Late Winter Meadow and Trees

"Late Winter Meadow and Trees" 2012

So I updated my Lightroom to Lr4 this past week, which was a fairly traumatic and trying experience because I always tend to over think things when it comes to file management, because I've lost files before and it's ooooh sooo painful- especially when it was something important like a half an hour of my mother painting a beautiful watercolor in her garden of a Japanese iris (I'll never forgive myself for losing that!) anyways, it wasn't until after I updated my catalogs of images of the last 12 years into the new version of Lightroom that I took some time to go back over last years and the years before's's images. And I found that they were really a lot worse than I remember them! What's up with that!

Homer Simpson great disappointment

Now don't get me wrong- I still like my keepers, but the less than 100 images represented here are the best work that I could cull from about 20,000 or more that aren't here. And a lot of those other images are snapshots of family and street shots and summer fairs and friends destroying their trailers and pictures of my dogs etc etc, which are important in their own way, but the point I want to make is that I feel from looking back that I have come a long way since even last year. 

My image laboratory and my many assistants ... (actually the LHC) ((Large Hadron Collider))

But how could that be? A year ago I was going out and shooting landscapes at twilight and dawn mostly, (the so called golden hours) and carefully following weather forecasts and planning with maps, and feeling pretty good about the results. I thought that my post processing -I don't like that phrase, -I prefer: developing skills, were adequate if not good in order to develop images the way I wanted. And I was making images like this:

"Katahdin Winter and Ice" April 16, 2011

and this:

"Bass Harbor Moonlight" April 17 2011

So these last two I wanted to pick to show ya what I was doing at this time exactly a year ago. I have some wicked keepers around these times last year but not this particular week. The mountain and ice crack shot above I think I might be able to breathe some life into with the development skills that I've evolved or maybe it's just the vision that has changed in me. And then again, I'm guessing that if I reworked the Katahdin Mt. shot above, a year from now I may want to change it again. So for you new timers out there who might be reading this, that's why you shoot RAW and keep an unaltered copy of that for prosperity! And the Bass Harbor Moonlight shot above I can see has some banding problems that I think I remember being aware of at the time, and that's probably why I didn't post it to any of my photo sharing places or place it into my keepers bin, although I do kind of like the mood of the image so that my be worth a revisit.?

I don't intend to drag this diatribe out forever, so I'll start to wrap it up. 

I still always feel the need to be better, and to make better images, and I still try to learn new development skills using Lightroom as a RAW developer and Photoshop CS5 as a fine tuning tool. And I do keep considering new approaches to photography and different aspects of photographic creativity to keep the feeling fresh. And so then I've been loving going crazy lately making shaky camera exposure abstracts of the landscapes that I've shot so many times before. So my pursuit continues, like my chase for the perfect picture continues, and with that I'd hope to say that even if I were to get the ultimate-perfect-picture-ever-of-all-times!!! then I would still be out there about a week later starting all over again. Starting like from scratch hopefully, with all the zeal and what-so-for of a first time newbie finding the awesomeness of the whole thing all over again! So keep on keeping on all you do'ers of great and or about to be great things! Just don't let the looking back on how you used to suck so bad bother you too much, that's a good sign! Have a good one- Nate.

Homer Simpson Great Success!

One more:

Rift

"Rift" April 16 2012