Recently my good friend and old college buddy (University of Minnesota, Duluth) Layne Kennedy, shared his creative thoughts and instructions on one of his favorite tools, the Lens Baby, which he attached to a Nikon D3 camera. This short video is a basic introduction to this interesting way of capturing photos. In this mini-film, Layne discusses his techniques and vision with two Trekkers he and I were Mentoring on our recent Mentor Series Photography Trek to Banff, Alberta.

Layne has always been a seriously creative person. You should have seen some the the psychedelic images he created during our time in school together. I distinctly remember one image where he was combining exposures of an industrial plant in Duluth that had steam coming from its smokestacks. I seem to remember three different smokestacks with steam bellowing out. He used three colored filters, one each during three different exposures, which gave each steam column a different color. At last that’s how I remember it. Maybe Layne will stop by the blog to refresh my memory. I’ll ping him so stop back to see if he fills us in.

One of the great joys in helping people become better photographers is to see them improve and begin creating great images. On our last photo tour to Costa Rica our guests produced some beautiful photographs. The following link shows some of the images they submitted to showcase their work. We’re currently working on a new website which will have the ability to present the work of our guests on a more regular basis. Until that is done and up to speed we’re going to share their images with the world via our blog page. Take a look and note the copyright watermark on each image which will tell you who shot the photo. I hope you enjoy these as much as Tanya and I do. Congratulations to all the folks who traveled with us and did such a great job documenting the beautiful animals and scenery of this beautiful country.

Flowers cover the forest flower near our lodge on the Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica.

The above image by Charlotte Kidd is stunning! She shot this with her new mirrorless camera – an Olympus E-PL3. The E-Pl3 did well with static subjects but she struggled with the monkeys moving through the trees and other fast moving creatures.

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I recently left Kenya having finished our latest photography tour, workshop, adventure or whatever you might want to call it. It’s one of our ongoing Invitational Photography Tours in a land I dearly love.

This blog entry is a miniature snipit of what our small group of African travelers experienced while in this wonderful land of wildlife, landscapes and interesting culture.

As many of you know, much of my work revolves around wildlife. However, I’m very fond of documenting people and their cultures as well. My early college years introduced me to the world of journalism as I worked my way through school shooting for a small newspaper and a very successful commercial studio in Duluth, Mn. My two dear friends, Tim Slattery and Dan Grandmaison taught me a lot about the world of capturing pictures. Those formative years gave me my first introduction to the world of small strobes and the power they have for making creative images.

On our last evening in the Masai Mara Game Reserve our group was treated to our annual Bush Dinner on the last evening before we all headed back to Nairobi. The lodge we stay at goes all out with grilled meats, vegetarian pastas, and sumptuous deserts.

Masai Dancers. Photo taken with Nikon D700 with Flash to stop action

An added highlight to this nights festivities was the ever present group of young Masai dancers that are on perpetual call for birthdays, anniversaries or other special events at the lodge. Tonight they followed us to the outskirts of camp to add an ambience of traditional song and dance much to the delight of everyone present and an opportunity for interesting images.

More Photos of Masai Dancers

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Greetings everybody. What a glorious day as I type this post, head phones on and jamming out to Steele Dan. It’s a cool September afternoon and I’m happy to be back in Montana. I love traveling but it’s always great to get home.

I was doing a little web surfing this afternoon and found something you folks who are using Aperture might like to know about. It’s a company called Graphic Node. They’re out of Lithuania and they specialize in creating several different Mac related templates including some for Aperture. Aperture comes with a few templates of its own but it’s always nice to have other options so you might want to check these out. I actually had a custom template created   for our business Natural Exposures, Inc. that matches our web site’s design. A young man from Missoula, Montana did the custom CSS for us on that project. His name is Scott Rouse and you can get to his Facebook page by clicking the link to his name. A custom web page is a bit more costly but well worth it to help set your work off from others in photography world. Let me kow if you have any questions or any suggestions.

A sample of the custom template I had desgined by Scott Rouse