Winter's Last Gasp at the Grand Canyon

Winter has been almost non-existent in the state of Arizona this year. Granted, Arizona is hardly known for its wintry weather, but the high country in the northern half of the state usually gets its fair share of the white stuff. Well, not this year. After a couple of decent storms before the holidays, a warm and dry pattern set in that pretty much lasted through the entire season. Temperatures remained warm enough that the wildflower bloom (what there was of it) began in February in the southern deserts...much earlier than usual...while the ski areas to the north struggled to remain operational.

February poppies in the Superstition Mountains east of Phoenix

Well all that changed when, on the last two days of the official winter season, mother nature decided to throw a doozy of a storm at the state. This resulted in lots of badly needed rain in the lower elevation deserts, while the northern half of the state got nailed with a good ol' fashion snowstorm. It was about freakin' time!

Newly Designed Website Has Gone Live!

After many long days and nights working on it, I've finally decided to unveil my newly designed Explore The Light website. For years I've been utilizing Smugmug as my behind the scenes ecommerce hosting platform for my ever growing image library. For the most part, I'd been pretty happy with Smugmug's service, but it had a couple of major flaws that have been eating at me for the last year or so and finally got the best of me.

First was its less-than-robust search mechanism. Search strings entered had to match an image keyword exactly or no results would be returned. Also, strings in an image's description field were not included in such searches. I had a number of clients express frustration with the trouble they'd had finding images and who knows how many potential clients were lost when they couldn't find what they were looking for and moved on. With an online image collection of over 2000 images (and growing) on my site, the need for a robust search mechanism has become more and more critical.

Secondly (and of even more importance) is that I wanted to move to a business model where all my online print orders are self-fulfilled. That is, whenever a customer places an order through the site's cart system and checks out, the order would come directly to me and I'd print and send it out myself. While Smugmug provides an excellent cart system with their service, it's only available if you utilize one of their third party printers and they've shown no sign over the years of offering a self-fulfillment option (despite many requests for it). Sure, I could eliminate the cart system and require orders to be placed via email, but I want a more professional ordering interface (and I'm sure potential customers do too!).

The New Look!

Software Review: FastPictureViewer Professional

I recently scored a nice Black Friday deal on a shiny, new Acer Aspire One A0722 netbook, in part to be used for image storage/backup on photo trips. An important piece of functionality I wanted this netbook to have was the ability to quickly browse any raw images stored on it. After much research of both free and not-so-free software packages, I settled on the FastPictureViewer Professional image viewer. It isn't free...it isn't even cheap, but it really excels in the areas I need it to. That is, it speedily allows me to flip through images stored on my not-so-high-powered netbook. So far, this combination has been so much better than my Epson Viewer (my current storage/backup device in the field) that I doubt I'll utilize that much anymore.

FastPictureViewer Profession v1.6 screen snapshot

For those looking for both a fast viewer combined with at least a basic image processing component...your search continues. I wasn't, as I don't have any desire to process images on a uncalibrated netbook screen anyway. That's a task that's always reserved for my workhorse desktop PC back in the office where Lightroom and Photoshop reign supreme. FastPictureViewer is special purposed as a speedy viewer that I find extremely useful for the following reasons...

1. It views most major raw formats (important because I own more than one manufacturer's camera)
2. One can quickly check for critical sharpness at 100% view.
3. There's full time access to histogram and exif information (which can be quickly toggled on and off).
4. It shows images in all subfolders when a folder is opened.
5. There's easy culling out of rejects or copying of keepers to a separate folder.
6. Quick rating and adding IPTC data to images (I don't know if I'll utilize this personally, but it's there).

Holidaze Print Sale

Would you like to give a unique gift to a nature loving special friend or family member this holiday season? Or are you looking for an excuse to give yourself a well deserved gift for the holidays? How about a crisp, vibrant print from one of any number of spectacular locations in the Desert Southwest or Rocky Mountains? Well, you're in luck as I've decided to have my own Black Friday sale this year on my Explore The Light website. Only I've extended Black Friday all the way to Christmas Day! What this all means is that there will be a 20% discount on all unframed prints ordered through my site from November 25 through December 25. Just enter coupon code ETL4Holidaze when checking out your order. Pretty darned easy! And if you ask nicely, I may also extend this to any ColorBox mount order as well! This is my way of thanking customers and followers of my work for their past support. I appreciate it very, very much!

Also Follow Me On Google+

You can now follow my crazy antics over at Google+ (Google's answer to Facebook's social networking site). Ok...maybe my antics aren't all that crazy...maybe not even interesting...but I'm there nonetheless!  So you may ask why Google+ and not Facebook? Well, I don't have a good answer for that. I already have a personal Facebook page that I rarely ever tend to and I wanted to start over fresh with a more business related page dedicated to photography. So I decided Google+ would provide me that fresh start.

Anyway, you can link to my Google+ page by clicking on the gadget over on the right hand side of this blog or simply follow this link. While I still intend to post major announcements and events here, more of the day-to-day stuff will be posted over there. Hopefully you find it worthy of checking out periodically!

Finalized Art Show Schedule For 2011

Hey all! I just recently put the finishing touches on my 2011 Arizona art show schedule so I thought I'd take a brief moment to share. It all kicks off this Labor Day weekend when I'll be showing my work at the Flagstaff Art In The Park festival. My complete schedule for the remainder of the year looks as follows...

Flagstaff Art In The Park - Sept 3-5
Sedona Arts Festival - Oct 8-9
Artfest Of Scottsdale - Nov 19-20
Bell Rock Art Show (Village Of Oak Creek) - Dec 17-18

I hope any fans of my work living in or visiting any of the above locations during the listed time frames can stop by my booth and say hello! My work on display ranges anywhere from 8x10 matted prints to 30x45 canvas and metal prints. The metal prints, in particular, have to be seen to believe!

Hope to see you there!

San Juan Mountain Wildflowers

I recently returned from my annual pilgrimmage to the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado to hike, photograph, and just generally enjoy this year's wildflower spectacle. This year I was accompanied by friend, and fellow photographer, Steve Flowers from the Phoenix area. Steve and I have hooked up on a few adventures now and I couldn't have asked for a better companion on this trip. We both ticked off a couple of entries from our photographic "bucket list" when we decided we'd do a couple of short backpacking trips...the first in the Sneffels Wilderness to take in the incredibly scenic Blue Lakes area and the second to the renowned wildflower hotbed that is Ice Lake Basin near Silverton. Both of these trips were to be done as two night base camps incorporating hikes to the surrounding scenic locations for our morning and evening shoots.

Of course, one can't talk about hiking and photographing in these mountains during monsoon season without bringing up the weather. In short, it was cool, wet and altogether unpredictable...exactly what we were expecting! It rained every day on the trip with the exception of the day we drove in. I guess it was nice that we were able to ease into the trip with a nice dry camp near the Blue Lakes trailhead that first night. The clear sky, calm winds and rushing waters of the East Fork of Dallas Creek created a sense of calm that we wouldn't often get to experience for the remainder of the trip.

East Fork of Dallas Creek about 10 feet from my tent...sweet!

The first morning started just about the same way as any other backpacking trip has for me. I get everything ready, pack my gear into the backpack and hoist it on my shoulders to see how it feels. Hmmm....kinda heavy!! Damn that camera gear! Then I get on the trail and start up the first of many steep uphill sections...holy crap! I'm huffing and puffing and the air I'm breathing seems like it has to be every bit as thin as what Everest climbers experience near the summit. Through all my heavy breathing I'm trying to think of how to tell Steve what a stupid idea this was and that I was heading back to Ridgway in search of a good, stiff Bloody Mary!

Spring In The San Juans - Art Show In Flagstaff

I recently returned from a week long trip to the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado. The purpose of the trip wasn't actually photography driven this time. It was more of an anniversary trip for my wife and I as we were married out in Durango Mountain Resort three years ago. Of course, there was no way I was going to keep my camera in the bag over the entire week so I judiciously picked my moments in order to stay in the good graces of my better half!

Wilson Peak Framed - Alta Ghost Town near Telluride

 It helped, for the most part, that the weather conditions during most of our stay were better suited for activities other than photography. Windy and clear conditions ruled for most of the week and I held my photography addiction in check fairly well as we hiked, rode horseback and visited with friends in the Durango area.

Entering the Art Show Circuit

One of the reasons for my incredibly busy spring is that I've made the decision to enter the art show circuit this year. I've chosen this route over showing at local area galleries in an effort to both maximize my profits from print sales and to have more control over the marketing of my images. Of course, going this route definitely requires more work and initial expenses over the art gallery option. There's much research to be done to determine how to best display your wares (requiring the purchase of a tent, display walls, bins, etc., etc.) and the building up of an initial inventory. Then there's all the research and uncertainty that goes into which shows you should apply for and the agonizing wait to see if you've been accepted by the jury process. To make matters worse, a beginning artist can not even apply to a show until they have finished creating a show-ready display, complete with inventory, as all art shows require a picture of an artists fully stocked tent display with their application.

My Art Show Display

I'm not quite ready to share many of my thoughts and decisions that have gone into preparing for the art show circuit because, quite frankly, I haven't even done a show and have much yet to learn (the school of hard knocks will undoubtably come into play here). Perhaps later in the year I'll discuss this topic after I've had a couple under my belt. What I would like to do now is announce my current show schedule. It is as follows...

May 28 - 30 (Memorial weekend) -  The Bell Rock Art Show in the Village of Oak Creek, AZ
July 2 - 4 (Fourth of July weekend) - The Flagstaff Art in the Park Festival
October 8 - 9 - The Sedona Arts Festival

I hope to add another show or two to this schedule later in the year and will announce those as I do. But until then, I hope to meet any Arizonans reading this at any of the three shows I've listed. The first show is now less than two weeks away and I can't wait to get started with this new endeavor!

The Soggy Columbia River Gorge

Well, better late than never for this trip report. I spent the better part of five days in late April with Phoenix-based photography buddy, Steve Flowers, hiking to and photographing the magnificent waterfalls found mostly on the Oregon side of the Columbia River Gorge near Portland.   Let me tell you, being the desert dweller that I've become, it was a fantastic change of pace to experience the soggy, neon green filled gorge and its thunderous array of waterfalls. Only in Yosemite have I experienced such a congregation of enormous waterfalls in such a compact area...although the gorge definitely has it beat for sheer numbers.

The grandaddy of all the falls in the gorge is Multnomah Falls, which is one of the largest year round waterfalls in the U.S. at 620 ft. In the spring, the pure power of the falls is incredible. Photographing it is very problematic though due to all the spray in the air. Another factor making photography difficult were the crowds. The falls is right along the scenic road that runs along the Oregon side of the gorge and access is just a few steps from the parking lot. This translates into a copious number of visitors milling about the vicinity. Quite frankly, my time spent here was far from the highlight of my trip, despite the beautiful setting. I enjoyed the solitude I found at some of the lesser visited, but still spectacular, falls that required a bit of hiking to see.

Final

Multnomah Falls