Kevin Merchant Photography News - 2018

Going back to my June 15^th entry, I have finally finished processing the images from this year's trip to Florida. The images were predominantly broken into two groups - landscapes & wildlife. With almost 500 images processed, it took awhile to complete. Each finished image receives some personal hands-on editing - contrast control, noise reduction, modest color enhancement as is typically required from original RAW files. This is all typical editing done in the digital darkroom these days and does not represent what has come to be known as being photoshopped.

Soon, I'll be moving on to the rest of the year's shooting. Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Catching up continues from two very productive snowshoe trips in January to the Artist Point area of the north Cascades, where you get sweeping views of both Mt. Shuksan, to the east, and Mt. Baker, to the west. The starting point is the parking lot at the Mt. Baker Ski Area. Approximately two miles uphill and you start getting a sense of the views available. Stunning is a word that comes to mind.

Of note on the first trip is that temperatures did not get above freezing all day - so we stayed bundled up and were glad we had every stitch of clothing. We stayed for the last light on Mt. Shuksan and descended with the fading light of day.

The second trip was almost a month later, and it is amazing how much snow had fallen in between the two trips. Equally amazing was how, on the second trip, that sections of the snow had been sculpted by the wind. Before we even got to the best viewing areas, we were mesmerized by all of the patterns in the snow.

As we got higher, the wind sculpting made for even better foreground subject matter for both Mt. Baker and Mt. Shuksan. It turned out to be a gorgeous day with very little wind.

As before, we stayed for the very last light on Mt. Shuksan and were not disappointed. We made it back to the car just before needing headlamps to see. A great day spent in the outdoors with great company.

The theme of the summer has been catching up. To that end I will share a little bit of what I have been working on.

As mentioned earlier in the summer on Father's Day weekend last year I attended a small local car show. The cars are packed in pretty close, so it is difficult to isolate single cars. But, you can isolate parts of cars and that is what I mostly did. Here are a couple of examples.

Next up is the shoot from the 4^th of July, fireworks show on Lake Union, as seen from Gas Works Park. My strategy was to do one set up, get the exposure right and keep shooting as long as there were fireworks in the sky. It is hard to pick one favorite!

About a month before the solar eclipse last year, I went on a scouting trip to central Oregon looking for possible locations to shoot the eclipse. The John Day National Monument was in the path of totality and so I went there. Brief discussions with Monument officials indicated that they expected to be overrun. Although that probably did not happen, I nonetheless chose another location instead.

But, while there, I took the opportunity to do a sunset shoot and a sunrise shoot the following morning. Here are some results.

One of my favorite beaches to shoot - Bandon Beach, on the south Oregon coast. We were there for the Cranberry Festival in September and I managed a bit of shooting while there.

I managed to get out for one day of fall color shooting last year, on the eastern side of Stevens Pass along the Wenatchee River and Icicle Creek. As I descended the pass, the cloud cover got thicker in the morning, so I ended up back tracking to a section of Nason Creek that was just above the clouds.

Later in the morning, the clouds lifted and there was some pretty nice light on the Wenatchee River as well as in Icicle Creek Canyon.

I have a fall color project that I have been doing for several years at home with an inside set up. I have collected leaf specimens in various states of fall color that I flatten out and dry. With lights and a white background, I shoot a single leaf that is backlit which really enhances the color, shape and detail of the leaf. This is a technique that I developed several years ago and continue to improve upon. This is what I do when getting out for fall color has not been possible.

The end of the year found us celebrating Christmas in Oregon for several days, camping no less at Bullards State Park in Bandon. While we enjoyed the time there, we do not plan to repeat a camping trip to the south Oregon coast in December - cold, dark, rainy should be adequate descriptors of our experience.

This happened to be my first foray into the field with my new Canon EOS 5D Mark IV.

And, we finished off the year spending a few days in the Birch Bay area. A sunrise shoot in Birch Bay and then we scouted a possible snowshoe trip near the Mt. Baker Ski Area which we did on New Year's Eve. Needless to say, we were too tuckered out to stay up for New Year's fireworks, but that was okay.

That catches me up for most of last year's shooting. There is still a pile of solar eclipse images that I plan to turn into a timelapse, but that is a much bigger project and will have to wait for another day. Now, it is time to turn my attention to some of this year's shooting.

Well, I finally finshed all of the fireworks images from a year ago. While I was sweeping up all that digital dust, I realized most of my fireworks shots from 2008 were still gathering cobwebs. With that particular shoot, I had a two camera setup so, it took awhile to get through all of those. Take a look in the NEW section of the GALLERY. Thanks.

What happens when you upgrade to a higher resolution camera body? Simple - you run out of disk space! Moving to larger capacity internal drives necessitates moving to larger external backup drives as well. And, so it goes.

I am in the process of moving to larger capacity internal drives, but I want to be sure that all of the current internal drives are backed up before I open up the desktop box, lest something go sideways in the process. When you haven't touched the box in a while, it is best to be cautious about wiggling cables and removing hard drives. I speak from experience and I've had a few scary moments when I thought I had killed my computer.

While waiting for the new hard drives to arrive, I have gone back to catching up from last year. I have recently added images from a car show that I shot on Father's Day weekend, a year ago. Just some fun stuff that I did, both in shooting style and in terms of how I processed the shots.

Soon, I will have fireworks images from the Fourth of July celebration at Gas Works Park on Lake Union in Seattle. The fireworks show is stunning - about 25 minutes and choreographed to music. The logistics of photographing the fireworks with a camera on a tripod is something else. You have to arrive early in the day to stake out a spot for shooting. And, you can't leave the spot (you really need to be with a least one other person). And, even though you think you have a spot staked out, people will crowd in at the very last minute (literally). If you don't protect your space, you will end up without any. You have to come with lots of patience and a little forgiveness. The results are worth it.

I will now crawl back under my rock now and keep working.

Recently, my web site was moved to a new server due to my ISP being acquired by another ISP. Unbeknownst to me, the transition broke a few things, due to being upgraded to a more recent verion of the PHP scripting software that I base this web site on. The main thing that was broken was the Contact page which is how I am reached, via e-mail, from the web page. After several days of messing with the code, I believe it is now properly working again. It seems that this feature is most used by spammers and I have put some code in place to at least break the nasty content that they manage to get through.

The big excitement here is a trip to Florida in May for two weeks of birding. Not that I did not know this, but I have now confirmed by way of personal experience, just how silly easy it is to approach some species of birds there. Needless to say, it was a very fruitful trip for bird photography as well as wiggling my toes in the white sand and bobbing in the warmish Gulf of Mexico water (the water had not warmed up to its summer temperatures, yet).

I have sifted through the 13,000 some odd images from the trip and reduced that count to around 9,500. Still a gargantuan pile to work through before showing any of my results. And, I'm still catching up from last year.

I will crawl back under my rock now and keep working.

Here it is, the eve of Easter and what have I been doing these last three months? All I can say is catching up! Looking back at the images I have recently processed, a total of 487 since last reporting in, I must have been doing something - a Mt. Rainier day trip in November, 2016; a ten day trip to Bandon that included landscapes, snowy plovers and harbor seals; and, a four day June, 2017 bluebird trip.

Further looking showed I still have a Prosser hot air balloon shoot from 2015 that sits and waits. As well as a 4^th of July fireworks shoot, John Day Painted Hills shoot, a couple of trips to the local zoo and some fall color shooting. Lots of other stuff from 2017 as well as recent snowshoe trips to Artist Point, in the Mt. Baker area.

Well, back to catching up!!!

Happy New Year to all who stop by and thanks for your continued interest in what I do. 2017 turned out to be a busy year for me. Preparation for the solar eclipse took quite a bit of my time and I am still making an effort to catch up with image processing from the past couple of years. Holiday activities have temporarily paused that effort. I am hoping to resume it shortly.

2018 is a transition year for me as I exit the summer art festival activity and pursue other opportunities. Fine art prints will still be a component of my business, but it will no longer involve the face-to-face sales that I have pursued since 2009. We will miss all of the friendly faces that we have met along the way. And we certainly appreciate all of the support from loyal customers and festival organizers.

My hope is that the photo tour effort will gain some traction this year. With that in mind, I am posting the 2018 tour plan here. Hopefully, a schedule will appear shortly.

In the meantime, I managed a short New Year's getaway for some birding and snowshoeing. Happy New Year to one and all.