Kutztown Folk Festival starts Saturday June 30!

My 9 days at the Kutztown Folk Festival starts this Saturday (http://www.kutztownfestival.com/ ). This summer staple is always a fun time and draws an audience from around the region which can number over 100,000!

There will be a lot of early mornings in my future and 9-days of smelling funnel cake, but the opportunity to meet new customers, and see some previous ones as well, makes it all worth while. 

One of the newer pieces that I will have at the show is this image – “House Finch”. It has become an image that I particularly like as it has many of the elements that I try to bring to my work. Much of my imagery that is about birds includes a good deal of habitat, some painterly selective focus, and soft light. The bird is  relatively small in the frame but the composition still make it the clear point of interest. The photograph was made with a Canon EOS 1D Mark III camera with a Canon EF 500mm f4.0 L IS lens and a Canon TC1.4X on a Gitzo Tripod with a Foba Superball head and Wimberley Sidekick attached.

“House FInch” available as a 6.75 x 9.75 print matted to 11×14

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Just a Drop Will Dew

Soon after I started making pictures (over 30yrs ago), I quickly became enamored with “macro” photography (photography of small subjects working with specialized lenses which allow you to focus close to your subject). My first “serious” lens was a used Sigma macro lens. It allowed me to explore nature in a way that made even the yard of my Philadelphia apartment seem like a wilderness.

I continue to explore nature through this close-up photographic technique, although now I do it with a variety of close-focusing lenses and in natural areas rather more diverse than my Philly front yard. However, it is the visual simplicity that I can achieve with macro-photography that really keeps me going back to it.

In the case of the image below, a simple line (leaf edge) and the contrasting almost-perfect orb of dew create an image of simplicity and tension. I am drawn to water droplets as characters in my work. They appear as jewels on misty mornings, after a rain, or when the appropriate dew point and I intersect.

For this image I was working with a Canon 40D and a Canon EF 100mm f2.8 macro lens set at f2.8. I had a shutter speed of 1/640 and set the ISO to 400. I set the camera to Aperture Priority and metered in Pattern mode.

Dew Drop – (c) Paul Grecian – http://www.paulgrecianphoto.com

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Blue Jay in 7×14 Series

I have been putting together a series of images printed at 7″x14″ and will be now offering this new image. The bird of course is a Blue Jay, an image I made here in Bucks County just yesterday. Blue Jays are handsome birds with sharp features and unique coloration. We’ve had one visitng around the house lately, so I’ve become more conscious of them.

The colors in this piece are very complimentary giving it a somewhat peaceful feeling. The branch lines lent themselves well I think to this more panoramic presentation. Importantly, the branchs diverge toward the right of the frame which balances the figure of the Blue Jay on the left. I had nice soft light with which to work, but a long focal length lens (400mm w 2X TC = 800mm) and low light required a higher ISO (1250). I was very conscious of the way the leaves frame the bird and the over framing of the image so that it would be a successful 7×14.

Blue Jay in Spring Foliage

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