Joseph Rossbach Photo Workshop- West Virginia- September 2010

Joseph Rossbach Photography Workshop

Dolly Sods / Canaan Valley

West Virginia

September 2010

It’s hard to believe but it’s been 4-5 years since we found ourselves in the Canaan Valley / Dolly Sods part of West Virginia. In fact, this was the site of our first Nature’s Image workshop. Back then we were toting digital “Point and Shoot” cameras and were just starting to move into digital. A revisit was in order now that our camera gear has gotten more “technically” capable. Our skill as photographers, hopefully, has improved as well.

Enter the opportunity to attend a Joseph Rossbach workshop in the area. Joe is a friend of the Fair Hill MD Nature Photography Meet Up Group and agreed to conduct a workshop for us. The date was set, notices sent out, and we signed on. The workshop began on a Friday night and, officially, concluded on Sunday afternoon. A couple action packed days concentrating on photography.

Joe is a talented and energetic professional photographer that we met for the first time a couple years before during a workshop at Meadowlark Gardens in Vienna Virginia. We admired his “get right in there and get the shot” approach when he literally stepped into a stream to get the composition he was looking for. This go where few, if any, photographers have been is why his images are so beautiful and unique.

The nature of things in this part of West Virginia makes it necessary to do an extensive amount of driving between photo ops. That’s OK, we’ve been on workshops like this before BUT we must be getting older and had trouble keeping up. Driving fast on dark curvy roads, eating dinner late, and getting by on little sleep kind of caught up to us. Everyone in the group was younger than us and was clearly more “gung ho” then us. In the end we skipped a couple photo ops and did our own thing.

As always, we did come away with some take aways:

- The first time we met Joe, he got me to use the graduated neutral density filters I had been carrying around. He did it again, and got me motivated to carry those things with me and put them to use. They really work and I’ve got to get in the habit of bringing them along.

- During the classroom session Joe went over a technique he uses to “blend” 2-3 images together to bring the best of each into the final image. I’ve used “feather” when painting on an image but never thought to apply a “Gaussian Blur” to the mask instead. I made a point of capturing some images to practice on.

- Joe spoke about situations where "mirror lockup" is beneficial. I had never used this feature of my camera until now and could see the difference it made.

- One of the images Joe showed us had the usual cotton looking flowing water but it also had a kind of “swirl” in it where some leaves got caught in the flow. Kathy worked at it and met with success in capturing something similar. It gave her experience fooling with camera settings.

Of course, just being at one with your camera gear for a couple days is a learning experience in itself.

Here are some of the images we captured during the workshop. Clicking on an image will take you to flickr for a larger view and access to camera data. Images captured with a Nikon D60 are Kathy's. Images with a Nikon D300, Canon SX20, and a Nikon CP5400 are Joe's.