Photography by John Caplis
This inch worm has taken up residence on top of a coneflower in our front yard. It was a good excuse for me to get out the 100 mm macro lens! The green worm made for a nice contrast with the vibrant colors of the coneflower.
Being of Irish decent, I took the opportunity to visit the Irish Memorial in downtown Philadelphia during a business trip. The memorial commemorates those that died as well as the many people who successfully immigrated to the United States during “The Great Hunger”. I recently converted a Canon 7D through Life Pixel to a Super Color Infrared Camera. The memorial was a good subject for giving this camera an initial “test drive”. For processing, I performed a channel swap and then desaturated the foilage in Photoshop.
Several months ago I sent in a Canon Rebel T1i to Life Pixel to do a permanent infrared conversion. The conversion process removes the existing hot mirror filter over the sensor, which blocks out most IR light, and replaces it with a filter that blocks most or all visibible light and allows IR light to pass through. I had them install a super blue filter, which allows some light in the blue spectrum to pass through. As a result, when rendered in a jpeg form, the camera depicts skies as blue and foilage as a yellowish gold. From there, you can adjust these colors with saturation layers in photoshop. If you desaturate for a certain color (ie yellows or blues individually) you can turn part of all of the image to a standard black and white IR image which is the most common thing you ususally see. I also had Life Pixel adjust the focus to their universal option. Essentially, this option works for all lens, but I have to use a tripod and the live view screen to do my focusing manually. Since I mainly shoot landscapes with IR, this set up works well for me.
Last weekend, we had a fantastic break from the cold of winter. So on this warm day in February, I took a walk in the Manassas Battlefield National Park with my IR camera. While there were not many clouds in the sky, which would have really added another great dimension to the shooting conditions, the afternoon sun was creating a nice warm shadowed effect. This shot is of the country lane that approached the old Robison Farm, which was owned by a freed slave at the time of the first battle of Manassas in the Civil War.
I went out with Charly Moore, owner and guide of Overland Canyon Tours, for an exciting day of photography in Canyon X, that was nothing but sheer photobug joy! Canyon X is part of the Antelope Canyon area, but is far from the overwhelming crowds that visit the Upper Antelope Canyon that is so famous now for photography. On this particular day, I was the only person signed up for this particular tour, and I was eternally grateful that Charly still elected to take me out solo. So off we went in his built up Jeep Wrangler, for a one on one session in Canyon X, where we had the whole place to ourselves for the day. Luck was with me, as it turns out June is a good month to visit Canyon X, as you get to shoot both light beams (which only happen in this particular Canyon in June), as well as the abstract shapes of the canyon walls in the changing reflected light as the morning turned to afternoon.
Charly appears to be nothing short of a master photographer, and thankfully he was very willing to share and instruct me on the best practices for shooting in these challenging conditions. Using his local knowledge and technical guidance, I took home some good captures that day that I knew would be fun to work on when I got back home. I must say, it was a fun, but somewhat mindblowing experience being the first time to really shoot in a place like this where you actually have time to think about what you are doing. Charly was always challenging me to alter my perspective and orientation, and see things that your eye may not see but the camera sees (such as low light areas that will show up more readily in the bracketed exposures). And the Canyon is a amazingly beautiful to view, even if you did not have a camera in hand. I am still working on the shots from this session, but here are a few of my favorites so far…and Charly, a big thank you goes out to you!!!
Sometimes you just have to stop and admire the shapes and colors of nature!
One of the many stops when touring Alaska’s Denali National Park is the Toklat River. Toklat River is fed by various glaciers and mountain runoff, twisting and turning its way through a large flat valley surrounded by steep mountains. I have posted several photos of the this spot in the Toklat Gallery page, that capture the changing fall weather patterns we experienced during our two and a half days in the park, and highlight the silty, glacial nature of the streams.
Peak fall color in Denali also makes for some very interesting black and white photography!
I was fortunate to have a short working trip to Alaska this fall, and was able to venture north to Denali National Park for a couple days of exporing and photo shooting. Most of my blot posts and galleries in the near future will feature that trip. While it was a short three days in duration, my camera was busy snapping away as there were amazing views at every turn! This photo was taken during the one sunny day we had in the park and shows a set of Caribou antlers framing Mount McKinley, or Denali, in the background. Denali, partially obsured by clouds, is the highest point in North America, and simply dominates the sky when you are in eyesight. In this photo, the base of Denali is still nearly fifty miles away!
While visiting the Petrified Forest National Park in Northern Arizona, I was lucky enough to watch nature’s spectacle unfold, with late afternoon thunderstorms and the setting sun, seen here from the Blue Mesa Badlands section of the park. See more colorful and stormy photos in the Petrified Forest National Park gallery!
The Lower Mississippi River is famous for old plantation homes, and my favorite one to visit is Destrehan, just outside of the city of New Orleans. One of the oldest homes in the Louisiana Purchase, Destrehan Plantation was constructed beginning in 1787 and completed in 1790. Like many of these old plantation sites, Destrehan has a reputation for being haunted, and has great ghost stories, as well as a very colorful history. In the nineteenth century, the house was the center of a bustling slave plantation that produced sugar for export. The site hosted the notorious St. Charles Parish Tribunal, which executed 18 of the slaves involved in the 1811 German Coast Uprising, the largest slave revolt in American history. Thanks to an old legend that the illustrious privateer Jean Lafitte had hidden treasure in the house, treasure-seekers left gaping holes in the walls and vandals stripped the house of many of its finer materials. Fortunately, a local sheriff prevented the theft of the plantation’s original 1840s iron gates, rumored to be a gift from Napoleon Bonaparte to the family. More recently, the house was recently the site for many of the plantation home scenes in the movie “Interview with a Vampire”. One of the star attractions in my mind is the live oak trees that surround much of the property. These trees are massive in size, and are covered in spanish moss, creating that distinctive southern style look to the grounds. Unfortunately, I did not have time to pay the admission fee and roam around the grounds for a dedicated photo shoot. I simply took a few quick shots from the the property fenceline before I had to get back on the road; even so, the brief encounter was grand, and I enjoyed the historic feel of the place and the shade of the amazing trees. See more photos in the Destrehan Plantation Gallery.
