Ian Adams Environmental Photography

BOOKS

Backroads of Ohio, my MBI/Voyageur Press collaboration with travel writer Miriam Carey on some of the roads less traveled in the Buckeye State, will be in the bookstores in early May. In the meantime, here is a link to a description of the book on the Voyageur Press website.

Our First Family’s Home: The Ohio Governor’s Residence and Heritage Garden, which is being published by Ohio University Press, has been delayed for a few months to allow Ohio’s new Governor and First Lady, Ted and Frances Strickland, to get to know the Residence better and decide how they wish to contribute to the book, which is now slated for release in early 2008.

WORKSHOPS , SEMINARS & SLIDE PROGRAMS

The University of Akron’s Workforce Development and Continuing Education group will hold another two-day Digital Nature Photography Workshop on April 27-28, 2007. The workshop will include a half-day field photography session in Cuyahoga Valley National Park and 1½ days of intensive classroom instruction on the basics of digital nature photography. For more information, call (330)-972-7577 or visit the University of Akron’s website at: www.uakron.edu/ce/schedules/photog.php This workshop is especially suitable for beginners in digital photography.

Experienced photographers may wish to join the Mansfield Weekend Photo Tour that I will be conducting with friend and fellow photographer Jim Roetzel for the Cuyahoga Valley Photo Society (CVPS) in the Mansfield, Ohio area on April 20-22, 2007. We will be visiting Fowler Woods State Nature Preserve, which has a spectacular display of marsh marigolds and other spring wildflowers, as well as Kingwood Center, Ohio’s largest public garden, which will be ablaze with flowering daffodils, tulips, and other spring bulbs in mid-April.

Another highlight of the photo tour will be a visit to the Mansfield Reformatory, which has the largest cell block ever built in a prison, and was the setting for several movies, including The Shawshank Redemption and a scene from Air Force One. Below is a link to a CVPS website page which provides more details on the photo tour:

http://www.cvps.org/wkshops07.html

On May 26, 2007 Holden Arboretum will be hosting a Floral Photography Feast to photograph flowering shrubs and other spring beauties at the Leach Research Station in Madison. After a 2-hour classroom session with tips on digital flower and garden photography we’ll car pool to the Research Station to photograph dozens of spectacular rhododendron, azalea, and viburnum hybrids at the peak of their late spring bloom. A review session will be held on Wednesday, June 6 from 6:30-9:30 pm to share photos taken on the photo tour. This is one of several programs I will be conducting at Holden Arboretum during 2007. For more information, call Vonna Zahler at (440)-946-4000 or visit www.holdenarb.org. This program is for experienced photographers.

You may also wish to consider the 2½-day Lake Erie Islands Photography Workshop on June 8-10, 2007 at Ohio State University’s Stone Laboratory on Gibraltar Island at Put-in-Bay in northwest Ohio. Stone Laboratory conducts research on a variety of Great Lakes environmental issues, and the photogenic island scenery together with the excellent restaurants at Put-in-Bay makes a very enjoyable combination. Participants stay in cottages on Gibraltar Island, the food and facilities are excellent, and a Stone Laboratory boat is available for field photography trips to Middle Bass and South Bass Islands.

Photographic subjects included sunrises and sunsets, a historic winery, cliff scenery and glacial grooves, the harbor at Put-in-Bay full of boats and water birds, a lighthouse, wildflowers and gardens. And at a price of only $450, including tuition, lodging and meals for 2½ days, this program is very attractively priced. Contact Kelly Dress at (614)-247-6500 for more information or to register for the workshop. This program will appeal to both beginners and more seasoned photographers.

FIELD NOTES – YAKTRAX
During February I spent a day photographing some impressive ice formations at Old Man’s Cave and Conkle’s Hollow in Ohio’s Hocking Hills, roughly midway between Columbus and Athens. The hiking trails were extremely icy, with some sections resembling the surface of a skating rink. Many visitors were losing their footing on the slippery surface, especially on the many sections of ice-covered rock steps in the gorge at Old Man’s Cave. Despite the extra padding afforded by middle age, I find that I don’t bounce off rocks as easily as I did in my youth, and digital cameras and lenses rarely survive a fall from several feet onto the rocks along hiking trails.

Anticipating these conditions, earlier in the week I had purchased a set of Yaktrax for my hiking boots. Yaktrax are lightweight, tubular rubber frames covered with steel coils that are pulled over the soles of your boots and fastened with a Velcro strap. They provide secure footing on sheet ice – I never slipped once while hiking the entire trail at Old Man’s Cave and Conkles Hollow.

They can be purchased from department stores such as Walmart and cost about $30 – a great investment for safe winter photography!

Here’s a link to the Yaktrax website: http://yaktrax.com/products.aspx

TECHNICAL TIPS – SELECTING AN LCD MONITOR

A few years ago virtually everyone used CRT monitors with their PCs or Macs to view digital images, but today the LCD monitor is ubiquitous and most monitor manufacturers no longer offer CRT monitors, other than a few very expensive models designed for graphics or CAD/CAM applications. The quality of LCD monitors has been steadily improving and they are becoming more and more affordable, so recently I decided to retire my tried and trusted Viewsonic P225f monitor and invest in a new LCD monitor. Like many digital photographers, I spend far more time sitting in front of a monitor working on my office computer than looking through the viewfinder of my camera, so choosing a good monitor is an important decision.

A bewildering variety of LCD monitors are available from manufacturers such as LaCie, Dell, Viewsonic, Apple, and Samsung. Many recent Web reviewers have extolled the virtues of EIZO (pronounced “AYZO”) LCD monitors, and after exchanging a few emails with EIZO sales representatives I was able to set up a demonstration of two EIZO monitors with Matthew Fehrmann at Dodd Camera in Cleveland, Ohio.

The two EIZO LCD monitors I looked at were the Coloredge CE240W, a 24-inch model, and the smaller but more expensive 21-inch Coloredge CG211. Both of these monitors are available in a black or beige finish, and each includes EIZO’s own proprietary software for calibrating the monitor. For comparison purposes, Matthew had set up the EIZO CG211 next to a comparable LaCie LCD monitor, and the EIZO CE240W was installed on his desk next to an older 23-inch Apple Cinema Display. Both of the EIZO monitors displayed an image that was brighter, sharper, and much more even across the screen than the Apple Cinema Display, though in fairness the latter was an older model showing signs of wear. When we examined a child’s portrait taken with a high-resolution medium-format digital camera, the EIZO CG211 seemed a little smoother and sharper than the LaCie, though you had to look very closely to discern the difference.

The specifications of the EIZO CG211, which retails for $1300 more than the EIZO CE240W, state that it incorporates more advanced circuitry and other technology that allow it to display a wider color gamut than the CE240W. Try as I might, I could detect no significant difference between the two EIZO monitor displays, and opted to purchase the less expensive CE240W, which also provides a wider, 24-inch display that is great for viewing panoramic images, double-page spreads or two pages of text side by side. I also purchased the optional hood for the CE240W monitor, which weighs about 25 pounds, far less than its predecessor, a Viewsonic P225f CRT, which tipped the scales at a whopping 78 pounds.

Unlike CRT monitors, which can be adjusted to give an optimal display at various screen resolutions, LCD monitors provide their best results at a fixed resolution known as the “native” resolution of the monitor. The native resolution of the EIZO CE240W monitor is 1920x1200 pixels, which is a sharper display than I was able to get from my Viewsonic CRT monitor. The EIZO display is also flicker-free and absolutely even across the wide screen.

The EIZO CE240W monitor was very easy to install, and includes a comprehensive set of adjustments for brightness, contrast, white point, color and other parameters. I prefer to set the White Point to 6500K, and Gamma to 2.2, on my monitor.

LCD monitors, like CRT monitors, need to be calibrated regularly for best results. I used my Gretag-Macbeth Eye-One system to calibrate the EIZO monitor, but the resulting display was a little too bright, and prints made on my Epson Stylus Pro 9800 inkjet printer were too dark. However, when I repeated the calibration using the EIZO Color Navigator CE software that is supplied with the monitor I got an excellent calibration that produces a display that is very close to an Epson 9800 print.

You can obtain more information about EIZO LCD monitors from www.eizo.com .

If you would like to see a demonstration of an EIZO monitor in northeast Ohio, contact Matthew Fehrmann at Dodd Camera in Cleveland: (216)-361-6805 or fehrmann@doddcamera.com

WEB SITE UPDATE

Last week I met with my website maestro, Jon Wilhelm, to discuss some updates to the site. The searchable website gallery now includes more than 700 photographs, and will be expanded to at least 1500 images by the end of 2007. In addition, we will be changing the overall color scheme of the website to give it a fresh look, and reprogramming sections of the site using the latest software technology to make it easier to update and maintain.

In the meantime, please visit the searchable gallery and enjoy the 700+ images that are already posted.

Best Wishes,
Ian and Fuji