Tomorrow we’re heading down to Starved Rock State Park in Illinois. The Illinois River runs through the park and I’ve seen pictures and read online that this is a great place to see wintering Bald Eagles.

If you remember, last year I went to Sauk City along the Wisconsin River to see the eagles. We’ve been talking about doing that again, but then I saw this picture on Flickr

and I knew were I wanted to go.  I count 28 eagles in that tree. This picture was taken at Starved Rock last week by MoodyGoat. Click on the link to see his photo stream on Flickr.

As always I’ll let you know what we find. I’m hoping to bring back some great pictures and video. Wish us luck.

 

Yosemite Backcountry from near Olmstead Point

 

While going through some of my Yosemite images yesterday, I happened upon the color version of this shot. I immediately saw the black and white potential for the image and felt it would be a fitting tribute to one of the biggest influences on my photography, Ansel Adams.

Ansel’s influence on me hasn’t been a  conscious one. I’ve never set out to shoot like him or imitate his style. But I realize that over the years his style has seeped into me and that many of my images are composed similar to his. And now that I’m creating more black and white images, I think the influence really shows.

When I’m sitting here at the computer working on a black and white image, I often see Ansel in my mind, standing on top of his car shooting a beautiful landscape and then working with the image in his darkroom, creating another masterpiece. I try to let some of his creative vibe flow into the image I’m working on.

Ansel use to say that a photo was like a musical composition.  The negative was the sheet music sitting on the piano, the print was the performance of that music.  As my photography has matured I believe that more and more. I now find myself looking at my older pictures and seeing them in a different light. The perfect examples are the many “just misses” that have recently turned into great black and whites. Including the one above.

So this image is for Ansel. My photography wouldn’t be the same without his influence.

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You can see Ansel’s amazing work at the Ansel Adams Gallery web site.
They also have a blog on the site. It has information on upcoming events and workshops at the gallery. They also feature many beautiful photos from their staff photographers.
The blog can be found here:Ansel Adams Gallery Blog.

Cory has upgraded the Bishop WebCam. It is now a high resolution cam that looks awesome. The cam updates every 30 seconds. I’m watching my first sunrise on it as I type this.
Cory is still working out the bugs on the cam, so there may be some technical issues here and there. He said it’s currently looking out of a window in his house, but he plans on mounting it outside in the future for even better picture quality.  Go check it out.

Here’s one more shot from yesterday. This one needed a little post processing before been shown to the world. I think it’s my favorite shot of the day. How often do you get to shoot looking directly into the sun. And no, the post processing wasn’t to remove lens flair. Amazingly there wasn’t any lens flair.

I just realized something about this shot. It was shot around noon. Look how low the sun is in the sky. No wonder it’s so cold back here :-)