Lane Scheideman

Today I went on a bird tour of the Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge with my friends Chris and Maureen. Chris had won the photo-tour at an auction last year and was nice enough to invite me along. Our guide, Roger, took us on a drive around the refuge pointing out and educating us about all the amazing wildlife in this area just north of Vancouver, Washington.

I learned a lot about the birds and also learned how difficult it is to capture these birds in their native surroundings. I took all of these images with my Nikon D300 and a 300mm f/2.8 lens (which was borrowed from a friend at work. I’ve also performed some drastic cropping on the images so you can see the birds as more than just a speck amongst the brown trees and bright white clouds.

Red-tail hawk being pestered by a smaller bird

Juvenile Great Horned Owl

Two male wood ducks

Cedar Waxwing

Great blue heron in flight

Good Morning Everyone,

With the purchase of my new camera, I decided that I’d start a new photography blog. The new blog will contain articles about my life as a photographer. There will be instructional articles about using the D300 or photography in general (using my experience as a technical writer) or informational articles about the photography world (using my experience as a journalist).

This blog will remain as a photo gallery so those of you who just want to see my pictures can remain subscribed to this blog without being interrupted by my photography articles.

Thanks for reading,
-Lane

Hello all,

I don’t have an image for you today, but I do have a request. I would like you to take a look at a slide show that I’ve set up over at my other web site www.lanescheideman.com.

(edit: The site seems to be alive again.)

I am hoping that you will critique those photos because I am planning on entering a juried exhibition at the Newspace Center for Photography, a local photography resource center and gallery. Based on your feedback, I’ll be able to pick which images I should submit.

The slide show exhibits 24 photos that I really like and I feel show of my talents as a photographer, but I will only be submitting 5 of them, which is where you come in.

I would first like you to take a look through the slide show and pick out your ten favorites. You can decide by using your gut feeling, looking closely at composition, paying special attention to the emotion of the shot, or basically because one makes prominent use of your favorite color.

Once you have the top ten decided, I’d like you to then pick the top five and then rank them in order from first to fifth; I would also appreciate you telling me why you prefer those photos.

Please respond before April 28th with:

• Your top ten list (making use of the image numbers: critique_xxx)
• Your top five ranked list, along with any comments
• Your name and email

You can respond either by email (click on “Lane Scheideman” in the upper right hand corner of the slide show) or by leaving a comment to this blog entry.

To entice further participation, I will randomly select one person who submits a critique and send them a framed 8×12 print of their #1 photo. (Note, if I have readers from outside of the US, I may have to alter this award due to shipping costs).

Thank you very much for visiting and reading,
-Lane

This past Saturday was to be a nice lazy day around the house. It started a little overcast, but held great promise of the coming Spring.

That is until my neighbor came knocking on my door. “We have a tree issue,” she said.
I had hardly finished my first cup of coffee when I headed outside and saw the issue to which she was referring.

One of my cedar trees, which had a split top, had decided to go visit my neighbor’s house. Fortunately for them, their maple tree decided to intervene.

Following are a couple more detail shots of the spar and its precarious perch.

Based on this situation we decided we should contact a tree service, luckily both of us had used a company in the past and were very happy with their work.

The foreman was on site in about an hour and gave us the good and bad news. Good, they could do it today; Bad, it wasn’t going to be cheap. Compared to the cost to the tree falling on my neighbor’s house and the other spar (you’ll see it later) falling on mine, we decided to get it done.

A two-man crew came out and anchored the “former” top of the spar to the limbs of the maple tree and anchored the still-attached spar to the rest of the cedar.

Once the spar was cut, the crew was able to control the fall of the spar into the narrow area between our houses, missing my fence, my neighbor’s deck, the power main going to my neighbor’s house, the houses, and most importantly themselves.

It was amazing to watch it unfold. Oh for a quality video camera.

Once the rogue spar was grounded, the crew’s attention was turned to the remaining spar still perched atop the remainder of the cedar. As you can see in the image the remaining spar tapers down to just a semi-circle where the split occurred. Both Dave and I were not comfortable with leaving the spar up.

(image: the not-so-stable second spar)

Dave took a few furtive glances at the tree, scoped out my back yard, made his selection and began cutting… felling it perfectly into my backyard, where it pounded down on the bank in my back yard and stayed put. Perfect shot.

First of all, I want to thank all of you for finding my gallery, especially those of you who are regular visitors. I really enjoy the fact that people take time out of their days to look at my pictures, even those who get here via the random Google search.

This post is to make public my photography-related New Year’s Resolutions.

I spent New Year’s Day taking a close look at what I want to accomplish in the next 12 months in a number of areas including: my physical, emotional, and physical well-being and also what I want to do with my arts and hobbies.

I won’t bore or scare you with the first three, but will share with you my photography goals.

1. Take more photos — This is a no brainer. I’m not too specific in this goal because the following goals will enforce this one.
2. Take one trip, out of state, where photography is a major reason for the trip — There are several places I can visit where ex-Oregon friends now reside: Phoenix, San Francisco, Denver, Seattle, and Calgary.
3. Take at least three trips, in the Pacific NW, where photography is a major reason for the trip — I’ll be taking a workshop that my friend Gary Hayes helps organize. I’d love to visit Crater Lake and Mt. St. Helens again. Plus there are my many regular trips to Cannon Beach (I’ll try not to count those as part of the three trips).
4. Revive and Reinvent my Intersections: Portland photography project — A couple years ago I came up with a pretty good photo exercise, but it never got its feet off the ground. So this year I will redefine the project and start working on it.
5. Continue archiving my old photos — These are slides, negatives and prints from my photography past, as well as my dad’s.
6. Join a stock photo agency — There are two parts to this goal:

• iStockPhoto — I need to do a bit more research into iStockPhoto to see if it is right for me, but I would like to give my photos a chance to work for me. This is something I’ll do in the next month or so.
• Getty Images — This will be a higher profile agency that will be tougher to get into. It is a fairly elite stock photo agency, but they just introduced a new program called their “Placement Fee Collection”. Basically, you send them ten of your best images and they determine whether you are good enough to be part of their “House” collection, which would be an amazing honor. If you are good, but not quite good enough for a House collection, they may offer you a chance to be part of the Placement Fee collection, where I would pay them to host my photos, in hopes that they get contracted out for big bucks.
  There is one big catch with joining Getty: They will not accept images taken with a Nikon D70 (my current digital SLR). So to accomplish this part of the goal I’ll have to pick up the Nikon D200. Good News? I would like to do this anyway. Bad News? I don’t have the $1300 right now. So I’ve added “Save $1300″ to my monetary goals for the year.