Whenever I do a shoot for our documentary The Sweetwater Seas I return and compile my favorite shots into a reel for quicker review when we edit the film later. This is a collection of the shots from this summer’s trip to Canada’s Pukaskwa Provincial Park on Lake Superior. I met a lot of great folks up there… Enjoy! Richard.
Lake Mead National Recreation Area
It is said the great wars of this century will be fought over water.
The first week of April I was out in Nevada and shot images around Lake Mead which show not only the scarcity of the water with Lake Mead being at its lowest level since Hoover Dam was built in the 1930’s. The lake level has dropped almost 100’ as of 2015, a vast amount of water for a lake which is when full 110 miles long. Harbors have been moved ¼ to almost a mile from where the shorelines were and some harbors just plain closed.
You can tell how far down it is by seeing the white “bath tub ring” as it is called around the edge of the entire lake. Turning the camera the other way you can also see why this is a National Recreation Area. Its landscape is both arid and beautiful. And gives you a feeling for what we covered over in the landscape by building Hoover Dam and covering over these valleys to create Lake Mead. This lake supplies not only power from the generators in the dam but controls water flow to Nevada, Arizona, California and Mexico via the release of the water down the Colorado River.
I covered this area as part of The Sweetwater Seas, a documentary on the health and beauty of all five of the Great Lakes. Currently there is an international treaty which protects the lakes from losing water to the west via pipelines. The west is facing the worst water shortage in history.
To see more of the images you can use this link: Lake Mead
Richard
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Sleeping Bear Dunes
Last week I had the pleasure of working in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore with George Elder as part of our Great Lakes Project The Sweetwater Seas a documentary on all five of the Great Lakes and their beauty and environmental issues and how we use these lakes.
We went to Sleeping Bear because it is not one of the most beautiful places on the Great Lakes it is one of two dunes which lay on bedrock so they have become tall and do not naturally sink back into the lakes. The other is the Au Sable Dunes on Lake Superior. We also went to shoot the story about of the US Fish & Wildlife and National Park Service has worked together to bring the Piping Plover back from near extinction to a growing group of birds. These tiny shorebirds nest right on the beach and continue to come back to the same areas they were born in. At one time they were down to about 7 pairs and are currently up to around 70 pairs. We were fortunate to have Vince Cavalieri and Sue Jennings work with us. While we thought we might be able to see some parents sitting on their eggs they had all hatched the few days before we got there. But we were able to photograph and videotape hatchlings only a few days old along with their parents running along the beach. They are quick little birds so it took a lot to keep them in the frame! Especially as I was using a Canon 500mm lens, sometimes with a 2x convertor to make it 1000mm!
The dunes themselves gave us a look at the beauty found in Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore. Sunsets along the north shore of Michigan were stunning with clouds and fog giving us stunning views and clouds to capture on film and a background to show how people enjoy these places.
To see more of the still images I shot you can use this link: www.mackphoto.com/BlogImages/SleepingBear Fine Art Prints will be available soon in the Quiet Light Publishing shop!
Cheers,
Richard
The Art of Editing
For the last few months I have been hard at work editing the images for my next book Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Thirty Years of American Landscapes. Part of the process of course is editing your work, both in deciding what images to use in the book, and then in working with each image individually to achieve the best possible printed piece. While this later part is done in Photoshop – it is much like being in the darkroom and making sure the “print” you end up with is what you had pre-visualized in the field.
I recently was on a friends blog where he talked about editing film and how there was a space of time between when you took the image and when you finally had a chance to see the image in film form after processing. His thought was that the distance in time helped you make better decisions about the images because the emotion of the day when you shot it was not as fresh. There may be something to that, especially in the day of digital photography where folks tend to edit their work even while it is still in the camera! This is never, never to be done! How can you tell what it really looks like on a 2” low resolution screen? It’s great for making sure your close on the exposure – although the histogram is better – I would never delete an image based on what I see at that point. But I digress.
Having worked on images from over a thirty year time span I have found the same emotions, or at least ones close to them come streaming back as I look at the images. I happen to be able to remember almost everything about a photograph I have taken – too bad I can’t remember things like that in real life – but it makes it easier for me to remember what I wanted the photograph to say and thereby make the correct adjustments to an image. Creating an image which comes as close as possible to what I was feeling and intended the image to look like in the first place.
The hardest part of editing is deciding which images should make the grade and be in the book. An example is the cover shot. Because of its importance it also has some additional requirements which must be met. It has to pull people in, take it off the book store shelf and make them want to open the book. Therefore, I tend to look at the covers of similar books, in this case other photographic books on
I think in some ways, my friend might have been right about distance and time in editing at least in this case. I let go of an image I really liked and had an emotional attachment to. And now that I see the new cover image I like it even better than my first choice. So what is your opinion – let me know – I’d love to hear your opinions too!
Peace,
Richard
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