People look at my best work and tell me I should "turn pro", as if it was a simple decision. In actuality, just to get to minimal pro level as defined above, you pretty much have to work with people, because - let's face it - people pay more to have their pictures taken than scenic landscapes do. 

I am a niche photographer. I do landscapes mostly, though am increasingly adding the big dramatic birds. Having acquired a used Canon 100-400mm, specifically for birding, I'm doing more Herons, Great Egrets, and Eagles which are all totally over photographed, and, pay poorly for any photos taken of them. The ROI score for that lens is outgo $1K, income zero/zilch/nada. I am not a Pro. 

Last week we had dinner with some folks who are pros. Roger and Bette Ross do landscapes, and have made some income selling scenic prints, but make much more shooting seniors, school sports and other "people" work. They are a lovely team who have put in the time and effort necessary to build a paying niche in a small rural area. They qualify as very good Pros. But it takes ongoing work, as Roger said, you have to market, and you have to consistently be there for that market. While they continue to sell some of their landscapes, becoming the semi-official photographers for a school district, is what makes their business viable.

So for "pros" the marker is easy, you earn the money, you earn the label. Within that there are levels ranging from "A very good living." to "It covers my expenses."

While I aspire, or perhaps more accurately, fantasize reaching the lower level of Pro-dom, I once again got a reminder that even in the Enthusiast community there are levels of achievement. 

While having dinner with the Ross's, Roger told me of a recent trip to the Ft. Stevens State Park to shoot a group of Snowy Owls that have been hanging around the Parking Lot C area on the Clatsop Spit. As mentioned, I'm expanding into the more dramatic birds, and Snowy Owls certainly fit that. So the very next day, even though the prediction was heavy rain, I could see a window on the satellite weather view, so I quickly threw everything in the car and sped to Parking Lot C. Got there while there was, indeed, a break in the weather, and also just in time to see some white feathers disappear over the horizon.

Yeager-0713

It was nasty cold, mostly due to windchill, with a few birders about, and I was stumped as to what to expect. Bird photography is 20% equipment, 20% being in the right spot, and 60% knowing the birds's behavior. I talked to a someone who said that a nice male had just been sitting near the parking lot, but, was the one I'd just seen as distant tail feathers. And, while there had been up to five earlier in the week, this one seemed to be the only one visible today. 

I had parked in the middle of the parking lot away from the action, leaving the tripod in the car while I scoped things out. So I figured that was my day right there: tail feathers. Just then the owl lifts and starts heading directly back towards me.

And lands 50 feet away from where I'm standing and sits there looking directly at me as if to say, "Wasn't there something you wanted to do?"

Oh god, oh right, right, right, you're right; I want to take your picture, I... Let's see should I run and get the tripod 'cus I've got this monster 100-400mm on, or should I... Oh god, oh right, right, right - just... Oh JUST shoot damnit. 

So I go into Spray and Pray mode, and shoot like crazy. Total Buck Fever. After about 15 minutes, the owl nods as if to say, "That'll do for today." and flies off into the marsh. Only then do I start looking at my camera settings. The lens was on 250mm focal length the entire time, when I could have gotten is so, so tight with the 400mm setting. The focal points were still set for rocks and trees which tend to move much less than owls, and.. I could go on, but you get the drift. As woefully dependent on dumb luck as when I was shooting the eagle pair. 

Mind, I did get some nice pics.

But so much potential for much better, and once again I'm foolishly depending on spray and pray, the lowest rung on the Enthusiast's ladder.

No, actually I'm convinced there is a lower tier, and the word for that would be: 

dil·et·tante     

/ˌdiliˈtänt/

Location:  46°13'38.31"N  124° 0'51.34"W

On the one hand I have a place to send someone who wants a sample of what i do. And that has proved worth the cost. I just don't see any point in putting photos up on Facebook or Instagram, which I regard as genuine vanity sites and not very secure places to put images I may, someday, get ambitions enough to sell.  But I'm not using Zenfolio anywhere near it's potential, and the question is whether I would do just as well with a Google+ or Flicker pro account. 

Part of the problem is that I'm unwilling to edit my galleries down to the lean/mean minimalist portfolio that the pros all say is an essential quality of a good web presence. Some of that is from the fact that I'm not selling myself and just want a place to put up a the stuff I consider good enough to print so I can see how it looks on a verity of screens. I currently view it as a warehouse of my best shots, not a promotional portfolio which is what the pros are offering rules for. 

Sidebar: one truth about "Pro" opinions is that increasingly making it as a photographer has less to do with selling images, and more to do with selling yourself as a guru slash marketable personality. Would love to see a breakout of the non-wedding photographer's income sources other than images. How much is books, sponsors for websites, magazine articles and teaching vs. images? Does a Trey Radcliff makes more off selling his brand than he makes off his images? What about a Peter Lik? Either way, I don't have the energy or the need to sell myself, but admit, it would be nice to make enough to pay for the cost of my passion. The truth is that there are too damn many photographers these days plugging away at the camera equivalent of an infinite set of typewriters turning out the photo equivalent to Shakespearean lines buried in a sea of noise. With the number of legit markets for pro-photography dwindling as print media contracts the ability to do a side business is becoming a commitment to self promotion.

But, I really, really do want my images to be seen, and, even more so, to have people request quality prints they want to put up and look at frequently. Delusions of being an artist I suppose. The issue of how to have a web presence that doesn't become a visual version of the final warehouse scene in Indiana Jones means I need to figure out a way to have people drop in, and want to come back and spend some time. 

What I think I need to try is using Zenfolio to create the online version of the coffee table photo books of the 70's.  Something along the lines of the Peter Lik book apps, without the need to have an entire design and coding shop on salary that Lik employs.. Something that would allow me to post to friends and family saying "The second quarter 2012 North Oregon Coast book is up." Or "Just posted the Barcelona Book this morning have a look."  But to pull that off I would need more text and caption flexibility.

A sample would be the little gallery of shots I took using just the G11 while in Luddington, Michigan last year. It's totally not like my other work, but stands well on tis own, but needs narrative and context to make it fit better. Can imagine doing that for all sorts of projects outside of the home grown Oregon Coast stuff. It's like the pano shot of a closed printing equipment factory with the fading flag in the window. It looks like someone else's work, but with some context it would allow me to expand and get a bit more playful.

Got to work on that.

Michigan Manufacturing 2012 Location:  43°56'53.94"N,  86°26'35.24"W

Link to Ludington gallery is here.

The problem was that, though there were over 100 birds spread over the tide flats, shooting wide gave a bunch of white dots with no visual impact.

There are 31 visible Egrets in that shot, but they are so far away and spread so thin that, while the shot may be interesting to a wildlife surveyor, it's visually not that interesting. Zooming in gives some better potential, but still not visually interesting. There is no context, and at the distance I was shooting, just getting focus was a challenge, let alone being able to anticipate interesting composition.

While it was wonderful (in the truest sense) to be there to witness this, there simply wasn't any way to "capture" the sense of it as images. I was in the process of packing it iin, when I decided to move down the shore to see if I could get a better angle. Just as I was setting up the tripod, several egrets moved in close following one that had caught a fish too big to swallow. The one with the fish was looking for a place to drop it so it could try to reduce the fish to something closer to egret bite sizes. 

I was shooting with the 5DMk3 and the Canon 100-400 mm f4.5/5.6 so was able to shoot multiple frames as the birdie Opera Buffa unfolded. I wish I had had the presence of mind to flip over to video, but I never anticipated the sequence that occurred. Sadly shooting as an action sequence meant the card buffer filled at some key stages. Despite that I was able to film what I call a "Slow Film" of something where the sum is better than any of the single instances.

It opens with our hero in possession of a sculpin, a fish too big to swallow, being pursued by a cadre of opportunists. But notice the gull coming in.

I imagine the dialog: "You gonna eat that whole thing??"

Our hero tries to walk away...

In the process drops the fish-too-big-to-swallow...

The gull swoops in ...

There's a great deal more as the egrets go through poses ever so easy to anthropomorphize. They actually appear to gloat, and the original owner of the fish-too-big-to-swallow gets ticked with the lot but takes it out one one over eager soul. 

If I had been able to get a smoother sequence of shots I would have opted for an animated loop, but there are too many big of lapses in the sequences available for that to work smoothly. As is I put up the full sequence that I have in this gallery. 

If you let it roll as a slide show you will see the full drama as I saw it. Wish I had a better idea for how to present this, but for now the "Slow Movie" will have to do.

Photo location:  45°31'16.18" N 123°53'19.49" W

Recently discovered a Great Blue Heron colony smack in the backyard of houses in Garibaldi. It's a large Heronry (as I've learned they are called) that easily has over 100 birds with seven nest easily observable from the sheet below. 

Anyone who knows the North Oregon Coast will recognize the Big "G" on the hill. The nests are above and slightly to the left of the blue roof, at about the hight of the street lamp. The colony is noisy enough that if you get on the street below, you'll hear them. I've been dropping by on a regular basis, and twice have gotten there just after a Bald Eagle has grabbed a chick, and the noise is astoundingly loud. 

The reason I keep going back is the fledgelings are just on the edge of flying, and I'm hoping to bottle the lightning of either catching a first flight, or, even more dramatic, being there when one of the six or so local eagles gets tired of fishing and decides to stop by for take out. For the most part, the weather has not cooperated, as we have had a record wet June, and Herons pretty much hunker down in the rain. 

For all my trips, I've gotten some good images, but most are like the one above. SOFT! Too SOFT (dammit). The problem being my lens collection was geared to landscaping, so I have lots of wide angle primes, but only the 70-300 mm f4-5.6 IS zoom that just isn't up to the job. Having just bought a new body, and a newish computer I am in no position to be catching glass fever. But, how I lust for a 400mm 2.8 IS. The 300 would be good enough if I could get in closer, but, even allowing for the limitations of tramping through private property, once you get into the trees the canopy screens out the birds from the ground. The ideal place would be standing on the roof of one of the houses, but I don't see me pulling that off. Maybe if I keep going back year after year, I can make a friend, but I'm not counting on that. 

No, what I need is glass, and developing an action shooter's skill set. If I really plan to shoot birds, I have the body, but need two more (expensive) tools: long, fast glass and a gimbal head. Right now I'm able to park the car on the street and use a bean bag on the roof in place of a gimbal, and I'm learning to prefocus, then do quick manual adjustments so... I may be able to get some really good shots, but I don't see me doing anything iconic without a couple years of visiting the site and hoping that the eagle predation doesn't cause the colony to move in the meantime. 

Because, what I'm really missing that no amount of kit can fill for is knowing the birds: knowing when they come and go, how they react to weather, what stage of physical development and practice flapping says a fledgeling is ready to actually take off. Great action shooting results from knowing patterns. Landscapers do the same thing, only it's patterns of light, weather and seasons. Stuff that is long and slow developing with years of going back to certain great places to stand, though storm chasing can move it into the "action" arena. Birds, I'm learning, requires the same long and slow gained knowledge of patterns, but it's a distinct set. Though it is one where kit can make a difference. But it's mostly about being able to pre-visualize where a likely shot with good light/composition will happen, and getting set up properly to take advantage of it.

Though, if the damn things are willing to roost out in the open and hold still, like my favorite Cormorant tree, the 300 can work.

This colony is almost always here at sundown and allowed one of my favorite nature/landscape shots.

Coordinates for heronry: 45°33'38" N 123°55'10" W

Coordinates for Cormorants: 45°33'46" N 123°56'13" W

Canyon del Muerto Petroglyph Panel in Sepia_ This was a shot that I had to salvage, essentially by overcooking using plug-ins, because I settled for a series of pano snaps that I didn't check for focus. By pushing it in NIK ColorFX, I was able to get a usable image, but not the one I would like to have of this.

Part of the problem is that I'm used to going to a place as a tourist at first, doing the usual tourist snaps more as scouting, then coming back to work the most promising areas. Trouble is, while this works in Sedona, which we visit a lot, places like Canyon del Chelly could well be one time events. Certainly being in the Chaco Ruins for the annular eclipse will prove to be a one off, and one I would love to have a do-over on. 

One major problem with shooting in a canyon that you can only access with a tour guide, is light is going to be a mix of top light and key features being in shaded recesses. This has made me thankful for Lightroom 4.1's new tonal sliders for allowing me to pull details out that would otherwise be lost. But given that a major sand storm was filtering down into the canyon while we were there, and I didn't feel comfortable taking time to set up the tripod (my own reluctance, nothing set by either my wife or my guide pressuring) , a lot of shots were lost to lack of focus, or amateurish set up.

As a landscape shooter, I'm mentally set to scout, spend time walking around pre-visualizing, using my iPhone for test shots, and being totally willing to write a shoot off because the light/sky/color-of-foliage isn't all that appealing. What I'm having to learn is that as a Travel Photographer, I have a limited opportunity to do that. "This moment is it." is a hard nugget to digest. 

Was cruising out of Netarts heading towards Cape Lookout, when an eagle pair flew over being mobbed by either a murder of crows or an unkindness of ravens. Not sure which, but aptly named either way. Also, not enough of a birder to know if the eagles were a juvenile pair looking to set up household, or siblings just exploring, but it was obvious that the welcome mat was not out for them.

As soon as I saw them go to ground (limb?) I found a quick illegal place to park and was out of the car not paying attention to my gear. First off I left the Canon 24-105 zoom on, as I didn't want to "miss the opportunity", and I didn't bother to confirm my set up. I had previously been shooting on the tripod, and since I didn't have a cable release for the 5D3, I had been using a timed shutter release and hadn't returned things to baseline.

After multiple shutter presses resulting in a long (2sec) delay, I finally figured it out that the camera wasn't failing to lock on focus (which was my first assumption) it was doing what I had told it to do approximately 20 minutes prior. And, I realized that I really needed to go back to the car and put on the 70-300mm which is the nearest thing I have to a birding lens. 

In the process of hurrying to not miss the shot, I missed many, many shots. I really need to stop the point and shoot mentality if I'm going to justify spending so much on hardware. 

Locations: Netarts, Or: 45°25'30" N 123°56'18" W

Hard to imaging what the G 11 thinks. Probably assumes she's the bastard child of the other two. 

Finally decided to take a closer look at where and how many dust spots might be plaguing the sensor on my 60D. Hadn't really noticed it all that much until I started using Nik Color Efex "detail enhancer" which made some so-so images pop, but also made grey, high contrast skies explode with spots. Looked as bad as the time I used a Conkin filter in a storm, and thought I had dried it off, but left water spots that showed in the next photos I took using it. The solution there was to wash each filter with soap and water, and dry carefully with micro-fiber towels, making a mental note to to remember to do this if I use ND grads on a wet shoot. 

If only the sensor were as easy a DIY fix. 

To check the sensor I followed a suggestion I found on the Canon info bank site that suggested shooting a plain white piece of paper stopped down as low as possible, then view it at 100%. I went the extra step of running it through Color Efex and fiddling with contrast and black and white settings to make each mote pop like it did on the pics that I first noticed it on. After counting close to 50 distinct spots I wept. 

It's all too obvious that I like to work in crap conditions (e.g. blowing sand, mist, storms) and that I like to change lenses a wee too often. Having come into enough money to be crazy-mad-boy and order a new 5D MkIII, -the 60D becoming my backup body- it's also obvious that I'm going to have to come up with a better plan on how to change lenses without developing sensor acne to such an extent. Blowing air with a Rocket didn't change anything, so once the 5D comes, the 60D will be off to Canon for a pro sensor cleaning. And I'm going shopping for an old fashioned changing bag like I used to use to swap out half shot film canisters in order to change ISO in the field. The trick will be to find a lint free one, or have one custom made out of micro-fiber. Will post when I come up with an actual solution.

Follow Up: Got a changing bag only to discover that I'm going to have to modify it for this to work. Need to figure out how to put in an small transparent window so I can see the alignment marks on the body and lens. It is possible to do it by feel, but it's neither efficient or comfortable. 

Was reading "Photo Nuts and Post" by Neil Creek and he mentioned that his favorite tool for blending bracketed shots was LR/Enfuse. This set off a sequence of discoveries starting with LR/Enfuse, and culminating in discovering the LightRoom users  candy store called Photographer’s Toolbox.

Wasn’t familiar with LR/Enfuse, and having gone through so many HDR programs, had little interest...  but anything that extends Lightroom is like tinfoil to a Magpie for me. LR/Enfuse being donationware —limited to 500px output for the trial period— so painless to test. I was impressed enough to send money for an unlock within a few minutes. 

Enfuse is based on a series of ‘nix packages which you can get for free and configure to run on a Mac but Timothy Armes has rolled them into a Lightroom specific plug-in—hence the “LR/”— that’s available trhough Photographers Toolbox, and worth paying for. 

Rather than get into a comprehensive review of all the HDR products I’ve tried, I’ll defer that to another post and focus on the differences between LR/Enfuse and Nik HDR Efex, which is my current goto blender.

Up front, there is no way that LR/Enfuse will replace HDR Efex Pro in my digidarkroom. The key problem with HDR is avoiding the overblown output that sets off a gag reflex in most established photographers not named Trey Radcliff.  Nik’s “U-point” technology gives them a leg up on all other plug-in vendors that’s hard to beat and HDR Efex keeps evolving, and is simply the best for right now. 

So what LR/Enfuse brings to the table, making it worth adding one more plug in, is that it is totally integrated into LR, works in the LR 4 Beta, and it supports batching. My normal workflow with HDR is to separate them into their own subfolder for that shoot, and then tediously merge them all to see which ones have the least problems with ghosting, blending and composition. I did say tedious, no? With LR/Enfuse I can stack bracketed photos then process the entire folder in one go. 

Enfuse results are something different from HDR, in that the Enfuse engine avoids tone-mapping (translating a broad range of colors to those usable by  digital equipment), instead it finds the sweet point for overall exposure and blends the best pixels in a way that actually reduces noise, avoiding a major side effect of tone-mapping. Lightroom renders the images without having to export to TIFF, images are aligned so well that handheld shots that were unusable in other HDR apps can be blended, and batching is a matter of making stacks then ticking a checkbox in LR/Enfuse.

Here are three bracketed exposures I shot from the North Tillamook Jetty looking south. 

Here is the HDR Efex Pro output at default settings.

A lot of the issues with it could have been fixed while in HDR Efex, but it's a little heavy handed just out of the box.

Here is the LR/Enfuse output at default settings.

LR/Enfuse’s main weakness is that there is little control, and it produces a rather light, low contrast, mostly mid-range image. It’s like having one nicely lit, slightly exposed-to-the-right shot. But the strengths for me is that mid-range image makes a good working platform in Lightroom, and the computer does the heavy lifting on a folder full of bracketed shots, making it easier to cull which can be tossed. 

I really like it. And, if you mostly use Lightroom, I recommend taking a look the other goodies offered on Photographer’s Toolbox.

Photo location:  45°34'13.01"N, 123°57'33.78"W looking south towards Bay Ocean Spit.

What I remember of these books is that they were largely gorgeous shots, but a mixed bag in terms of the quality of the reproduction methods used towards the end. Atkeson died in 1990, but was active from the 30's into the 80's, and like Weston and Adams, did most of his work using 4x5 view cameras. Some think his best work was his B&W ski photography and there is a nice site that collects a lot of his early work at The Ray Atkeson Image Archive. But it was his landscapes that earned him the title of Oregon state Photographer Laureate (1987–1990). 

Digital photography has lead to an explosion of amateurs like me that the industry chooses to flatter with the term "prosumers". Translation, we're the folk who keep the industry going with our "kit lust". I cop to getting chewed by that particular chigger too too often: thinking that if I just had that 50D Mk II my images would soar to a new level. Hell, if I chucked my Canon kit and went with a Nikon D800E I'd be…. Well, I'd be poorer and possibly divorced, and my pics wouldn't necessarily move to a new level. 

The sad truth is that in my area of interest -landscapes- I can replicate a 4x5 view camera's field of view quite easily, and, for the most part, exceed the levels of resolution of older view cameras. Using a motorized gigapan head and a relatively cheap Canon G11 on max zoom, with Kolor's Giga-Autopano Pro, I can create photos of incredible resolution that exceed Atkeson's equipment.

Pros would easily be able to tell that it was "cheated", but if I set out to recreate an iconic Atkeson shot, 95% of people looking at my print next to his wouldn't be able to see the tells that give it away to the obsessive pixel-peeker. Contemporary pros, most of whom make more by teaching folks like me than they do selling prints, will tell you it's The Eye, and The Passion more than The Kit. And that's both valid and touch of desperate attempt to set themselves apart from the prosumer masses.

What made an Atkeson, a Weston, or an Adams unique was that they had to make every exposure count. Big sheets of film were expensive, and labor intensive to process and print from. I have no idea how many dilettantes were out and about during the 30's and 40's but damn few would be using the big guns, and the Kodaks of the "enthusiasts" had limits. Serious limits compared to the better point and shoots available now for pennies on the 1940's inflation adjusted dollar. 

Yet, even with fewer limits, it would be very hard for me to replicate the career of an Atkeson, if that was my goal, because there are so many of us with the tools, and the leisure to take thousands of exposures, and throw away all but the three or four that are actually somewhat good. The market for eyes is flooded with TMI, and the signal to noise ratio is quite high. Flikr / Instagram / Google+ / phone cameras have all made it so that a portfolio site like mine is just one more damn thing to glance at, and tough to get a lingering eye in the age of visual spam. 

So, I'll fall back to the current standard: "I do it for me." (a bit of self placating, onanistic nonsense) and keep putting stuff out there. But to what end? I know I have no interest in "going pro" (at 70, I really neither need to, nor have the energy), so I settle for being driven by the desire to create a body of images that strangers would want to look at more than once. In some ways, Atkeson had it easier.

Note: Just checked Amazon saw that the "Oregon" books are OOP and offered for a mix of prices ranging from "collectable" to the used book equivalent of remaindered. In fact I just ordered the book in the photo for less than the cost of shipping. 

Strange winter: we've had more clear days in December, January AND February than we had the prior May through August. Shot the above on February 2, when the temp was in the high 50's and little wind. I had gone out the Bay Ocean Spit to work the dunes but got little. Even though the weather was lying about the season, the dune grasses knew it was lying and were having none of it. Very yellow/grey rather than the greens of an old shot I'm still trying to recreate, since the original is very nice but too flawed to print bigger than 8x10 at the most.

Driving off the spit, I stopped to see what would develop with what originally promised to be so-so sky and happily ended up with a series of images that are classic West Coast / Haystack / Sunset. This was shot from the Bay Ocean Spit road looking west across Cape Meres Lake towards Pyramid Rock. It was the first shot of many, and while I've punched it up a tad it's pretty close to true color. I've put a copy of the original raw (or as close as downloading to Zinfolio will allow) on the web site and will leave it as the opening slideshow for a week or so.

Weather has finally turned bad enough for me to focus on processing all I've shot over the past several months so will be posting more as I get them processed and move this deeper into the catalog. In watching these images in the slide show mode, it's almost a stop motions sequence but not quite,  Wasn't what I was going for, but I'm now determined to lock the camera down and see if I can take people through the sunset progression. 

Location:  45°30'32.98"N, 123°56'40.21"W