Last Friday a group of friends and I went to Squaw Creek in Missouri to take some pictures of eagles. Every year during the first two weeks of December bald eagles come to this location to fatten up on fish and geese before they finish their migration to Alaska. I have been coming here for the last three years, braving the frigid cold, trying to get a solid picture of an eagle in flight. Thus far I have been unsuccessful. I have many images of the birds in flight but there has always been something wrong with the shot. Usually the shots have been slightly out of focus or soft because of movement. It is rather difficult to get a tact on image of something moving when you are using a zoom lens. To add to the difficulty your lens sometimes focuses on other objects in the image such as branches. This year was different. This year I scored numerous choice shots. Here are a few.

Well Pat and I had the opening of our show and it went great. Hot Shops was packed over the weekend. It seemed as if there was a nonstop flow of people coming into our gallery. At one time we even had a string quartet playing in our room. The best thing about the opening was the people I met. I made several new connections and ran into some old friends that I lost contact with.

It was amazing getting feed back on my work from so many people. I have learned more about my work and the people who view it in one weekend then I could have thought possible. For all of you who are thinking about doing a show, even if it is a small one, do it. There is nothing more fulfilling than to put your work on the walls to share.

Our show will be running until the end of December. If you are unable to go I have added the images from the show to my web site for everyone to see (www.mikecameronphotography.com).

I spent the weekend with family in Southern Missouri. While there my father, uncle and I decided to do some night time photography. We went to an abandoned house that we have worked with in the past. This building sits in front of an old cemetery out in the middle of no where. While taking pictures we kept hearing scratching and banging coming from inside the house. We told ourselves that this was just animals running from our lights. But truth be told, this really did not calm our nerves (I have watched to many ghost hunting shows on T.V.). Well we did not see any ghost but we did get some good shots.

Other Images Part 3

This image is from Fontenelle Forest in Bellevue. I had come here to walk
the forest with my boys. Giving the kids one of my old cameras they took
off to take their own pictures. While I was chasing after them this scene
caught my eye. The way the light highlighted the plants in the background
leaving the trees in the foreground a silhouette really intrigued me.

Other Images Part 2

Here are a few images that I took at Monahans Sandhills State Park in Texas. This is a beautiful park. I took these at sunrise so there was a lot of nice light to work with. It was awesome how the wind made intricate tracts in the sand. These tracts added greatly to the composition of my images. What I really liked about this park was that the Dunes were not too large like other dune parks I've been to. I was able to really get into the dunes to get some nice images. I was going to print these images for the show but they did not retain the quality I needed when printed in large format. There will be other images from this park in the show.

Other Images Part 1

With working on my show I have been to over 10 states and have taken thousands of images. With these I have been working on hundreds of images that will be cut down to about 30 final shots for the show. Instead of just hiding these other images in an obscure file on my hard drive for no one to see, I have decided to share some of these images on my blog. I will post images periodically from now to my show. These images will be the ones that I have worked on but for some reason I have decided to exclude from my show.

This first image was from Great Sand Dunes Start Park in Colorado. This was the first stop on a 5 day road trip I took to the four corners last winter. I was standing on a frozen creek bed. In the distance you can see the beginning of the Rockie Mountains and to the left you can see the edge of the sand dunes. The thing I remember most about this area was not the beautiful view but rather the multitude of fresh mountain lion tracks scattered all around me. When I saw these tracks part of me couldn't wait to see the animal so I could score a few choice shot, but that was just a small part. The majority of me wanted to gather my equipment and run before I became the snack of a hungry cat. Well I never saw a mountain lion but I did get a few decent pictures of the landscape.

If you haven't heard I have been working on a show for about 6 months. This show will be featuring a lot of my latest black and white landscapes. My opening will be Saturday, December 5th, noon - 8 pm and Sunday, December 6th, noon - 5 pm. I will be at the gallery during these times. It will be at Hot Shops Art Center at 1301 Nicholas Street, in Omaha Nebraska and will be up all December long. Below is the poster I am making up for the show.

Candy Buy Back

This Sunday I volunteered my services at Aesthetic & Family Dentistry in Bellevue (my father's practice). They were having a candy buy back event where kids could sell their unwanted candy from Trick or Treat'n. The candy will then be sent to our troops in the Middle East. My role was to take pictures of the children in their costumes. It was a fun day. There were lot of activities for the kids to do and everyone had a blast. Below are some images I took that day. The first three images were from the event. The last image was a fun shot I staged with the team before the event.

Wild Flowers

I have had several people ask about what I do in post processing and why it is important. For me what you do with your image after the shutter has been opened is just as important as taking the initial image. Here is an image that I took in the southern part of the Bandlands in South Dakota. The first image is the straight Raw image without any conversion or enhancements. The next picture is the same image after Raw conversion and other Photoshop enhancements. I had to take the first image the way it was to guarantee that I had enough info to work with in the bright sky and in the darker flowers. If I exposed for the sky I would lose details in the flowers and if I exposed for the flowers the sky would be washed out. To solve the problem I metered for an exposure in between the sky and flowers, knowing that I could do a few adjustments in Photoshop. Keep in mind that I do not use Photoshop to fix bad images but rather I use my camera and Photoshop together to produced the image I pre-visualized before I opened the shutter.

Over the last weekend I had a wedding to shoot. The wedding was a blast. We have done so much work for this family that my wife and I practically consider them family. The Ceremony and Reception were held at Bayliss Hall in Council Bluffs. This is a beautiful building. The wedding day started out cold and overcast but by the time the ceremony came the sun had come out. You could not have wished for a more perfect wedding. Below are a couple of images from that day.





I also had a senior session. I always enjoy these. This session went very well the subject was very excited to get her picture taken. Her enthusiasm made it very easy to get some awesome images. Here are a few of the images from my senior session.

Well Saturday the family and I went to the Pedestrian Bridge connecting Omaha and Council Bluffs. I was hoping to get some images of the bridge and the river together with maybe the cityscape in the background. When we got to the bridge I found that the lighting was not the best for the image I had in my head. Instead of gong after a scenic landscape I decided to concentrate on the form of the bridge. While walking across it I found myself intrigued by the strong lines of the cables on the structure. I spent my whole time there looking up at these cables. These are some of the images I got.

I have been taking a lot of grief lately because I have not taken 3 month pictures of my baby (Landon). I guess I deserve it, I have not been taking as enough pictures of him. He is a really cute boy and I’m already noticing him growing up too fast. It’s hard to believe that it was only 2 ½ months ago he was barely pushing 5 lb. He just seems like a different baby now with all his rolls. Anyways for my friend's and families' Landon fix, here are a few images I took this weekend. These were just some quick images using natural light.

My Blog

I want to welcome everyone to my blog. Blogging is new to me but I feel that this is the best way to share what I am currently working on with everyone. With that in mind let me share what my last shoot was.

Last Friday a friend of mine (Pat Mingarellie) and I joined another local photographer, Jeff Bebee at River City Round Up for some charity work. Here we took images of handicapped children with professional rodeo cowboys. This was an awesome experience for me. I loved seeing how happy the children were with their cowboy mentors. Below is one of my favorite images from that day. I love how this kid carried his little teddy bear around and had him pose for the picture with him. With looking at the cowboys smile it was hard to tell who was having more fun, him or the child for whom the event was for. This was my first year doing the event but I will be back again next year.