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| Taking on a new challenge: JondoU.com
I've taken a new job, I’ll be working for JONDO, a major photo printing company, to create and lead a new website featuring photography education and news.
It is a rather strange turn of events, I was exhibiting at an art show in Woodstock, VT, this summer and I saw two guys closely examining a frame’s corner. Rather fussy guys, I thought. A little later they were behind my booth looking at photos so I started talking to them. I introduced myself and one guy said “Hi, I’m John Doe.” My first thought was if your buddy is John Smith, I’m out of here. It turns out his name really is John Doe, and he owns one of the largest canvas printing companies in the world, saw my photos from the street as he was driving past and stopped. He prints all the photos on canvas for Costco, has five factories, three in the U.S., one in England and one in Mexico. He invited me to visit his nearby factory in New York state, so I went there a few weeks later and was impressed with the quality and let him know.
After several conversations, I made a trip out to his JONDO headquarters in Anaheim, CA. The week before I went he called and asked if I had ever been to Joshua Tree National Park. The night before I was researching it thinking I could take an extra day to go shoot pictures there. He said he knew where to go and we could go there and I’d shoot and he’d watch. So we got lots of talking done and I realized he’d be interested in creating a website to educate photographers and help make their pictures better.
So we are creating JondoU.com from scratch. We will provide education, inspiration and news about the photo community and workshops around the world. I’m putting together a team based in Somerville, NJ, and we’ll use pro photographers to write and lead workshops. It is an exciting venture that started completely random.
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| | Print of the Month: Joshua Tree National Park
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| This month I picked a shot I did last month at Joshua Tree National Park. I set a camera out in the desert and had it take a picture for 3o seconds every minute all night until the batteries died, which they did. I took about 120 of the photos and combined them in Photoshop to create this image of stars circling the North Star with a Joshua Tree in the foreground. You can purchase the photo on LorenPhotos.com.
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| | Upcoming Destination Workshops |
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Next weekend is my fun Vermont Winter Photography workshop, it is sold out and it looks to be another great crowd.
I have some great destination workshops coming up. I’m teaming up with Connecticut photographer Ron Lake for a special tour of Tuscany, Italy, the first week of July. Ron has photographed extensively there and has some special locations for us. It will be visual overload.
But before that I’m off for another workshop in Maine’s Acadia National Park,(photo above) a unique place filled with photo opportunities. We are there a couple of weeks before the summer season, which means there aren’t big crowds. While summer has sprung in most of the country it will still be spring there and the greens are fabulous and the coast is fresh.
I’m thrilled to be heading to Guatemala in March, that workshop is sold out but let me know if you are interested, you never know when someone cancels at the last minute.
I’m offering my one day Getting the Most Out of Lightroom workshop March 26 at my new JondoU.com office in Somerville. If you are just starting with Lightroom or are familiar with it but don’t know how to get the most from it, join me then.
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Favorite Photos of 2015
The end of the year provides a great opportunity to look back, so each year I select 50 photos that I made and put together a little slideshow. 2015 was a great year and I’m thankful that I got to visit great places like Hawaii, Florida, Virginia Beach, Acadia National Park in Maine, the Hamptons on New York’s Long Island, Mystic, CT, Washington, D.C., and finally California and Joshua Tree National Park. I was able to get away from N.J. and spend some time at our Woodstock, VT. I hope you enjoy the photos, see them here.
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| | | Cutting back on art shows |
| Since I will be spending so much time with JondoU.com, I’m not doing as many art shows this summer, probably only five or so. I love meeting and talking with people who come into my booth and I’ve gotten to know lots of other artists, and I want to keep that up. So you won’t see me at the smaller venues, I’ll only be doing the major shows. But you can still see all my work on LorenPhotos.com or displayed at my JondoU.com office in Somerville, NJ.
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Upcoming workshops
• Feb. 5-7, 2016: Vermont Winter Wonderland Photography Workshop Woodstock, VT
• March 13-20, 2016: Culture and Color of Guatemala Antigua, Guatemala
• March 26, 2016: Getting the most out of Lightroom Somerville, NJ
• June 5-9, 2016: Acadia National Park Photography Workshop Bar Harbor, Maine
• June 30-July 7, 2016: Tuscany Photography Tour and Workshop Tuscany, Italy
• Oct. 1-5, 2016: Vermont Fall Foliage Photography Workshop Woodstock, VT |
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| Taking pictures in the snow I love getting out and shooting in the snow. The air is clean and a nice deep layer of snow makes everything pristine. The landscape is simplified and the world becomes graphic and beautiful. But snow can fool your camera’s light meter. The light meter tries to make everything 18% gray, so if you are shooting snow, it tries to make it gray rather than white. The same thing happens on a sunny, white-sand beach. That is why many pictures you take in those conditions come out dark. So you need to tell the camera that you want your snow to be white, which means you need to OVER expose what the meter is telling you. It isn’t initially logical, but usually you need to add up to two stops of additional exposure, either by using a longer shutter speed or larger aperture. Don’t believe the camera and your photos will look much better.
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