So, we were home for about a week after Iceland and took a drive to the South Dakota Badlands for a couple of workshops. After filling every workshop for about 15 years, these two are lightly populated. And that’s kind of a good thing. The clients get what amounts to semi private workshops, and Sue and I get to shoot a little more. Also, smaller groups can get into areas that are tighter, in as far as having parking room for a large number of vehicles. Of course, we would prefer to not make this a habit ($$$)…!

We came in a few days early to get the lay of the land, and ran into another workshop at, what we thought was, a “secret” sunset location. I asked one of the photographers who was running the show, and he pointed to a guy walking up the hill, and said, “Rod Planck.” I haven’t seen Rod and Marlene for almost (gulp) 20 years, and we had  a long conversation about Shaw, Larry West, the business, and Iceland. We’ll probably run into him during our first workshop.

After many visits (not as many as Rod!), I’m looking for different approaches. This is why I’m a huge advocate of returning to favorite locations. After a while and shooting the same basic shots over and over, there is a natural evolution to do something different: approach, perspective, lens selection, software optimization, etc. 

Here’s a few ‘warm up’ shots taken the past few days:

Image #1: I broke out my 85 tilt/shift lens and forgot how incredible it was for landscapes!
Image #2: Always fun to isolate a single cloud over a subject.
Image #3: The sky was white on this one. A Flypaper texture took care of that!
Image #4: Creating mood in B&W using Silver Efex Pro
image #5: Isolating and simplifying small area with grass accents.
Image #6: We’ll be doing a bunch of this stuff (found a GREAT area for the workshops!)

I brought my Lightning Bug trigger, hoping for  some heavy weather during our stay. 

Of course, the (soon to be old) iPhone 4S and apps are always part of the show!

More to come…

Feel free to drop in a comment!!

Thanks for visiting and we’ll see you online!

TS