Daniel Ruf

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"For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity."  Henri Cartier-Bresson

Spending an afternoon in a wooded area last week gave me the opportunity to work with natures figures. The oak trees in our area can take on some really graceful poses and with some nice lighting and a few flowers the options for creativity increases. In this case I was first attracted by the light in the background and the flowers in the fore ground. A pretty simple scene to work with. 

At home it went through the editing process starting in Lightroom and moving on to Photoshop to do the finishing detail process. After I finished I decided I'd like to see this scene as a black and white to weigh the differences.

While the scene holds up well, IMO, I still wanted to push this image in another direction. At first I thought I would use the opacity slider to bring in a little the color to see what difference that would make.

After a lot of fiddling I decided to use the brush tools in Photoshop and selectively paint in a thin amount of the original background yellow/green color in certain areas.

As you can see there are three images created from one particular capture. A lot of times I find my brain is locked in to certain "used" creative options and I forget to take on some different challenges.

I used my Canon 5D Mark IV camera with a 24 - 105mm "L" lens for these captures.

Thanks for visiting...Keep safe and use the social distancing options and masks

Places to see more of Daniel's work:

Pearson Lakes Art Center - lakesart.org 

Arts On Grand - artsongrand.org

 

Morning Lights

    

"Photography is about putting the pieces together." Daniel Ruf

This morning was all about patience and putting the pieces together. I changed positions several times, yet as I walked away to my truck to leave for home I turned and found this setup.  My last position was about 10 feet to the left. We can have the best lenses and camera money can buy, but if you don't move your feet you might miss the best shot of the day.

This blog image was taken with my handheld iPhone and its wide angle lens. The clouds and rocks demanded the wide angle approach and both subjects compliment each other. 

While I was driving in search of the right spot for the sunrise at 4:30 a.m. and using "The Photographer's Ephemeris" app I came to this lakeshore spot and realized that the sunrise was less important than the nice cloud formation that was taking place. 

The black and white version.

 

It's continues to be a learning journey no matter how old you might be.

Thanks for visiting

Thank you for dropping by...go plant another tree

Places to see more of Daniel's work:

Pearson Lakes Art Center - lakesart.org 

Arts On Grand - artsongrand.org

 

Remains

"To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy."    Henri Cartier-Bresson   

Enjoy the winter!

Places to see more of Daniel's work:

Pearson Lakes Art Center  lakesart.com 

500px.com

Facebook - Daniel Ruf Photography  

 

Chance, Luck, Opportunity Meet

 

"Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity."   Lucius Annaeus Seneca

A couple of weeks ago a really nice fog rolled in to our lakes community and I jumped out of bed and packed my gear into the truck with the idea that I would be doing a bit of photography around the lakes area for most of the morning.  The sun wasn't quite up yet and I had time to explore several spots before "crunch time".  As I drove past the first lake I was surprised  that there was no fog lingering over the lake surface...I drove on.  As I came to another lake I again saw no fog hanging about waiting for this excited photographer. This same disappointment greeted me at my  next water stop and I was starting to get really puzzled and upset.

After one more stop with the same result I thought I'd drive into the rural areas, since shooting fog scenes looked to be off the list for the morning.  As I got into the countryside, however, I found where the fog was hiding, drove to a spot I that had a river running through it and the result was the last blog image.  Once again I realized that just because the initial plan of lake scenes was fixed into my brain, doesn't mean that will be the outcome. God does have a weird sense of humor!

The other two blog images were all taken within a 1/2 mile radius of my first stop, places that I continually visit and that have been a great source of photographic pleasure.  As I've written before, thanks to the words of my good friend and mentor Tony Sweet (tony sweet.com), always revisit those treasure stops of the past under different lighting and weather conditions.  They will continually change in character and dynamics offering a plethora of opportunities.

Luck????

Thank you for your continued support and enjoy the summer as it slips away. Please pass on this site link to your friends. Also, I'm going to have a tent at this years Pearson Lakes Art Center's "Art In The Park" coming to Arnolds Park, Iowa on August 4.  Please join the event for a fun day of looking at some great artwork of over 90 artists.

 

Places to see more of Daniel's work:

Pearson Lakes Art Center  lakesart.com  Also on Facebook for up to date activities

500px.com

Reflections

"You have to dream before your dreams can come true." A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

It is with great sadness that I report the Summerwind Gallery in Arnolds Park, Iowa will not reopen this coming summer.  The gallery director did not specify any reasons, but I know that the summer of 2018 will have a hole in it for me.  The gallery director was top notch and for the two years that it was open it was a huge success for my photography.  It is sad to see such a needed person and gallery disappear from our community.

So, where do I go from here?  My mind at this point is a blank, but blank spaces are meant to be filled and I'm waiting for that proverbial door to open for my next experience. I no longer am represented by any gallery, but that doesn't necessarily concern me since I was looking for a gallery when Summerwind Gallery came into my life. "Bert" was an exceptional gallery director and I say that with the experience of treading through many galleries.  As I've mentioned before, when my wife and I travel gallery hunting/visiting is about second on the list behind scouting for scenery.  We've found that the galleries that we have enjoyed the most were run by people that were truly interested in the customer.  They spent time getting to know us, exchanging ideas, and gathering information. We found that to be paramount at the Summerwind Gallery.  I wish "Bert" continued success with her art and future.

Moving on...the above image was taken on a beautiful morning with much frost and fog. The camera was a Canon 5D Mark IV, which I have fallen in love with.  The image was processed in Adobe Lightroom and converted to a black and white (it was pretty monochromatic to start with) in ON1, which is a filter in my Adobe Photoshop CC program. I also used a painting program, very lightly, to soften some of the effects of B/W processing. Just a matter of taste.

Subtle scenes like this, in my opinion, find real depth and mood when converted to black and white.  I have always been a follower of Ansel Adams, especially since attending one of his Yosemite workshops back in 1977.  I've also found the work of John Sexton, an assistant to Ansel way back when, to be extremely inspiring as well as my instruction from Tony Sweet.  Add to that the works of Andrew Wyeth, an artist that I followed when I was wading through college art classes, and all of this makes sense.  All of these artists could squeeze life into compositions, that others might pass by, with their own versions of creativity.

Thank you all for visiting this site and a reminder that Spring is just around the corner.  I'll let you know when I find a gallery!

L E A R N I N G

"There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education.  The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die,is a  process of education."  Jidda Krishnamurti

Not too long ago I finished a private critique session that was offered by one of my mentors, Tony Sweet, and I was given another insight into the fact that my learning process just keeps on rolling along.  In this session I would submit 20 images each month for three months.  In my case we kind of sped things up since he's coming into his workshop season, which was not a problem for me.  Most of the work I submitted was from the last year and I would "dropbox" the work to him and in a few days he would "dropbox" a video of at least an hour in length for those 20 images back to me.  I did this same process a couple of years ago and it was an enlightening experience.

 If you've been a regular visitor to my blog you are probably aware that I have also been a participant in two of Tony's location workshops, one in the Badlands of South Dakota and one in the Smoky Mountain National Park area of Tennessee.  Those workshops allowed me to get to know Tony and his style of teaching as every afternoon of the five day workshop was spent in his critiquing the participants work from the last outings.  I found that both he and his  life partner Susan Milestone had a comfortable style of teaching and relating to the students as well as both having a unique thoughtful creative vision.

What I learned mostly from this last critique session is that I had slipped into some "sloppy" habits, one of which was the editing process called cropping.  Tony doesn't limit cropping to the camera viewfinder and its restrictive ratio.  He is aggressive and continued to tell me in each video to "...isolate and simplify the subject."  While I'm not a slow learner I do know that my bad habits die hard.  My habit of printing 18" x 12" prints resulted from wanting to keep my costs of framing and matting to the minimum by being able to reuse frames and mats cut for that proportion.  It worked as I had hoped in that I could pop out a photo from a mat and put in a different photo and have it back into a gallery in a short time with little added expense.  It didn't work because I slid into the habit that allowed main subjects of scenes being lost among other items in the scene.

Along with that he spent a great deal of time discussing the attributes of making "selections" in Photoshop which is a way of making adjustments to areas of an image that will not effect other areas surrounding the selection.  I was aware of how to do selections, but I didn't really make an effort to use the process more.  Being able to watch Tony do these different selection processes on the return video critiques impressed upon me the value of selections in the creative process of photography.

The blog image is both an example of the cropping and selection process with some work I shot in the past.  The selection process helped to give the subject a "glow" as well as better separation of parts of the subject.  All of the adjustments and cropping help to keep the viewers eye in the game and not aimlessly wandering about in the picture frame.

I've always been a fan of critique sessions by reputable people (I never give family praise much stock) and through my art classes in college my work was continuously being critiqued and graded.  The really good thing about classroom or workshop type of critique sessions is that everyone benefits from the learning of others.  In fact, the most astounding thing I learned is seeing how people interpret subjects differently from what I might be thinking or seeing.

While I only pointed out a couple of things I learned from this process with Tony there was a lot of other learning that was going on whether it was the use of differing editing tools, using textures or visual concepts.  It was well worth the money as well as the time that we both put in to making the process an educational one.  Check out his site tonysweet.com .  His work is beautiful, his workshops are incredible and he is sensitive instructor.

http://500px.com

Arts On Grand, Spencer, Iowa http://www.artsongrand.org/

Lanesboro Art Center, Lanesboro, Minnesota www.lanesboroarts.org

Summer Wind Gallery, Arnolds Park, Iowa http://www.summerwindgallery.com

Thaw

         "Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family." Joseph Brodsky

    Wishing all my followers a belated wonderful Christmas and prosperous new year.  Nothing is quite so fun as experiencing the joys of Christmas and then turning the leaf to a new year.  Where does the time fly?

    The blog image is from the north end of Spirit Lake, near Mini Wakan State Park in Iowa, and takes in the consequences of an unusual winter thaw...a little hiccup in the season that included these "blocks" of broken ice floating casually on the waters surface.  A little unusual for this early winter season, but not unwelcome when we know that there is still winter "seasoning" to come.

The sunrise, drifting cloud formations and reflections on the water and ice are a little much for me to pass up as I set up the tripod and my Canon 5D Mark II for this vertical shot.  It was a choice between a vertical format showing the many pieces of fractured ice or showing the expansive cloud formation and sunrise.  I chose the clouds as it would not have seemed right to cut off the the huge diagonal line of the cloud and blue sky, especially considering I could include the "repeating" diagonal with the ice in the lower right of the image.

The editing was done in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) as I'm finding it using this editing option doesn't seem to intensify the noise problems as so many other HDR editing programs tend to do.  I followed that with some work in NIK Color Efex Pro as I could paint in a little more detail in the textures of the foreground ice pads, without affecting the rest of the image softness.  This option along with the U-Point technology of the NIK products make it a go to plug in when working with a lot of my work.

                  

 

When I converted the color image into a black and white using the NIK Silver Efex Pro plug in I noticed a scene of more intensity and punch as well as the sun's rays along the horizon.  

Thank you all for joining me here and have a great Christmas season and 2016.

"Sic 'em Bears" Playing the University of North Carolina in the Russell Athletic Bowl, Dec. 29......"SIC 'EM BEARS".

For more views of my work visit;

http://500px.com

Arts On Grand, Spencer, Iowa http://www.artsongrand.org/

Lanesboro Art Center, Lanesboro, Minnesota www.lanesboroarts.org

Summer Wind Gallery, Arnolds Park, Iowa

Sublime Winter

"We all start in this medium because of the magic and the challenge is to keep it going."  John Sexton

A week or so ago winter finally made its stand in northwest Iowa with inches and inches of soft wet snow clinging to every branch, porch post and mailbox in the area.  The beginning was marked by huge drifting white flakes gently falling to the ground and finishing overnight with the finest particles sealing the white carpet.  I was thrilled to put on the boots and other winter gear that had found its way to the back of our closet, digging for those favored winter gloves and "sock" hat.  I was excited that finally that brown nondescript residue of autumn was finally covered.  

I week later the same type of snowfall hit us again and just in time as the previous snow was becoming tracked and dirty.  Some of my favorite haunts were covered in a lacework of deer tracks and scuffs that only made the digital editing process more cumbersome when cloning out the intruding marks in the snow.  My response to those of you in awe of such interference with the "real" is, "somebody's got to do it!"

The blog image is of a favorite road with a couple of favorite trees that, unfortunately, don't get recorded in my camera often enough.  Spring is the time for flowers, summer the time with the lakes area, fall requires visits to local forests and glen, but winter is the time to drift among the drifted roads of rural Iowa.  Searching for those rural icons such as barns, windmills and lonesome woody giants is a good way to pass the time between storms and editing behind the computer.

The whiteness of snow becomes the perfect canvas for those long graphic lines of shadows that occur when the sun is low on the horizon leaving only minutes before the canvas is changed to more subtle grays.  Those ancient monarchs of the fence line are even more beautiful as skeletons of their former selves calling to my wonder and attention.  

While in rapture of the glowing light rooster pheasants are calling in a neighboring field, while crows pass overhead looking for their next meal.  With all of this there is still a softness of peace that exists...except for the crunching snow under my feet reminding me that the chill of winter is finally here.

I wish you all a wonderful Christmas...yes, it's Christmas, not "holiday season"...and prosperous new year.  Thank you all for continuing to visit my blog site.

"Sic 'em Bears"

For more views of my work visit;

http://500px.com

Arts On Grand, Spencer, Iowa http://www.artsongrand.org/

Lanesboro Art Center, Lanesboro, Minnesota www.lanesboroarts.org

Summer Wind Gallery, Arnolds Park, Iowa

 

Tango Or Waltz?

"Nature, like man, sometimes weeps from gladness."  Benjamin Disraeli

Give me fog and I'm a happy man.  Give me fog and some boats and I'm jumping for joy.  Give me fog, boats and calm waters and I'm ecstatic.  And while a scene like the above has me frothing while I'm clattering with equipment it's not without it's complications.  As the sun rises the fog begins to fade I'm challenged by time.  With calm water it seems that it's only a matter of time before a fishing boat putts by, but I can deal with sharing.  If the fog thickens, as was the case here, the shoreline in the background disappears causing some confusion between the viewers eye and brain.

Obviously no two scenes are alike and sometimes even opposite extremes.  Hence the title of the entry..."Tango Or Waltz".  I have learned to enjoy the process no matter the speed that is engaged.  I have learned to "take in" the scene as I'm putting gear together if the circumstance warrants a certain amount of speed...or lazily enjoy a sunrise/sunset scene since waiting is the result of arriving early before the "fireworks" start.

New photographers, having seen all the magazines full of beautiful images, are clueless to the work and patience involved with advanced stages of photography.  This is largely due to the culture that we live within today.  Fast...social media...instant gratification...publication in seconds...feedback in minutes.  Unfortunately, most results of fine photography are achieved over days or months when one includes research, logistics, travel and final output.

It becomes a long empty road for many.

Sic 'em Bears".  The 2015 Baylor football season begins in two days....vs. SMU!!

For more views of my work visit;

http://500px.com

Arts On Grand, Spencer, Iowa http://www.artsongrand.org/

Lanesboro Art Center, Lanesboro, Minnesota   www.lanesboroarts.org

Summer Wind Gallery, Arnolds Park, Iowa

Send In The Fog

"Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communication, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.     Ansel Adams

The blog image above was captured at Jay Cooke State Park near Duluth, Mn. and the park is also celebrating its centenial year in 2015.  It's been a while since I've been there and I'm hoping to make a return this year in the Spring.  Spring is the time of high water on the St. Louis River, which flows through the park, and provides the type of flow as seen above.  On this particular morning a nice fog was lifting out of the valley providing an added accent to the park scenes.

The rock formations and geography of the area are stunning and provide a lot of differing photo opportunities for serious photographers especially if they're willing to venture through the park during early morning and late evening hours.  

My adapting the original color version to a black and white is due to the fact that the black and white rendured a stronger image while strengthening the presence of the fog.  NIK software was used to do the b/w conversion.

I'm looking forward to a return this year.

One another note, I have been notified that my "Floating Docks" image (below) has been accepted for a juried show at the Octogon Gallery in Ames, Iowa, which will open Jan. 23.  

I've also recently started a twitter and instagram account so you can follow me there as well.

Thanks to all for continuing to follow my journey in photography.

"Sic 'em Bears".

For more views of my work visit;

Arts On Grand, Spencer, Iowa http://www.artsongrand.org/

Lanesboro Art Center, Lanesboro, Minnesota   www.lanesboroarts.org

Side Street Gallery, Arnolds Park, Iowa  www.okobojiimages.com

http://500px.com/pigs4u