News & Articles

Shooting on the Spring 2009 tours exceeded my expectations. As usual the tours were conducted in the Lafayette, Louisiana area, with day trips to local bird habitats including the Atchafalaya basin. There were very few rainy days for all the tours and there were excellent opportunities at all the locations we visited. As usual there were different opportunities for each tour due to the stage of the nesting season and the water levels in the Atchafalaya basin.

We had our first photo tour of the year from February 8–11. Originally scheduled from January 18–21, it was rescheduled for the February date to allow photographing osprey building their nests at Cow Island Lake. Due to incredible efforts on the part of Kim and Andrea of Atchafalaya Experience, we were able to place a shuttle boat in the Lake as well as a floating camouflaged photo blind that provided unparalleled opportunities to photograph osprey. In addition to the osprey, there were thousands of tree swallows on the lake.

For the upcoming shows, I'm hand making 8 x 10 frames and painting them to match the images. The idea is to create smaller, less expensive pieces that are ready to hang. By doing the frames myself I'm able to keep the cost of the framed piece at $45. I'm doing a representative sample of my better selling pieces along with some interesting smaller subjects inappropriate for larger frame sizes but ideal as an 8 x 10.

While we experience several less than perfect days on the December Nature tour, we were able to maximize the shooting opportunities and get some very good shots.

September and October will be very busy months. I hope to see you at one of those shows. Fortunately between storms I’ve been busily creating inventory, with lots of new work and older work that I’m printing for the first time. In addition, I’ve done an 8x10 book collecting 74 Louisiana photographs—including some aerial shots of our disappearing marshlands.

A thorough understanding of the flash is critical to the understanding of when and more importantly when not to use flash and how to use it to achieve the appropriate results. In addition, the photographer also needs a knowledge of how light behaves and how the addition of the light from the flash will interact with the natural light in the scene. Knowing the basics can fundamentally improve the quality of your pictures made using flash and fortunately it’s not that difficult to understand.

July 2008

We had outstanding photo opportunities with this years photo tours. This year I did 2 scheduled tours in April, in May I did one scheduled tour and two custom tours. We were very fortunate with excellent weather and exceptional photo opportunities for each shoot.

Bosque del Apache, Louisiana Fall Nature Tour, Florida Bird Tour, Louisiana Spring Bird Tours.

In the old days when we produced slides, photographers would often store their transparencies in plastic sleeves in file folders with labels that matched the subject matter to be stored, they created labels for each of their slides and then stored about 10,000 slides per filing cabinet…

July 2006

I found Lake Martin in February 2002. I’d moved back to Louisiana in December 2001 and had been shooting full time since that April. Specializing in birds, finding Lake Martin was a godsend. During the nesting season from late January until the end of July, there were ten’s of thousands of nesting wading birds, including the Roseate Spoonbill…

July 2006