The Final Post – 3 Years Later

Three years ago in January, 2009, I made my first blog post. This post will be my last one on this blog.

It has been a wonderful experience sharing photos, stories and tips about life and learning through the lens. I’ve had photo contests where I gave away lenses and trips and other goodies (how fun!). I’ve had a seriously controversial camera review (Sam and I won’t live that one down… but we do get emails daily totally in agreement with our findings)  But best of all I have shared with you the amazing work of many fellow photographers through Inspirations and Photographer of the Month posts. Thanks to these photographers for letting me feature their work!

I have been inspired and humbled by he response to this blog. Thanks mostly to you dear visitor for stopping by to read and make comments!

Going forward Samantha and I will do all our photography and community posts over at oopoomoo where we will have tons of free photography tips and tricks and techniques and of course our popular How-to and Photography Guide eBooks and announcements of workshops and tours. We still plan to keep the inspiration up and have lots to stimulate the eye and mind on the topics of photography and living better on this planet. I hope you will join us at oopoomoo.

Finally, I want to thank a Samantha Chrysanthou, Sabrina Henry and Catherine Byram for help with posting blog entries.

Darwin

Fire and Ice Photo Tour Results – Earl Merrimen

Below are Earl’s favorite six photos from his time on the Fire and Ice Photo Tour. Earl decided to ‘stretch’ himself and shoot most of the time in black-n-white.

©Earl Merrimen

©Earl Merrimen

©Earl Merrimen

©Earl Merrimen

©Earl Merrimen

©Earl Merrimen

Fabulous Film Fridays – December 23, 2011

Below are two photos made after a fresh snowfall in Cochrane while Samantha and I were walking our dog, Brando. These were shot with “Einstein” our glass lens Holga (which is our ‘sharp’ Holga). To see just how sharp, click on the photos for larger views. Thanks for looking!

©Darwin Wiggett - The Bow River at sunset in Cochrane, Alberta

©Darwin Wiggett - Park bench in Cochrane at sunset

Inspirations – Spiritual Wood by Philippe Sainte-Laudy

© Philippe Sainte-Laudy

Nikon D300 Nikkor 18/200mm at 
38 mm  
2 sec. 
f/16 ISO400

Hi, I’m Philippe Sainte-Laudy. I live near Strasbourg in France. My goal in the world of photography is to strive for originality, and create my images into an art form. I like photographing nature and in particular landscapes. Photographer by passion for years, today I have my own business.

I also like optimizing and working my images with software such as Photoshop, Aperture or Lightroom.

I hope that photography can bring people closer to nature and encourage them to preserve it for future generations.

This photo was taken this autumn in France near Strasbourg. The season was beautiful this year! The woods were bathed in a light yellow to brown. Almost magical! I also used a tripod to get a good depth of field and bring out maximum detail. I used several layers set in Photoshop to optimize the atmosphere of this forest and give an artistic touch.

I recently published two free ebooks. The first talks about landscape photography and the second includes my best photographs of autumn this year. A kind of Best of …

Thank you to Darwin for allowing me to talk about myself without moderation.

Inspirations – Andy Brown

© Andy Brown

I shot with a Canon 5Dmk2 and Canon EF 17-40mm L.  Exposure was 0.2 seconds at f/14 and ISO 160.  The camera was handheld throughout and I panned vertically to achieve the ICM – it’s the first time I’d tried this technique and a concept I hope to revisit soon.  Processing was done in ACR and CS4.

Intentional camera movement goes against the grain of so much I have learnt through my imagery – there are no hard and fast restraints on focus, clarity and detail.  Instead, it’s an intriguing way to try and reveal the spirit of your subject – and of course trees work well given their familiarity and strong vertical lines that react so well to panning!  My intent was to work a contrast between the all pervasive mist and the vivid hues of the woodland vegetation, with the trees providing a pseudo-abstract link between the two planes.  It’s funny how with the creation of some images I spend hours deciding on composition, deliberating over subtle lighting nuances and suchlike prior to releasing the shutter.  This photograph was borne of completely the opposite.  I was on my way to an entirely different destination when I drove through this woodland, laden in early morning mist.  I stopped, took just a handful of shots and was back in my car within twenty minutes and on my way… ~ Andy Brown

I oopoomoo, do you?

Today is the official release date of oopoomoo! This is a new website that Samantha and I put together that is the one-stop shop for everything Sam and Dar. But it will be more than just a photography site, or a place to get eBooks or workshops. The concept behind oopoomoo relates more to our attitude towards life. Life is short:  why not just do the things you love and live a balanced healthy lifestyle? Why not give back a little instead of always taking? Why not live a little softer on the planet? Why not have fun and smile a lot? Well, oopoomoo is our attempt to live that kind of life. We are photographers and photography instructors and we love our work. But we also love nature, hiking, eating, drinking, art, music and, in short, life. We want oopoomoo to reflect our passion about these things, and we want to share our passion for living well with the world. We would love to have you come along!

Ultimately we will be ending all our other websites so we can concentrate on oopoomoo and all the fun and meaningful projects we hope to engage in. So we will stop posting on our personal blogs (both this blog and Sam’s blog will finish at the end of the this year). Ultimately we will also end our personal websites and have everything we do happen at oopoomoo.

Finally, over at oopoomoo we decided affiliates and sponsorships wasn’t our thing.  We’ll let others continue on with these kinds of partnerships because they are good at them! We find our time is pretty much taken up trying to live our new philosophy on life.

Drop by oopoomoo and let us know what you think and stay tuned for all sorts of interesting posts on photography and life!

Darwin and Sam

Fire and Ice Photo Tour Results – Roger Raepple

Below are Roger Raepple’s favorites form the Fire and Ice Tour:

©Roger Raepple

©Roger Raepple

©Roger Raepple

©Roger Raepple

©Roger Raepple

©Roger Raepple

 

Inspirations – Olga and Boris

© Olga and Boris

Everything that is created on the Earth–fine, unique and surprising–is created by nature. Or God. It seems to us that when the potter molds an amphora from clay, he sees before himself such image. We have tried to “mold” an amphora by means of a photo. And it seems to us that it has turned out. ~ Olga and Boris

Fabulous Film Fridays – November 25, 2011

Alberta recently passed a distracted driving law where you not supposed to text, put on make-up, or sketch while driving. I looked carefully at the regulations and there was nothing there about using a Holga while driving (but electronic cameras are banned – yeah for film!). So last time I went into Banff National Park I pulled out the Holga at nearly 100 KMPH (check the speedometre in the photo) and snapped this shot of Cascade Mountain from the Trans Canada Highway (as you can see the road was empty so who was I distracting anyway?). Safety first though; I was wearing my hard hat and steel-toed boots while doing this dangerous exercise (and I did put my coffee down before snapping the shot)! 😉

©Darwin Wiggett - Holga GN120, Fuji NPH400 film

The Weekly Photo – Nov 21, 2011

I just got back from the final Fire and Ice Photo Tour this year. We were ‘blessed’ with cold temps (-25 degrees over night) and therefore some nice ice and even a little bit of fire (sunrises and sunsets). The gang of shooters were a blast and everyone was open to the amazing possibilities nature tossed our way.

Part of each tour is a safety meeting about ice conditions. You can see here what happens when someone does not listen to the safety spiel! The good news is with my super long exposure of the scene (5 minutes using a Lee Big Stopper ND filter), the waves and bubbles of the struggling participant did not even register in the image. So let this be a lesson, always listen to your instructor….

This one is dedicated to Joe (thanks for leaving the camera gear on shore) 😉

©Darwin Wiggett

The colour version – Canon EOS-1ds Mark III, Canon 24 TSE, 5 minutes at f11, Singh-Ray LB warming polarizer, Singh-Ray 3-stop soft-edge grad, Lee 10-stop Big Stopper ND filter.

©Darwin Wiggett

The B+W version (conversion done in Nik Silver Efex Pro) – which version do you prefer?