Every Man has a Story

By PF Staff in Favorite Photos on Dec 3, 2012

A series of fortunate occurrences lead to this photo which I absolutely love. This is how it all happened...

My girlfriend and I were sitting in an alleyway in town (Auckland City, New Zealand) and having lunch on one of the benches. It was a gloomy day, people rushing past, nothing incredibly interesting happening. I recently got my first DSLR (Pentax K-30) and my girlfriend loves photography but doesn't own a camera so she was playing around with my new toy, pointing it at things she found interesting and enjoying the zoom range of the Pentax 18-135 WR lens. Across the street from us, sitting on a bench, just as we were, was a homeless man we have seen several times before. My girlfriend spotted him through the viewfinder and started snapping some shots of him thinking he would make a good subject. Seeing we were so far away on the other side of a busy street he was completely oblivious to it all. After she was done with the camera, I too wanted to take a photo of him. I checked some of the settings, pointed my camera in his direction, raised it and put my eye to the viewfinder. I scanned the scene quickly until I found him- he was staring right at me. I think my girlfriend pointing the camera at him for several shots managed to attract his attention and he got interested by the time it was 'my turn'. I was so surprised when his gaze met mine. Without much thinking (for which I am glad) I pressed the shutter release and captured the photo. In the next photo I captured, he was already facing away.  

Galaxy Road

By PF Staff in Favorite Photos on Jan 1, 2013

There are a lot of reasons why this is one of my favorite pictures. I've always been inspired by a lot of beautiful pictures I've seen of the milky way and wanted to capture it myself. "Galaxy Road" was taken in August when I made my first trip out to truly dark skies to observe and photograph the stars. This state park took about 3 hours to drive to from the Chicago area. The drive was well worth it as I could see thousands of stars, dark clouds and nebula in the milky way, and a couple dozen meteors. The beautiful night sky is always up there, I just think it's a shame that the light pollution from cities blocks out so much of it.

Click to enlarge

The Making of "Unexpected"

By PF Staff in Favorite Photos on Dec 16, 2012

There are two thing you need to know about me.  First is that I love adventure.  Being primarily a landscape/nature photographer and living in Kansas City leaves me itching to get away sometimes.  So, with nowhere in mind I hopped on the highway for about an hour, took a random exit and kept driving until I was lucky enough to come across this field as the sun was setting.

Second is that I am a sucker for unique process techniques. I love pictures that are unique or different than what you would expect. This led me to the processing technique that I used.

Star Trails and Waterfalls

By PF Staff in Favorite Photos on Nov 30, 2012

This is one of my favourite shots I've taken, for a variety of reasons but mainly because it was more than an opportunistic single shot and took a good deal of thought, effort and planning to get the result I wanted. Not to mention the result I had imagined before I started!

 
Thornton Force Falls By Night by andy_grundy

By the Light of a Cement Wall

By PF Staff in Favorite Photos on Dec 29, 2012

Back in 1986, back when we used film and called it ASA not ISO, I volunteered at a small, rural preschool in St. Vincent, in the Caribbean. I was 21, and I lived in a small cement brick house with a corrugated tin roof, the tropical rain a cacophony with strangely comforting rhythms. With me was the classic, obligatory Pentax K1000, and a Pentax K 55 1.8 lens. I had some lens cleaning tissue, but that was it. I was young, I had very little money - my camera was a cherised possession that often didn't seem that inanimate.

It was a poor community, and my Pentax and the 5 rolls of tri-X I had with me stayed in an old pot in a cupboard. The lid came off towards the end of my 8-month posting. Like on this day back in ‘86, at the pre-school. The young girl’s name was Kenisha, caught here in the cement-reflected light of the tiny school.  

I took the shot with the 55mm lens, the only one I had with me. It was 400 ASA Kodak tri-x that I developed myself when I got back to Canada. It was all natural light, and in fact the preschool didn’t have electricity.