NANPA Day One

8:30am Summit Opening

Master of Ceremonies John Nuhn started the festivities today with an amusing collection of songs about photography, pictures of NANPA luminaries in their salad days, his own first hummingbird shot, and a lovely tribute to his parents, who encouraged his photographic endeavors. Quite charming.

9:00am Keynote Address, Jack Dykinga

Mr. Dykinga is a view camera landscape photographer, in so many ways the complete opposite of what we bird photographers do. He shoots one to ten images per day with a shutter time of 10 to 100 seconds, whereas we shoot 500 images per day at a shutter time of 1/1000 of a second. Still, I really appreciated the way he talked about developing a relationship with his subject, in much the same way one hears human portrait photographers talk. His sequences of images of the same subjects in varying light reminded me of the Monet haystack paintings we travelled up to Chicago to see back in the 90's. Beautiful images from an entertaining presenter.

Said "hi" to Arthur Morris and Ellen Anon, my instructors from the November 2005 Bosque trip.

10:30am Critique panel

A photographer, a Photo editor, and a Stock agency representative review some thirty or forty images submitted to NANPA, of highly varying quality. Although they were at times rather brusque, it was very helpful to see things from their perspective.

Had lunch with my friend and fellow Bosque participant Beth Maynor Young.

12:30 Exhibits

The new Wimberely gimbal head is here, but they're backordered until March and don't have a show special. There is a deal on the LowePro RoadRunner AW, but not that great of a deal. I talked to Jim Cozad of Cozad Ranch, where they can charge photographers to sit in blinds all day on their working ranch, which I think is a brilliant way to get more use out of their land. I talked to a really cool high-end color printing lab conveniently located in nearby Santa Cruz. I learned that the cool kids are using a printer that actually fires colored lasers at conventional photographic paper which is subsequently processed with traditional paper printing chemistry. Who knew? Also, I learned that Giclee is a fancy french name for "ink jet". It's nice to demystify this stuff.