The Slow Travel Movement

Just as there's a slow food movement - taking your time and eating fresh, locally procured sustenance, there's also a slow travel movement. Rather than caulking up another country, and if its Tuesday, it must be Rome, slow travel is going somewhere and staying - observing and participating in the community and all it has to offer. This weekend's New York Times has a question-and-answer piece with the 70-something who has traveled extensively and now travels thoughtfully and slowly.  Worth a read. http://tinyurl.com/lkwbv3m.

For Those of You Longing for a Road Trip

Great article in this weekend's New York Times travel section of Woody Guthrie's America. From Grand Coulee Dam to Los Angeles to Santa Fe and on to Long Island, its a great read and a great trip.  I more or less did it in reverse some 25 years ago, leaving Brooklyn where I had lived for a while, heading down the eastern shore to Savannah, hung a right through New Orleans, New Mexico, the Grand Canyon, and Las Vegas, before heading north to return to my roots in the Puget Sound area. 
In Search of Woody Guthrie's America

MOVING ON

Starting today, I will be blogging on photographic topics at my photo portfolio site, www.chuckkirchner.zenfolio.com. Information on my workshops, publications, etc. can now be found on that site as well.  Please follow! 

This blog will now focus on travel, my other favorite topic.

F Stop EMagazine

If you'd like to see contemporary photography by emerging artists, check out F-Stop, a free on-line photography magazine.  Each bi-monthly issue is dedicated to a specific topic, with the current issue focusing on "Cities."  Worth a check. http://www.fstopmagazine.com/home.html

Snapseed II

When it comes to creativity in photography, there are lots of options, both in camera and post-processing. In a post earlier this summer, I discussed a new app available for iPads (and possibly smartphones, but not desktop or laptop computers). It's called Snapseed and has an amazing array of special effects, most of which are fine-tunable by the photographer.

While India is a blaze of color, the simplicity in me likes the opportunity to boil an image down to its essentials. So, starting with a vibrant color photo, it took only a few adjustments in Snapseed to truly get down to the basics - almost a line drawing.  As with any photo of a person, the eyes probably matter the most, and that's obvious here.  I did not do selective work (meaning a different degree of adjustment on the eyes versus other elements of the photo), but rather and overall adjustment applied to the whole photo.  I love the result. Hopefully you will too!

Artist Registries

One way to get your art out there is to sign up for artist registries whenever you have the opportunity. I've been a registered artist in the Episcopal Church Visual Arts site for several years and have just had a photograph accepted into their latest open call "Of the Heart."   

http://ecva.org/exhibition/OfTheHeart/012ChuckKirchnerOTH2013.htm

Various organizations that you belong to may have artist registries as well.  Worth looking into if for no other reasons that to share your vision - and what better reason is there?!

Says It All

A picture is worth a 1000 words.  Or sometimes it emphasizes one word. A little panning motion shot at 1/13 of a second with the subject - Triumph - in focus. All the elements came together on this one - motion, both of bodies and of the drum stick, background totally blurred and a good depth of field in terms of the drum corps. Taken at the Pacific Northwest Highland Games, August 2013. The Triumph Street Pipe Band of Vancouver BC, one of the world's best pipe bands.