Gallery Updates

I've made a lot of gallery updates on my website. Click here to see them.

Quiet Beach

I like the quiet tones and symmetry of this image. I may make a fine-art print out of it in the future.

Sandy beach of Monterosso al Mare on the Cinque Terre in Italy

All images are Copyright Terry Smith. All Rights Reserved.

Beach umbrellas closed until next year

Sandy beach of Monterosso al Mare on the Cinque Terre in Italy

All images are Copyright Terry Smith. All Rights Reserved.

Bay of Monterosso al Mare on the Cinque Terre in Italy

Bay of Monterosso al Mare on the Cinque Terre in Italy

All images are Copyright Terry Smith. All Rights Reserved.

Monterosso al Mare on the Cinque Terre

Fort protecting the bay of Monterosso al Mare on the Cinque Terre in Italy

All images are Copyright Terry Smith. All Rights Reserved.

Christmas Cards, Personalized Gifts, and Holiday Party Supplies from Stunique

You can save 25% on all orders $25 or more now through Monday at Stunique.

Now is a great time to order family picture photo cards, personalized men's gifts, personalized women's gifts, holiday party cupcake wrappers, and more!

Use promo code BFriday at checkout.

Recently Published Photography

I know... I know... It's been forever since I've blogged last. I've been really busy though! I wish I could say I've spent the whole last month taking pictures and didn't blog because I could never get a good sat-com up-link from my hut on a South Pacific beach, but unfortunately that's not an honest excuse...

I thought I would get back into the blog spirit by posting some recently published work over the past month and rambling about the pictures.

This picture of the Clinton Library in Little Rock is not my best. Frankly, I don't even like that much. I have others captured in much better light; however, I like it much better now that someone has paid for it. :-)

William J. Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Arkansas

Paris is probably my most favorite city in the world. Actually, I'm not a big fan of cities, so I would say Paris IS my most favorite city. I get an extra thrill whenever any of my Paris images are licensed, like this one from Napoleon's tomb:

Alter inside Dome Church housing Napoleon's Tomb in Paris, France.

The streets of Paris may be in French but at least they are pronounceable (for Americans like me), as opposed to trying to tell your friends back home what a great time you had on the Lauriergracht Canal in Amsterdam. The what? Did you catch a cold on the plane?

Evening sunlight on Lauriergracht Canal, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

A couple years back I did a large collection of digital illustrations in Photoshop that I coined "The Pixel Exhilaration Collection". Apparently the only one exhilarated by them was me because they've never sold well. A magazine in Russia just picked this one up for their recent issue though. I just hope they realize it's not a REAL galaxy:

abstract colorful digital galaxy purple space swirl swoosh twirl universe whirlpool whorl from the Pixel Exhilaration Collection

I started as a serious, "aspiring" professional photographer a little over ten years ago. At that time, if you wanted to be published professionally you had to shoot slide film and submit slides to publishers. Fuji Velvia was "IT". If you weren't shooting Velvia as a professional landscape photographer, then you simply didn't know what you were doing. If you were shooting Velvia then at least you "looked" like you knew what your were doing. (Or your credit card bill did anyway. It was about $12 a roll with processing.)

My very first roll of Fuji Velvia that I ever shot was on a trip to Vancouver, British Columbia (tacked onto a business trip) ten years ago this past October. The picture below of the Capilano River is not from that very first roll, but it was one of the first. While I've been fortunate to have licensed many images from that trip over the years, I'm being historically retrospective here because this image was recently licensed to a publication in South Korea almost exactly ten years from the date I took it. I'm sentimental like that. (Sorry, this blog doesn't come with a cinematic, deeply sentimental musical score.)

Capilano River seen from the overlook at the Capilano Suspension Bridge in North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

For all of the aspiring professional photographers out there, when I started ten years ago I told myself it might take ten ten years to reach the level that I wanted to be at. I expected it to take that long when I started. As it turns out, my natural artistic ability contributed a lot early on, but ten years later I still haven't reached "that level" and I'm not even sure what it is anymore. I've learned a lot, but I now know that there is so much I don't know, even after ten years of trying to learn it. In another ten years I doubt I'll feel any different.

All images are Copyright Terry Smith, 1998-2008. All Rights Reserved.

Leaning Tower of Pisa picture

Leaning Tower of Pisa, Italy

All images are Copyright Terry Smith, 2007. All Rights Reserved.

Previsualization and Professional Photography

The Photopreneur blog recently had an article about The Differences Between Professional and Amateur Photographers. The article lists important points like business and marketing skills, but I chimed in a comment that I had been meaning to blog about here as well regarding previsualization.

To really be a professional you have to be able to CREATE images on demand in any circumstance with any subject matter. This goes far beyond just snapping the camera when something that is obviously a good pictures happens to be in front of it.

One of the most important skills to make that leap is previsualization, the ability to imagine precisely what you want to capture in a picture beforehand. Sometimes this means previsualizing a scene a few seconds before you adjust the elements within it, the lighting, and/or your own position to capture it. Other times it means previsualizing a scene in another country before you even arrive on location to shoot it and then capturing it exactly as you had planned.

Plus, you have to back it up with the technical skills to make it happen. Amateurs tend to make an effort to improve their technical skills solely for the purpose of capturing a better exposure for whatever just happens to be in front of them. Professionals add technical skills to their toolbox and use them as a means to an end in achieving a previsualized goal.

Previsualization brings together all of the creative side of professional photography: creativity + technical skills + research + hard work.

For more on this topic, every photographer should be familiar with the late Galen Rowell's Created Images article originally published in Outdoor Photographer in September 1999. (His website does not allow me to link directly to the article, but you can click here and scroll down to it.) In it, he discusses his four-part visualization scale. Though he speaks in context of nature photography, the points of the article apply to all photographic genres.

Tuscan Sun, Pisa, Italy

This week's blogs will feature images from Pisa, Italy. I thought I would start things out with something other than the Leaning Tower. Below is a photo that I had forgotten I had even taken until I started editing through my images. By itself it doesn't scream "Pisa". It still needs companion images to complete the story, but for our purposes here it will serve as a preview of the great light that I had in Pisa on this day.

Tuscan sun reflected in a building window near the Campo dei Miracoli (Field of Miracles) in Pisa, Italy

All images are Copyright Terry Smith, 2007. All Rights Reserved.