Found this pristine scene in a dense New Hampshire forest while enjoying an early morning jaunt.  The sun had not yet risen to burn off the fog, so everything more than several dozen yards in all directions was visually muted. 

I shot from a tripod using Singh-Ray’s color-enhancing filter to insure the leaves’ color really popped against the ghostly white skin of those birches. 

The thing that drew my eye to this scene was the tight stand of three birches on the right, counterbalanced by the single birch on the left.  However, to my eye, it was the intensity of colored leaves hugging the left-most birch in the stand-of-three that chinched the deal.  I pulled out my gear and made this image.

I’ve been asked, increasingly, over the last year to restore old black and white images and make fresh prints.

This first started shortly after I did some photo restoration work on a few old photographs of my dad. I made these restorations for use at his funeral service, last year.

Here is a link to one of those restored images of my dad:

View Restored Photograph of my Dad

Subsequently, I’ve had several people ask me to repair and restore old photographs for them.

Here is a scan of one such original photo that I was asked to restore. (click to enlarge)

The thing I like about this image is its unusual content. I’m told the image is from the 1940’s. It’s a snapshot of a woman and her farm.

This image is a double exposure (possibly triple). The person taking the photograph was a cousin of the woman.

The picture taker didn’t wind the camera, thus advancing the film forward to a fresh frame, before snapping the next frame. This is from a day when the shutter and film had separate winder mechanisms on the camera. A picture taker had to correctly wind both in order to take a new exposure on a fresh frame.

The goof ended up making this image an heirloom in the family. The novelty of having the woman superimposed over her farm was an accident of providence.

This next image in my restored version of the above original. (click to enlarge)

I had the opportunity to photograph the wedding of Natalie and Mark.

They were married in the Draper Temple, which I had not yet had the opportunity to photograph.  It is a beautiful temple in a beautiful location.

Afterwards, Natalie and Mark hosted their family and friends for a fun evening of barbecue, ice cream, and dancing.  It was a wonderful evening.

My daughter, who worked as my assisted that night, summed it up by saying: it was the most fun wedding reception I’ve ever been to.

Congratulations Natalie and Mark!  May your love grow as you continue to grow closer through out all time.

The attached images are a few of my favorites from that day.

I often think it’s the detail shots that make a wedding album spectacular. There are so many uses for them in the album.

They can be used as a full page anchor on one side of a two-page spread.

They can be turned to opaque and used as a background image on which other images are placed.

Or, they can be used as a sequence of smaller images within a larger spread.

I love to capture detail shots such as these.

My favorite subject is light.  I love to photograph dramatic light.  This scene depicts the contrast found as the fiery burst of morning first invades a slumbering land.

Hours before making this image, I arrived at my perch overlooking Oregon’s Hood River Valley.  At that early hour, the valley was cast in a pre-dawn, infant light.  The pale landscape had not yet revealed its secrets.   I had come to this spot intent on photographing a snow-capped Mount Hood in the breaking dawn.

Having accomplished that, I could not leave – the landscape below me had come to life, its secrets revealed.  Sunlight began popping down the throats of canyons rimming the east, playing wonderfully across the orchards, vineyards, and hills spread throughout this valley.  I continued making photographs until the sun had crested the mountaintops and the entire valley had flooded with light.

This image, Morning’s Hill, is among my favorite captures in that valley.