• Pages

  • Bio
  • Contact

• Friends of Shutterup

  • 
  • 
  • Moose’s Wild America

• Recent Posts

  • Splash
  • Zenfolio
  • Taxation without representation
  • Winter Snow
  • Riders in the Fog

• Archives

  • June 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • January 2009
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008

A little milk, food coloring and light on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Getting everything ready and setting up took longer than the shot. I had not tried the milk idea and had always used water. I think it turned out ok. Focus was a bear! I want to try this again soon. I have a few more ideas. I hope you enjoy.

Well, I have thrown around the idea of a secure site for ordering prints for quite some time. I even went to the trouble of installing the digital certificates and the site is all set up to handle those requests. After closer consideration, I have decided to use Zenfolio and let them handle my print and ordering needs.

Zenfolio uses professional labs for their prints. Everything ordered through them should be a professional quality. I do go to great pain to insure the color and format are as near perfect as possible. If you have the choice, do not let the lab color correct.

I figure they are all set up to handle the process, why not leave it to the professionals. Maybe this will allow me more time to actually take pictures rather than sitting behind a computer processing images for print. The cost of this site and the Zenfolio site will probably mean I will take a loss every year but that is acceptable to me at this point to hopefully get my business rolling. I may re-evaluate next year to see if it is all worth the expense and effort.

If you see any prints in the gallery that are not offered on the Zenfolio site, please let me know and I will be glad to upload the print.

Please visit Shutterup.zenfolio.com and order your print today!

…..and you call yourselves Americans?

We normally do not get much snow around here. When we do, I normally have to work anyway. Tuesday January 20th all the stars aligned and I had a prescheduled day off and we receieved over 7″ of snow. That is the most snow we have seen around here in 10 years. Marsha and I layered up, put the truck in four wheel drive and off we went. 

We treked out, often on roads that had not been traveled on yet making new tracks in the fresh powder. I knew where we had to go. I have been watching this spot for over a year. There were no trespassing signs everywhere but that wasn’t going to stop us on this day. We took our chances. 

This shot is from an abandon farm. Most of the out buildings are covered in vegitation to the point that you nearly can’t tell they are there. The driveway has cables blocking the enterance and I can barely get the truck in far enough to get off the road. There are power lines hanging low, hopefully disconnected, laying across the driveway. We carefully slip into the woods, around the cables to enter the property. The snow fall has picked up enough that I am having to protect the camera under my coat. We walk past the main house, crumbling and forgotten. On the back side of what was once a humble farming homestead we see this. The snow undistirbed as I stop Marsha from making foot prints in the frame I have invisioned in my head. One carefully placed and calculated shot. I can’t wait to get back home now to see if I captured what I have invisioned in my head. 

A friend of mine recent asked me if I had captured any images of the foggy mornings we seem to be having around here. I made a handful of excuses but the ultimate outcome was “No” I had not. 

Saturday morning I decided that I was going to get my but out of the house and bare the cool foggy morning. I have been watching a spot that I have been wanting to capture under the proper conditions. One of those conditions was Fog. 

My wife and I set out. She is such a trooper. I had been up for hours as usual. She gets up Saturday morning and I immediately hit her with “Let’s go shoot”. She doesn’t skip a beat, goes and gets dressed for the conditions (which by now she has learned it could mean anything with me when I’m in shooting mode) and asks one simple request, can I wait long enough that she can fix a to go cup of coffee. Of course I obliged and fixed myself one as well. 

We set out and literally can’t see 100 ft in front of the truck as we take some back roads to the spot I have visioned in my head. We always take the truck on our photography expeditions becuase we never know where we may end up.  We get to the spot early in the morning and as quietly as I can, I pull the truck off on an entrance to a field beside the farm workers house. After all, I will be treaspassing and I don’t want to alert the natives so to speak. I get the shots that I had stored up in my head and as usual they did not turn out exactly like I had pictured. Not saying they were bad shots by any means, but I wasn’t crazy about them just the same. 

Heading back to the truck I notice in the field adjacent to us, a cattle feeder that I can just barely see through the fog. I also notice some black outlined figures standing around said cattle feeder. Off I go, gingerly stepping over the electric fence and into the seemingly endless pasture. I am stepping very deliberately to dodge the cow patties while approching the black angus gathered around the feeder. Damn! I have been spotted. The lookout alerts the others and they are all watching me now. I take a couple of shots, still approaching slowly when I hear this female voice with a British accent break the erie silence of the morning. 

Startled and assuming I have been busted for my treaspass, I imediately look to see where my wife is at. Wait, a British accent? I am doubtfull that the family that own this farm and have so for as long as I can remember are recent transplants from the other side of the big pond. I slowly turn a 180 and spot a group of bicyclists coming up the road. Their amazement with the fog is as strong as mine as I listen to them discuss it as they ride. I raise my camera up and take the first shot of them and when I ready for the next shot my camera doesn’t respond. I check and I have no power. It’s that darn battery that I have suspected for quite some time as being faulty, why did I leave that thing in the camera !! I quickly swap the location of the two batteries in my battery grip, power the camera on and fire another shot. After the second shot, thats it, my camera is dead. A feeling of dispare comes over me because I know that was probably a once in a life time shot. I can’t even check my cameras lcd screen since I have no power.

Cutting my losses, head hanging low, I locate my wife and we make the walk of shame back to the truck. I quickly give the faulty battery an improper burial as if this will be any restitution for it failing me. I load up some new batteries and think desparately of another place to capture some more shots of the fog. I can’t bare to look and see if the one good shot I took was a keeper. I need to set my mind on the next location or I might as well go back to the house and wallow in my disappointment. This is not an artists best moment.

We continued on and captured a few more decent shots and various locations. To put this in perspective, I may have taken 25-30 shots this morning and I’m not feeling very inspired by any of them.

We return home and I put the memory card (an ironic term for such a device) and start uploading the photos to my computer. We got cleaned up, ate some breakfast and I sit down at my computer not exactly excited about this mornings shoot. My wife normally stands here beside me as I take the first pass over the shots of the day. She was finishing up in the kitchen while I am browsing the shots and I see the thumbnails of the cyclists. I can tell from the small preliminary images that only one of them has any chance of being a keeper.  I purposely do not look at my monitor when clicking on the image to enlarge it. 

I open my eyes after a couple of seconds with anticipation of the image on the screen. Remember, I have seen this image with my own eyes before I took the shot. I have that image in my head as I open my eyes. 

The shot is exactly like the image in my head as I took it. I rarely like any of my own work but I am truly satisfied with what I have captured. If you look closely, you can see the British woman pointing at something looming in the fog to show her fellow riders.  

-Jerry Mumma

It was gorgeous outside this morning. The humidity dropped, there was a light breeze and the mornnig sunlight was amazing. I managed to capture a few decent shots.

I recently purchased a Canon 5D and it took some time getting used to the camera. Now I am very happy with the purchase.

Finally I was able to track this little guy back to his perch and he sat there long enough for me to capture this shot. He sat in a Red bud tree protecting his food source (Zenias).

We put up a bluebird house this spring and already have a family of blue birds. I’m not sure if the parents are feeding each other or if the chicks have hatched and they are feeding the babies.

The recovery of the site being hacked is proceeding but slowly. I blew out the entire site and started over from scratch. There are still some formatting issues that I need to take care of that you may notice. I’m also starting to upload images again.

I think that I will probably take this opportunity to clean up the image database and remove some old shots or not upload shots that I no longer deem worthy rather.

Thank you for your patience.

Well it appears my site got hacked. My gallery was effected. For now I am uploading our St. Johns pictures to my Deviant Art account HERE

I will be rebuilding the site over the next week or so. I haven’t decided if I want a complete face lift or just rebuild what I had.

***UPDATE*** I found one of the vulnerabilities and have totally wiped the original site and rebuilt the front page. The gallery will be upgraded and rebuilt next. Sorry for the inconvenience. I will get the gallery repaired and updated tonight or tomorrow.

***UPDATE*** Well, I have blown out the entire site and am in the process of rebuilding. You will notice the visual aspects of this page and the gallery are very different at this time. That will be fixed at a later date. All the previous images were deleted as well. I will upload old images as I get to them. My priority right now is my St. Johns pictures. I have people chomping at the bit to see my shots from our trip. No pressure……

***This front page is loading slow due to the page looking for thumbnails that no longer exist. I will fix this as I work on rebuilding the site. ***

keep looking »