Looking Back 16 Years (Fall Imagery - 2009)

U.S. 2 in Michigan's Upper Peninsula (near the Cut River Bridge)
Copyright Andy Richards 2009
All Rights Reserved

OCTOBER 2009 was an exceptional year for me, photographically. We spent a week in Acadia National Park, in Bar Harbor, Maine with my buddy, Rich and spouses. Over the years, I have traveled on many photography shoots with Rich. More than any other companion. As I look at old photographs, I am very often reminded of him - and our good times together. We don't plan to stop. We just spent almost a week the Great Smoky Mountains National Park with our mutual friend, "the other Rich" from Vermont this past April.

Park Loop Road - Acadia National Park - Bar Harbor, Maine
Copyright Andy Richards 2009 - All Rights Reserved

BUSY SCHEDULES militated against us choosing the most ideal time of the year for Acadia (though in hindsight, we actually hit it pretty well). I was mildly disappointed to have missed so-called "peak" foliage that year. Shortly after we returned from Maine, I took a quick long weekend solo trip up to Michigan's Upper Peninsula ("U.P."). Only marginally pleased with the foliage in Acadia, I was determined to at least try to catch some of the color in the U.P (it turns out that after some recent review and new processing, the color in Acadia was really pretty impressive - just not the multi-shades and reds I have grown accustomed to seeing in Vermont and Northern Michigan. My favorite spot in Michigan's U.P. to stage from is Munising, Michigan, which was a 5 - 6 hour, relatively easy (good roads) drive from Saginaw, where we lived at the time. My work schedule was flexible enough that I could take off very early Friday morning and arrive in Munising in the afternoon, giving me 2 afternoon/evenings and two mornings for "good light" shooting. I did that "long-weekend" trip numerous times before we moved permanently to Florida.

Otter Beach morning - Acadia National Park - Bar Harbor, Maine
Copyright Andy Richards 2009 - All Rights Reserved

UNTIL RECENTLY, I had pretty much forgotten about that particular trip. The following year, we started traveling seriously, with our first cruise experience (to Alaska), and the many trips that followed shortly all over the world, probably overshadowed my U.P. experiences. Some of you may know that I have co-written a "book" with my good friend and talented photographer, Kerry Leibowitz, about photographing the U.P. Finding the eBook publishing game too burdensome for lots of reasons, we recently made the decision to discontinue its distribution on Amazon, Apple and other eBook publishers. Instead, we have elected - for the time being - to continue offering it on our own websites, as a freely downloadable pdf file (find it under "Pages" up in the right margin here, as "Photo Destination Books"). We think it had interest primarily (perhaps solely) from other photographers, and expect this distribution method, along with so-called "word of mouth," will suffice in the future.

Sugarloaf Mountain overlook - Lake Superior - Marquette, Michigan
Copyright Andy Richards 2009 - All Rights Reserved

MY REMINDER of the trip, and what motivated this post, was the recent "discovery" as I worked through my entire archives with a "keywording" project, in the 2009 archive folder, of some images which I had never gotten to (or perhaps more accurately, overlooked) in earlier rounds of post-processing. For the past 2 1/2 months I have undergone a complete review and restructure of my keywording process for my image archive. That meant looking at every one of my more than 55,000 archived images. The process has been - in numerous ways - an eye-opener for me. Germane to this post however, is that I frankly "missed" a few images. Part of that is the "fresh eyes" thing, I am sure. Another part of it is that in the 15 years between making these images and today, the digital post processing world has advanced proverbial "light years" ahead. In 2009, I was shooting with a 10 megapixel Nikon D200, "DX" (APS-C) sensor camera (as opposed tothe 40 mp "full frame" Sony a7rii I have shot with for the past several years, and even my "travel" Olympus camera is 20mp). I don't remember which version of Photoshop I used then, but it was well behind what we have at our fingertips today. The raw conversion engine was pretty elementary and most of my own "heavy lifting" was done in Photoshop itself. Back then, it was still impressive and I always kept in the back of my mind the possibility (probability, it turns out) that newer software develpments would allow us to do more - even with images we considered marginal at the time. So I always kept most of my stuff (to me, storage was cheap enough).

Sugar Loaf Mountain Overlook - Marquette, Michigan
Copyright Andy Richards 2009 - All Rights Reserved

IT HAS been great fun finding old images and being able to process them from scratch under the current Photoshop capabilities. In the past year or two, I have processed a few images I previously wouldn't have even bothered to try. At the same time, I found images that I am not sure why I never processed (or even "saw"). This post is solely made up of images made in October 2009 that I have recently uploaded to my LightCentricPhotography website and that I have never published before. While they may not be my "best," it was still fun finding them and realizing they had the potential to be processed with decent results.

Acadia National Park Seascape - Bar Harbor, Maine
Copyright Andy Richards 2009 - All Rights Reserved

I HAVE, of course, found others in other years' folders. I have always thought fall was "the time" for my most enjoyable photographic pursuit, and it is without doubt my personal favorite time of the year, though these days, living in the Tampa Bay area, it takes on a very different meaning. I have to travel for my fall photography now, and will be doing so soon - as I plan to spend a week in Vermont in October. You may notice a bit of a break here, as we board a plane bound for London for a week, and then a cruise ship bound for the Fjords of Norway for a few more days. Hopefully, I will have some more new material when I return, of two pretty different photographic venues, as well as an in-depth review of my somewhat newly acquired travel camera. For you, I hope many of you have travel plans for the upcoming fall season and will have a great chance to get out and shoot. Give me a few weeks, and as Arnold so famously said: "I'll be back!"