As a participant in our most recent Bella Italia workshop to the Tuscany region of Italy, Brian Hartz, took his share of wonderful images while under the inspiring care of instructors Elizabeth Stone and Tony Rizzuto.  After returning home, Brian took notice of a post on our Facebook page encouraging participants of the workshop – and anyone else – to submit their Italy related photos for a contest appropriately being offered by Walks of Italy. Taking bold initiative, Brain submitted one of his images from his trip…and deservedly won the grand prize for the contest! See his and the other top ten winning images here.

Coincidentally, another RMSP student took similar steps to enter the contest. However, this time it was not a participant in the Bella Italia workshop. It was former Photo Weekend and Basic Photography participant as well as recent Summer Intensive graduate, Erica Prairie. She had apparently visited Italy on her own and then submitted her work. Low and behold, she is ALSO a Top 10 winner!

No doubt,  the judges of this particular contest had their work cut out for them and chose quite well from among the many submissions. All of the winning images are spectacular! Congratulations to all of the winning photographers and to everyone who submitted for the contest. It is never an easy thing to put one’s images “out there” in the court of either private or public opinion. Doing so in general is a very big deal, but you can’t win if you don’t enter. As photographers ourselves, we continue to encourage those with our common passion to expose (pardon the pun) their work to the world and see where this might lead them in the future.  Once again, we proudly congratulate both Brian and Erica for their accomplishments!

*Thinking you might want to visit Italy soon? We’re currently taking registrations for Bella Italia 2012!

After graduating from RMSP’s Summer Intensive Program in 2010, Lisa began working with RMSP’s newly-formed Exhibition Mentorship Program. The 6-month, one-on-one course is facilitated by former RMSP Gallery director and instructor, Kerri Rosenstein  and culminates in a 3-month exhibition at the RMSP Gallery .

Passport to Adventure depicts Lisa’s love of travel. The aluminum-mounted, color photographs in the exhibit span travels in eight countries, including: Canada, China, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Nicaragua, and the USA. As an overview and taste of her travels, she intermixes landscapes with history and monuments, people with nature and architecture. The presentation invites an interactive quality for viewers to join her in a sense of adventure.

Lisa M. Kurtzhals currently resides in West Lafayette, IN where she attends Purdue University as an Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering student.

Please join us at the RMSP Gallery for an opening reception on Friday, September 2nd, 5-8pm and the following afternoon, Saturday, September 3rd at 1pm for a talk with the artist.

For further information or questions contact RMSP at 406.543.0171 or Lisa at lisa.m.kurtzhals@gmail.com. The exhibition can also be viewed online at www.rmsp.com/gallery , beginning Friday, September 2nd.

For years I didn’t quite “get” the whole B&W photography thing.  The world around me is in color and that’s the way I wanted to preserve it in photographs.  Ironically, it’s the immediate feedback provided by digital that got me to thinking more about monochrome compositions as a way to minimize the “seduction of color,” as Jay Maisel says.

Once I became more comfortable with exposure, lighting, compositions, etc. (thanks, RMSP!) I found myself returning to film – first medium format and now large format as well.  And B&W has been in my film holders more and more as I explore shapes, textures, tones and contrasts trying to “see” beyond the color.

The lesson I’m working on these days is using color filters to modify my film images.  Sounds odd, but modern B&W film is sensitive to the range of RGB colors we associate with digital capture, and color filters help adjust B&W images based on manipulations of RGB values.

The primary lesson I’m working on with filters is this:  for a specific colored filter, the tones in the composition made up of that color will be lighter and the tones of the opposite and complementary colors will be darker (opposite/complementary on the color wheel).  Varying degrees of filter color density will give varying amounts of change.

For example, a sunny day with big puffy clouds against a blue sky and a composition of a forested mountainside.  With no filter the blue sky will be brighter than your eye thinks because the film is more sensitive to blue wavelengths.  As a result, the brightness of the sky will be close to that of the clouds and you’ll see little contrast between them, leaving a flat appearance to the sky.  Putting an orange or red filter on the lens will result in blue light being absorbed, rendering the sky darker without affecting the clouds.  Now the image will show bright, white clouds against a dark sky with the degree of darkness depending on the density of the orange or red filter.

In another example, objects of different colors but with similar luminance values can show up in an unfiltered B&W image as the same shade of gray.  By using a filter to block one color preferentially,  you can darken one object enough to make it stand out.  Say your image is of apples in a tree with green leaves where the whole tree is evenly lit.  If the red apples and green leaves are equal in luminance they will show up as the same shade of gray in your picture – probably not the result you want.  By putting a red or green filter on the lens you can darken either the apples or the leaves enough to make them stand out separately.

More on this for B&W film can be found at http://www.fineart-photography.com/bwfilter.html

Why this is important to digital is that the same RGB colors can be adjusted to enhance your B&W images when you convert them.  The software programs I use (Lightroom, Photoshop, NIK Silver Efex Pro 2) all provide the option of adjusting individual colors even after conversion to B&W, either globally or locally.  With this capability you can post-process your image as if you had used a color filter for B&W film, but with the advantage of being able to make as many changes as you like.  Adjust the blue sky by “adding” a red filter and make those puffy clouds stand out, or showcase those red apples in a green tree.

What I’m doing now is looking for image opportunities that I know will be B&W in their final form, and paying attention to the colors in the scene so I can use these “digital filters” in post processing.  Here’s an example from a photo tour I did of Great Sand Dunes National Park in southeastern Colorado.  I wanted to show the lines, curves and texture of the sands but in color it all came out the same (the color image has not been processed).  Only in B&W did I get the look I wanted.

So keep your colors in mind when you’re out scoping B&W opportunities and use them along with your digital tools to create the look you want.

My job going into this project was ostensibly to document every aspect of our research project. But the longer I was there, the more I relaxed into my role and began to recognize and anticipate the light, and the more the coffee farmers and their families tended to invite me into their lives. As a result, my photos “on the side” naturally became more intimate and revealing.

For example, on the afternoon of the fifth day of our project, I found myself sitting outside under the overhanging roof of the golden brown adobe building where the workers stayed with their families. The sun was bright but we were in the shade as the pickers came in one at a time to do their muscle tests and have the EMG electrodes and wires removed after a day of testing.

Each man stopped long enough for me to fire off a few close-ups with my 70-200mm lens, a shallow DOF, and on-camera Speedlite flash (to compensate for the backlight). Despite the chaotic activity around me, it became my own personal portrait studio with golden light reflecting off the earthen walls and the time for me to focus on their remarkably unselfconscious eyes. It was magical, I knew it, and I didn’t want it to end.

Of course, it did end, and we moved on to other things and other opportunities arose to shoot their kids, wives, and animals in a similar light. But the “portrait session” made an imprint on me for how the light, the subjects, the right equipment, my readiness, and my recognition of what was unfolding all came together at the same time. And it would not have happened had I not been coming back day after day. I can only imagine what may have emerged had I been able to stay longer.

Next Month: Yep, Nicaragua has bugs (and snakes!).

Needless to say, the photographic opportunities were as ripe as the papaya we ate every day, which means it will require more than one blog article to share the experience. In the eight days of the project and an additional eight more days I spent in the city of Leon for fun, I depressed my shutter button over 3,000 times. One thing I learned right away after reviewing my images: not all of them or even a high percentage of them were masterpieces (dang!). Like in photojournalism, oftentimes you take the less-than-ideal conditions and situations you’re dealt with and shoot it the best you can in order to tell the story. But it does pay to be open and alert (and even anticipate) the interesting compositions, beautiful lighting, and spontaneous happenings that can make images even more compelling.

This is what I brought along with me to capture and back up the images: a Canon 7D camera; 70-200mm 2.8 IS, 28-75mm 2.8, and 10-22mm 3.5-4.5 lenses; 580EX Speedlite; 1.4 EF Extender; 500D Close-up Filter (for macro); twelve 8GB CF cards; Canon G11 10MP point and shoot camera and SD cards; assorted batteries, lens caps, and cleaning supplies; Nexto 160 GB battery-driven portable hard drive that receives CF cards directly; and a Kata R-101 bag to carry it all. I did not bring my computer for weight and safety reasons, and I brought my Rollei carbon fiber tripod but it was mainly used to support an antenna for the research equipment.

Here are a few images as a way of introducing you to the people, the place, and the project.

Next article: Diving deeper into the coffee growers’ lives.

I don’t do so well taking posed portraits whether it’s in a studio or not. Directing people, choosing backdrops, controlling lighting – not my strengths. But shooting candid shots, well, THAT gets my blood flowing. What could be better than capturing a spontaneous, unselfconscious look that tells a great story in and of itself.

Not that candids are shot without planning, plotting, and anticipation, but in my experience the opportunities just seem to appear in continually surprising ways. And while I have all the respect in the world for good traditional portrait photographers and their craft, I know I’m not one of them.

Here are some recent candid shots that illustrate what I’m saying. The first one I stumbled upon while nonchalantly shooting the ceiling of the Chihuly Bridge of Glass (like everyone else does who walks under it) on a nice sunny day. But I happened to spot the reflection of three women who had stopped to photograph the ceiling and admire the imbedded glasswork. An amazing image appeared – their reflections looked as if they were a part of the artwork themselves! I shot it at 1/30 sec, f/4, ISO 100, 75mm, on a tripod.

The next one is a normal everyday shot I got when scanning the gathering at a friend’s wedding with my 70-200mm IS lens. I purposely shot the repeating figures with a shallow depth of field (f/2.8) with the focus on the nearest one, but what I didn’t realize until I was told later was that they were all siblings. Nice chance natural “portrait.” (1/100 sec, ISO 3200, 200mm, no flash.)

The third image was taken at the same wedding during the reception when they were contra dancing, but this time I played with a slow shutter speed (0.6 sec) using an on-camera Speedlite flash to try and freeze some of the motion while blurring the rest. In the manual mode, I also set the ISO at 3200 to shed light on the background dancers. This image was the best of the experiment and the wedding couple’s favorite.

Each and every one of these candids was a treat to capture because of the surprise element. They all required pre-planning the exposure settings and watching and waiting for the fleeting opportunities to emerge, but each paid off as if they were great discoveries.

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I am headed to Nicaragua to shoot a project to help coffee harvesters and hope to write about it in upcoming blogs. In the meantime, have a meaningful and safe holiday everyone.