so excited to see where this interest of mine takes me. I don't want money to hold me back. It would be amazing to have the opportunity to travel around the world. I am making a list of locations and parks that interest me, and it is getting really long already.

Panoramic Mind: Masumi Hayashi

Her work is a combination of images into 1. A panorama where the viewer can see all of the images that were combined. I am interested in panoramic photography work, bu t in mine, I usually take the images I want and combine them in photoshop to make 1 cohesive print. I don't want the viewer to see the images that were stitched together at all, just the overall effect.

Here is what this artist was going for in her very different approach to panoramic photography:

Masumi Hayashi's panoramic photo collages explore the incongruity between appearance and reality in the American experience. She does this by creating photographs of contested sites: abandoned prisons, post-industrial landscapes, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund Sites, and the remains of American concentration camps. Yet, the resulting panoramic photo collages exhibit tremendous beauty, laced with both precise detail and abstraction. Without overt or critical commentary, they explore both the surface and the reality behind such places, whether they be panoramic landscapes or haunting interiors.

A key characteristic of Hayashi's work is the fact that her photo collages refrain from overt commentary. She creates work of tremendous beauty and simplicity, even though the landscapes she selects are primarily sites of conflict and contestation. Her work does not preach or condemn. Rather, it entices the viewer to learn and question through attraction to the physical, and often haunting, beauty of a site-whether it be the inherent beauty of the landscape or that which results from the transformations of her artmaking.

To create her panoramic photo collages, Hayashi's process is both systematic and open to change. She begins at the horizon line, shooting approximately two dozen photographs in a horizontal circular rotation until she ends up where she began. She then angles upwards, then downwards, continuing until she has fully captured the landscape around her. After she returns to the studio, she collaborates with a printer to produce the component photographs and begins the final phase of assembling the collages. Rather than submit to a rigid framework, Hayashi plays with the discrete images to determine what might make-first and foremost-a convincing work of art. The resulting photo collages range from a 100 degree to 540 degree rotation and include as many as 140 individual photographs or as few as five.

Hayashi's use of multiple images underscores the insufficiency of a single photograph to capture complex experiences and realities. Viewers must simultaneously process the individual component parts as they try to make sense of the vertiginous perspectives produced by the circular rotation. This is especially the case in Hayashi's photographs of interior spaces, where the camera distorts what the eye and brain naturally process.

Mark Adamus

Marc Adamus is a landscape photographer based in Corvallis, Oregon. The visual drama and artistry of his photographs are born of a keen eye for the many moods of Nature and a life-long passion for the wilderness. This passion shines throughout Marc’s work and has attracted a wide audience around the world.

His talent for rare captures of amazing light and fleeting atmosphere imbue his portfolio with a sense of the epic, majestic and the bold. His success derives from patient single-minded pursuit of all the unique moments that generate the magic and energy of the wilderness, often spending months immersing himself in the landscape he shoots despite the rigors of season and weather.

Marc’s photographs have been published extensively worldwide in a large variety of media ranging from calendars, books, advertising and the publications of National Geographic, Outdoor Photographer, Popular Photography and many more. Marc has been acclaimed as one of the most talented landscape artists of his generation.

"Mood and emotion are the primary elements I seek to capture in all of my work, and for me, these are the images that evoke that emotional response the strongest."

My Favorite images:::
1) "Great Beyond" Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming. WOW! This creates such a mood of mystery and beauty. The starry sky is stunning and the waterfall coming from the background into the front in a good trail for the eye. He says he combined 2 exposures for this which I would guess. He needs 1 for the night sky and another for the landscape at twilight. The exposure used for the sky took in more than 5 times as much light as is seen by the naked eye, using an extremely high ISO, a big aperture of f2.8 and keeping the shutter opening for 45 seconds.
2) "Ethereal" Central Oregon Coast. Dramatic twilight skies and a long exposure create the surreal, otherworldly mood. I like the ghostly water on the rocks again.
3) "Magic Mountain," Mount Rainier National Park. Taken as the moon was setting. I like this particularly because the clouds are clear and divide the mountain. It looks like the mountain is rising over the cloud horizon.
4) "The Storm Wall" Glacier National Park, Montana. Again, a longer exposure created the movement of the water and waves. The black and white gives the feeling of being cold and stormy in this image.

William Neill

Awesome photograph for landscapes, water, light and nature. I am a fan!

Portfolio: http://www.williamneill.com/portfolios/landscapes-of-the-spirit/index.html Top picks:
Landscapes of the Spirit:
1)Dawn, Lake Louise, Banff National Park, Canada. Foreground shows rocks under the water, middle ground is all blurred blue water, background is 2 mountains meeting with fog in between.
2) Twilight Surf, Big Sur Coast, California. Time exposure on moving water creates a foggy blur on top of the rocks that I like.
3) Bridal Weil Falls, Eldorado County, California. Using a medium shutter speed, probably 1/25th of a second he captures the water falling on the rocks. There is focus there, but also a blur at the same time showing motion. I find this interesting.
4) Rocks formations and surf at twilight- again, he uses a time exposure to create a ghost effect of the moving water on the rocks.

Impressions of Light:
1) Giant Seqoias, Maripose Grove, Yosemite National Park. I think he uses a camera shake to create this effect. The trees are obviously stationary, so he must have had a 1 second exposure and tilted the lens up or down slightly while the shutter was open. This creates a really interesting effect. It looks very painterly.
2) Carp, Bronx Zoo, wow, at first, I had no idea what this was until looking at the title, and now I see it. He took a time exposure of the fish while they are swimming under water. I love the effect.
3) Dawn, Mono Lake, California: This would be a boring image without the time exposure. There is no focal point, just ground and sky. But the longer exposure creates a Gaussian blur and painterly effect that I like.
I find this series very interesting. I love the effects of time exposure of light on different objects and scenes. He used close ups, middle ground, moving objects, and landscapes.

Meditations in Monochrome
These remind me of Ansel Adam in terms of contrast, light and shadow. He does some very stunning landscapes in black and white, and also patterns and repetition subjects.

"The reason I photograph is to experience the beauty of Nature, of wild places. I explore the essential elements of rock and tree, of cloud and rushing water to discover the magic and mystery of the landscape. My search for beauty is romantic and idealistic. It is the spirit of the land I seek-be it in a small piece of urban wildness or in vast wilderness. Rachel Carson, in her book The Sense of Wonder, writes, "Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts."

Paul Nicklen Photography

He photographs Leopard seals, polar bears, narwhals, aurora borealis, walruses, birds, sea lions in the arctic for National Geographic.

He got started in 1994, while struggling to make money as a young photographer, Nicklen wrote a proposal to the Nunavut territorial government asking for funding to begin a book project documenting wildlife in the arctic and Antarctica. The government cut him a check for $8,000.

I like how he captures action scenes. For example the image of the leopard seal reaching for a bit on the penguin and almost snapping his jaws is so thrilling. His favorite places to work are places where he knows that he can protect through strong photography. He likes to work in remote places with extreme environments such as the high arctic. Such places get very little coverage and their species need protection as much as any other.

"My goal is to bridge the gap between scientific research and the public by producing stories for magazines such as National Geographic. Since 1994, I have been fortunate to see my work published in hundreds of magazines around the world. In the last few years, I have published seven stories in National Geographic Magazine: "Atlantic Salmon," July 2003, "Northern Exposure," January 2004, "Phoenix Islands," February 2004, “Where Currents Collide,” August 2006, “Deadly Beauty: Leopard Seals,” November 2006, “Life at the Edge,” June 2007, “Narwhals,” August 2007. Other stories are in the works and I will be on assignment for National Geographic for much of the next two years"

I like his use of reflections on water and snow. "Ice Chunks at floe edge" the curved lens makes the illusion of the surface of earth and the sun rising over the horizon.

He is an adventurer photographer. Online it says he has ridden on the the back of a bowhead whale. He has had a near-disastrous attack by a bull elephant seal.

To approach animals in their most natural, native settings, he has to understand they mysteries of their behavior. He takes careful preparations he can show the animal in its best light, demonstrating its beauty, strength, and intelligence. I think photographing the polar bears is helping to show people the effects of global warming and what we are doing to the animals in the arctic. I like the dramatic use of lighting in the early or late parts of the day. He also uses reflections to make the image more interesting.

Frans Lanting

Frans Lanting:
He photographs birds, places, mammals, people, the environment, fish, frogs, and nature. I like his use of repetition, pattern, color, light and shadow to compose images. I looked at his images of birds and tried to do similar techniques with my seagull shots. He likes to capture their eyes to draw you into the photograph. I also looked at the environmental pictures to get new ideas for my documentary project. His portfolio "larger than life" is very interesting to me. He has elephants, antelope, penguins, polar bears, rivers, lions, impalas, cougars, dolphins and birds. He usually has a repeated form with no real focal point, or he has 1 strong focal point with a very pretty background.
He was born in Rotterdam, Holland. His photographs are regularly published in National Geographic, for which he is a photographer-in-residence. He is also featured in Outdoor-photographer, Audubon, and Life.

"I don’t like to talk about that too much," he said, looking out of the window over the dunes into the fog bank that moves from the Pacific onto the California coast almost every afternoon, where it stays until the next morning, a mellow mediator between sky and ocean, and ocean and land. The question which Frans Lanting avoids is supposed to lead to the topic of his work as a wildlife photographer.

His success came fast. He arrived at the peak of his profession in only ten years and has been able to add a new dimension to it. His stories, which normally take shape during long months on vacation, bring life to remote geographic names like South Georgia, Madagascar, Botswana, and often create the public image of these landscapes and animals for a worldwide audience.

Environmental Photography for my Documentary

By 2050 a third of the people on Earth may lack a clean, secure source of water. Join National Geographic in exploring the local stories and global trends that define the world's water crisis. Learn about freshwater resources and how they are used to feed, power, and sustain all life. See how the forces of technology, climate, human nature, and policy create challenges and drive solutions for a sustainable planet.

This is one reason why I wanted to do my documentary on the waters and environment of the jersey shore. http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/photos/freshwater-threatened/fenriverpollution.html . This site helped to give me ideas about topics and shots I can look out for. They have examples of freshwater and ocean water. They capture moments of waves crashing and ocean tides, while they have the calmness of the freshwater. They also have underwater shots on the national geographic site of course, but I did not have access to an underwater camera unfortunately. However, I would not want to photograph in the ocean here, no image would come out because the water isn't clear at all. But at the same time, maybe that would help to get a point across... I liked experimenting with time exposure and photographing water. I went to the beach for the sunrise to see what I could get. I didn't have a tripod at this point, but I tried to balance my camera on rocks and rails. I liked the outcome of shooting the rocks in the ocean with a 3-4 second exposure. The ocean waves move over the rocks creating a ghostly effect. I just think next time I should bring the tripod to make the rocks more crisp and in focus.
I also was passing the waterfall gardens on campus and I took some time exposure shots. It was in the middle of the day so the light was not ideal, but I still think I came up with some good stuff. I like both of the different options when shooting water. First, I shoot on automatic and froze the water as it was falling. I like this effect. Then, I used a 1/5th second exposure, followed by a 1 and 2 second exposure. This obviously blurred the water and showed the motion. I like how both of the shots turned out. I want to continue to explore the use of time photography on water.