We head for New Orleans next for our alumni workshop. Everyone is excited, and there have been some very funny e-mails zinging back and forth. We love New Orleans and can’t wait to enjoy the sights and sounds and great food.
Thank heavens for our house sitters. Without them, we could not do the traveling we do. We can leave, knowing our house is safe. If there are going to be high winds, they batten down the hatches. If a tree falls — and that has happened to us whilst we are away — they let us know and call the appropriate people. They take phone messages and pass them on to us, delete the Spam ones, return phone calls when we cannot, cope with the mail, water the plants, feed the birds, and all the assorted things we cannot do on the road. That, and we have great neighbors that also watch the house when the sitters are out and about. Those who travel know what I mean.
And now, we revisit the last four workshops of 2013 and Arnie’s and my favorite images from them…
From the Southwest, we headed back for New England Fall Foliage. It is a long drive from Colorado to New Hampshire, but we have done it often. We put “Tara” on auto-pilot and enjoy the scenery. Just kidding … at least about the auto-pilot part.
Each state has something to offer. We have stopped to photograph wind farms, The Pony Express site, silos in the late afternoon (or early morning), whatever catches our interest; however, there was not a lot of extra time this round.
“Phew, there’s some foliage,” we said as we crossed Upstate New York. The previous year, because of the horrendous rains and strange weather across the Northeast, the foliage was scant, a very unusual situation. This year, we saw plenty of great color. With changing weather patterns, we never know quite what to expect or where. That’s the beauty of knowing a location well. If one place does not work out, another surely will.
Arnie found a patch of colorful reflections that curved around and set off some still-green grasses, their tips echoing the orange in the water..
I was attracted to some Pickerelweed, kicked off my flikp-flops, waded out into the shallows of the lake, and isolated one plant against some brilliant reflections and lily pads.
Back in North Carolina, we had some time to catch up on paperwork before driving down to the coast we love so well for Lighthouses of the Outer Banks. Here, we photograph a lot more than lighthouses. Home to the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, there are a lot of pristine scenes here. Often, our favorite images from this workshop are, in fact, from the National Seashore. Not this time.
On the sound side of these barrier islands, there were some marsh grasses that set off a magnificent evening sky. The colors were unusual for that time of day.
At our favorite fishing village in this area, Arnie had fun with this old trawler, using the morning sky and village lights to set it off beyond the lone piling.
Last winter, we did our first weekend workshop. CatchLight Gallery along the Blue Ridge invited us to exhibit our work there and run a weekend photo workshop, using the gallery as our base. It was an offer we could not refuse, and so was born what we now call Blue Ridge Mountain Magic. There is a reason that this area is so popular, and because we ran it in November, we had the locations pretty much to ourselves, and our participants made some wonderful images.
The layers of the Blue Ridge Mountains are always impressive, but the challenge is to make them look different. Arnie did so by giving them a really moody effect. The mists made the shot.
We met a world-traveled, locally-born woman who had returned from New York City to North Carolina to live in her grand-daddy’s house, and she gave us permission to bring our group there. I fell in love with her porch.
Death Valley National Park was our final workshop of the year. It offers so much for photographers, but those who have never been here have no idea of the variety of shapes, colors, and textures. Our participants always come away with some great shots.
Arnie found this patch of light soil — probably salt — and backlit shrubs in a lesser-known location and turned it into a black-and-white photograph. It gave the scene an austere look that went with its geological history.
I love the valley floor and continually marvel at the early explorers who survived it. We had a spectacular evening, the likes of which we have never seen here. Everyone repeated, “No one is going to believe this,” but these were the colors we all saw and all recorded and all reviewed on our computers.
So, it was a very good year. We met some amazing people, forged new friendships, welcomed back dear friends, and challenged our students to do ever-better work. We were pleased that we managed to get a few shots ourselves.
Next: Off to The Big Easy …
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