Tag Archives: Ben Barnhart

Uncooperative Cows

Uncooperative Cows
Photo-A-Day #1565

Things are looking much brighter today than yesterday despite the gloomy weather outside. Today when I picked up Eva from my Aunt Corrine’s house I saw that the cows were out in the pasture across the street. I’ve tried and tried to catch these cows ever since I totally missed a fantastic opportunity about a year ago when I drove by and saw the cows out in the snow. Their breath making steam as they chewed up whatever shoots they could find, some had the lightly fallen snow on their heads and noses and the scene was idyllic. I’ve come across many scenes like this when I am without my camera.

There was another time where I was driving to work and I looked over at a small island and saw a small deer on the tip of the island bending to take a drink, it was early in the morning and the mist was everywhere. I was on the opposite side of the road on a highway with no way to get back to take the show. So I used a little trick that I learned from Ben Barnhart, who talked at work. As he was growing up he didn’t always have money for film so his father told him to take a mental picture. But his father wasn’t just telling him something to shut him up about lack of film, he meant take a real mental picture. Look at the scene, frame it in your mind and capture that one perfect shot. The photographer said that because of that practice of taking mental pictures his physical photography improved. I’ve tried to do that at times when I’ve had a camera and not had a camera. Just stop frame a shot and snap it there in my mind. I can still see those cows in the field and that deer on that island.

Photo-A-Day #964 11/28/07

Tonight Allison and I got Eva dressed in her Christmas clothes and took her photo for our Christmas card. Afterwards we took this one of here in a stocking, she doesn’t quite fit and her expression reflects that. Once the Christmas cards have been sent out we will post up the Christmas card photo shoot. It was fun, Allison, me and my mom were all bouncing around trying to make Eva smile.

I finally got the perfect shot, edited and cropped it and uploaded it to Kodak, we made the card and ordered our boxes. I even found a coupon code and got 20% off the purchase. Sweet! Making the cards with Kodak Gallery was so incredibly easy.

Today at lunch at work I was lucky enough to attend a great presentation by freelance photographer Ben Barnhart. He was a really interesting guy and he is a New England Photographer. I talked to him a bit about photowalking, he’d never heard of it. I was glad to go up and speak to him after the presentation, sometimes I miss opportunities to make connections because I get nervous about what to say but the more I’ve been networking online and blogging and actually creating things the more I have the confidence to talk about something interesting with other people. One thing that Ben does really well is take Portraits. I was very inspired by his portraits and getting ready for Trevor Carpenter’s December Challenge, portraits were right up my alley.

I e-mailed Ben after the presentation and even extended him an invite to go on a future photowalk. Now I have to work on setting up photowalks for New England. You can check out Ben’s portfolio on his website. bbimages.com.

Speaking of Photowalks, I uploaded my Las Vegas Photowalk to Zooomr and Thomas Hawk commented on the Google map that I used to show the whole photowalk. I made the map with the GiSTEQ PhotoTrackr software. He’s going to be in New York on December 15th for a photowalk and I really would want to go if I hadn’t already committed to two annual Christmas parties. I’d bring my PhotoTrackr with me so I could capture the locations of the whole walk. That would be cool. I have to go shoot with Thomas Hawk sometime, there is so much I can learn.