Hey Everyone! I hope today finds you healthy and safe. Where's your gallery? What a question. I thought of this at my virtual camera club meeting when we were discussing a local exhibit that we were going to put our photos in.  And I got to thinking, why would I go to the effort of printing a large print of something, frame it, and get it ready to hang?  I'm not trying to sell it. The local Arts Council, although nice, is small and doesn't get that much traffic. So I started wondering about galleries and the purpose of showing off your art there. I guess most of us dream of being a professional photographer, traveling the world, and living off of our art like the people we see on YouTube or Instagram. But the truth is 99.9 % of us are never going to make this into a profession. I know I'm not and really don't want to.  I love taking photographs, the act of it. The photo is the byproduct of the shoot to me. The experience of traveling or seeing something new is what I treasure. I am and always will be an amateur. And I'm okay with that. I'm also okay with people that want to be professional or semi-professional or just do it on the side for a few bucks. Well, I see I've gotten off on a tangent. Back to galleries.  

My galleries, I guess, are Instagram, Flickr, and occasionally Facebook. I also consider my house a gallery,  and I like to hang my work around the house as well as photos of family and friends.  Within the last couple of years, I've been making a Year in Review book of my work that I hope will be handed down through the generations of my family.

Instagram- If you follow me you know that I post to Instagram daily or at least try to. If you want to keep up with my work, it is here that you should go. I like the interaction and all of the great photos you can see there. But it has been acquired by Facebook, my least favorite place to post photographs. I don't like the way that they compress the photos, and sometimes they look blurry when they are not blurry. But for right now Instagram is doing fine, so I'll keep posting for now.

Facebook- I used to post most of my stuff to Facebook, but then I don't like the compression, like I mentioned before.  I do like all of the social interaction that you get with everyone, but there is a lot of negativity happening on Facebook that I don't like.  I usually check Facebook once in the morning and once in the evening. Other than that I try not to look at Facebook too much.

Flickr- In the early-2000s I started posting to Flickr. I don't post much anymore because it has changed hands a couple of times. However, in the last year or so it has been bought by SmugMug, which is a great photography company.  I've got a feeling that this will become my next daily-post platform. I love the way my photos look on Flickr and all of the groups that you can join.

500 PX - Another platform that I have occasionally posted to but not in a while, and I don't know why.  Your photos look great and there is a lot to look at. When I go to a new place, this is one of the sites I go to so I can see what other people have posted and what's already out there.

I do think that you should share your work, but formal galleries may not be the place to go for most of us. I do think it is important to print your best work. But for most of us, I think that an online gallery is the best choice and maybe the best way to get others to see our work.  Social media is big in our culture now, and photography is a big part of it. So sites like Flickr, 500 Px, Instagram, and even Facebook are some places to have your online gallery. Being a photographer is more than what you can do to make money, and formal galleries, to me, are geared toward making money in some form or fashion. So I will not be submitting photos to be hung in a gallery this time with our club. To tell you the truth, I don't think I have anything that is formal gallery worthy. For those who want to see their art hung in a formal gallery, I think that's great, and it is fun the first time you see your work on a wall. Well, that's my two cents on that subject. Until next week keep shooting and get outside.

Hey Everyone! I hope today finds you healthy and safe. This week's blog is about my landscaping lens setup and what I think a good setup is. I am primarily a landscape/travel photographer. I like getting out in the woods, setting up my tripod, and waiting for the shot; or at a sunset or waterfall and setting up my composure; and going to town and trying all kinds of different things to get that perfect shot. The lens setup that I have might not be right for you. My landscaping lens setup is an ongoing evolution and will change in the future as I try to get that perfect lens setup. Now some landscape photographers shoot wide, wide, wide and that's all they shoot. So a 16-35 mm lens might be all they carry. Some might carry a wide-angle and a telephoto to get both ends of the focal ranges. I'm not that way. I like taking wide as well as telephoto for tight detail shots and in-between shots too. I shoot a Sony crop sensor camera, so my specific lens choice might not be right for you. But the focal range should be able to be matched up with what you may have. Another choice I have made is to keep my minimum aperture at f4. I do this for a couple of reasons. First of all, as a landscape photographer, I don't need the wide-open apertures like a portrait photographer would. The f2.8 lenses are great for portraits, but most of my photography is shot at f8 or smaller like f11. I usually want the biggest depth of field (what's in focus) that I can get. The f4 lenses are also lighter than the larger aperture lenses. The second reason is that I shoot a crop sensor camera and I try to use crop sensor lenses which make them smaller in size.  And the really big reason is that there were not any large aperture lenses made especially for crop sensors until recently for the Sony that I shoot. I also shoot zoom lenses for the flexibility that they provide. Primes are great, but you don't always have the chance to use your feet to zoom in the woods. So let's get to the lenses.

My first lens is the wide-angle lens. A Sony 10-18mm f4, a 15 to 27mm full-frame equivalent.  This is a small and sharp lens. I use this lens a lot! I use it for waterfalls and wide-open shots when I want to show the vastness of a scene. This type of lens is the staple of any landscape photographer's bag of tricks. What I like about this lens is that I can get really close up to subjects like a flower and get that distorted look that only a wide-angle lens can give you. This lens is also great in tight spaces. Some trails can be small and tight, and this lens will give you the room to shoot. So it's great for hiking.

My next lens is my middle-range lens.  It's the Sony/Zeiss 16-70 f4, a 24-105mm full-frame equivalent. This is a super walking-around lens. This is an older lens, but mine is very sharp and still works well.  I use it for waterfalls, for small detail shots, and just general shots. When you're hiking and come to a clearing with maybe an overlook, this is the lens to use. You can get the wide shots at the 16mm range and a small telephoto with the 70mm range. This is also a great lens for walking around your favorite trail town. The size is small to medium and is easy to handle all day walking around. I do have my eye out for a larger aperture lens that Sony just came out with that will give me a 2.8 aperture. But for now, this lens gets the job done and that's the important part.

My last lens is my long lens. It's a Sony 70-350mm f4.5-6.5, which is a 100-525mm full-frame equivalent. This is my newest lens and I plan to have a blog to review it later on. The long lens I used to have was a Canon 70-200 f4L lens, but I wanted some more reach for those times when wildlife happens. So far I have fallen in love with this lens. It is sharp and quick to focus. I use it for isolation shots at long range. It is a larger lens, especially for my crop sensor, but it isn't really long. It's shorter than the 70-200 lens that I had before and much lighter. It's not the brightest lens with its smaller aperture range. But with the newer cameras capable of shooting at higher ISO's, this is not as much of a problem.

I do have one other accessory lens only used for a specific purpose. When I do astrophotography I use a Rokinon 12mm f2.0 manual focus lens. This is a fantastic lens and almost became my all-around wide angle but was edged out by the Sony. This lens is great for astrophotography.  It's sharp, small, and bright. At f2.0 it lets in lots of light which is needed when shooting in the dark. It is a manual focusing lens that works well for astrophotography. It is an inexpensive lens also coming in at just a couple hundred bucks. If you don't have a wide-angle lens and are on a budget, this is the lens for you. It comes in all kinds of mounts for any camera. Of course, I have it in the Sony E Mount.

Lenses are the eyes of our cameras and to me the most important. If you have to invest in your kit, this is the place to do it.  A good lens can last for decades. So get out and shoot some landscapes and have some fun in nature. Until next week get out and shoot!

Hey Everyone! I hope everyone is healthy and safe today! This week's blog is about a trip I took a few weeks ago to get to as many state parks as I could in one week. I have a personal project to visit all of the state parks in North Carolina in one year. I have visited a lot of them already, but I wanted to visit all of them in one calendar year. There are 34 state parks and 7 recreation areas that I had planned to visit on weekend trips.  Shouldn't be a problem until Covid-19 showed up and shut down the parks for a few months. Well actually here in North Carolina everything shut down for a couple of months and some stuff is still shut down.  At my work all vacations were canceled, like we would have somewhere to go, so I had some extra vacation. So when the parks opened back up for camping, I configured a week-long camping trip that would take me to 10 state parks to make up for the ones that I missed during the lockdown. My wife, Forrest, and myself took our teardrop trailer for our trip and had four different camping spots reserved.

The first leg of our trip we headed out "on time," which never happens.  We drove to Haw River State Park for our first state park. There we took a lovely walk around the lake and had lunch there. After lunch we went to Mayo River State Park where we actually did the same thing hiking around a lake.  Of course we were taking photos during the whole time. Our last stop was to Hanging Rock State Park where we were scheduled to be for two nights camping. While there we hiked and enjoyed ourselves camping. I got to use a new solar panel kit to try to keep my teardrop battery charged and it worked well. We did not have electric power at this campsite.

The second leg of our trip we left on time again, a really great job to my wife. When we headed out we went to Pilot Mountain State Park where we went to the observation deck and had great views. After that we went to Stone Mountain State Park where we had lunch and hiked to a historic farm site at the base of Stone Mountain. We then took off to New River State Park the furthest point of our trip. This is one of the parks that I haven't visited yet, and I was really surprised at how nice the campground was and the park in general. The trails were nice and well-maintained. We stayed there for two nights where we had an electric hookup and were able to enjoy the A/C in our little trailer, although this was the coolest spot on our trip. While we were there we took a trip to Elk Knob State Park where again I was pleasantly surprised by the small trail that we hiked and how well it was maintained. On our way back to New River State Park, we stopped at Mount Jefferson Recreation Area at one of the lookouts overlooking Jefferson, North Carolina. I can easily say that this was my favorite leg of this trip with cooler temps, and weather matters when you're camping.

The third leg of our trip started out not so good. We actually left on time, filled our trailer up with water, and were on our way. But the fog was going to be a problem. We were scheduled to drive the Blue Ridge Parkway to the Aquaduct by Grandfather Mountain State Park. But when we got up on the Parkway, it was fogged in and we drove for about 20 minutes on winding, foggy roads with no views. So we canned that part of the trip and went straight to Lake Norman State Park where we were scheduled to be for two nights. We had a nice spot but the temp was hot, hot. We had no electric hookup so no A/C, but we did have a battery-powered fan that we ran off of our RV that helped a little. We did a 2.5-mile hike on the morning of the first day and saw lots of deer. The lake was pretty, but it was hot. We drove into Statesville to cool off in the car and went to Walmart and got some supplies and water. Back at our trailer we did have lots of TV channels on our TV, so we could do that and we had a pretty good cell signal.

The last leg of our trip was to Morrow Mountain State Park. This is a park that we had visited and camped at in the past and had fond memories of. We were scheduled to be here only one night. But the difference was that when we visited before it was in cooler weather. When we arrived at Morrow Mountain, the heat index was 105 and very hot and sticky. The campground was half empty. When we arrived we partly set up, as we were only going to be there one night, and tried to stay cool. It was too hot to hike and even Forrest got under the trailer to try to hide from the heat. After a few hours of this, my wife and I figured that we were only three hours from home and A/C,  so we decided to leave and go home. So we packed up all of our stuff and headed home. This was maybe the best decision that we made because the extra day of rest before going to work was really needed.

So that's how we went to nine state parks in one week. We had a good time and enjoyed the sites. I have visited 25 parks so far and have 9 more to go.  It will take me four or five three-day weekends to reach the parks that I haven't gotten to, but hopefully I'll meet my goal. Please go out and visit your local state park. You might be surprised like I was of all the things there to do. So until next week, get out and shoot!