I have attended a few of Blake’s excellent ASMP seminars over the years. In fact, an excerpt from my book Exposed: Inside the Life and Images of a Pro Photographer was published in the Fall 2012 issue of the ASMP Bulletin. That excerpt included an anecdote about how Blake’s SEO seminar led to my assignments in Patagonia over a three year period. To say the least I have learned quite a bit about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) from Blake through his seminars.

Later in his blog post, Blake goes on to say, “It’s an astonishing effort…” My thanks to Blake for promoting the Newsletter and for the high praise. It still remains to date my best marketing tool. If you would like to read more about the “Newsletter as a Marketing Tool” check out an interview I did with Rob Haggart for the aphotoeditor.com blog.

The ASMP Strictly Business blog is chocked full of good business ideas and advice from a wide variety of ASMP members and consultants. ASMP stands for the American Society of Media Photographers and it is the largest organization of its kind in the world. Its mission is to protect and promote the interests of independent photographers, to promote high standards and ethics, and to empower and educate professional photographers.

You can download the latest issue of the Newsletter by clicking on this link. If you would like to subscribe to the Newsletter please send me an email and I will add you to the mailing list. The Newsletter is a quarterly magazine that goes out when I get around to putting it together in between assignments. If you would like to check out back issues of the Newsletter you can find them on my website.

This issue includes an editorial about adapting to new technologies, an equipment review of the TrekPak dividers for Pelican Cases, an article about an on-going personal assignment, a perspective article entitled “Taking Risks,” and an excerpt from my recently released e-book Location Lighting for the Outdoor Photographer, and much more.

The Michael Clark Photography Newsletter goes out to over 6,000 thousand photo editors, photographers and photo enthusiasts around the world. You can download the Spring 2013 issue on my website at:

http://www.michaelclarkphoto.com/spring_2013.pdf

If you’d like to check out back issues of the newsletter they are available here.

Please note that the newsletter is best viewed in the latest Adobe Acrobat reader which is available for free at www.adobe.com.

I don’t normally promote photo competitions on my blog but the Red Bull Illume Image Quest is the grand-daddy of them all for adventure photographers. And there are only seven days left to enter your images in this contest. Winning any of the categories in this contest can help to kick start your career as the images will be seen by potential clients. This contest has literally helped kickstart a few photographer’s careers. If you shoot adventure images, I highly recommend that you enter the competition. It is free to enter and while it does take some time to format the images end enter all the info it is worth it in my opinion.

I know a few folks have had some reservations after reading the fine print for this competition. Red Bull does not ask for your copyright or anything like that. And as is standard with any photo competition they do ask for the rights to use the winning image(s) to promote the competition. That is pretty standard for any photo contest. Basically, Red Bull just wants to find the most insane, stellar adventure sports images out there and promote them and the photographers. And the overall winner wins a Leica S2 medium format camera system worth over $20,000.

I have already entered quite a few of my images – a few of which can be seen above and below here. While I shoot for Red Bull on occasion, and the image below was shot while on assignment for them, I am not promoting this event just because I work with them, but rather because it is a top-notch, class event. Thanks to Red Bull for promoting adventure photography in all it’s forms.

To enter your images in the contest got the Red Bull Illume website.

I am very happy to announce the launch of my new HTML 5 website at www.michaelclarkphoto.com. I have been working on this new update to my website for a few months now in between assignments and workshops. It has been a long process but the end result is a better website that looks the same across all platforms. This new HTML 5 website was built using the stellar APhotoFolio Design X HTML 5 template.

In the process of updating my website, I have also gone in and revamped all of the web galleries to show off some of my latest work. The Portfolio, in particular, has been reshuffled completely and I feel that it is stronger than it has ever been. In addition to the Portfolio reshuffle I have also reworked the specific image Galleries to include new work and a whole new category entitled “Industrial.” Over the last few years, I have been hired to shoot a number of green energy industrial sites including a recycling plant in the Netherlands and wind turbine sites in Kansas. It seems that my climbing skills as well as my lighting and portrait techniques have caught the eye of a few green energy companies and I have gotten the call to shoot for them. While climbing up a ladder inside of a 400-foot wind turbine is fairly mundane when compared to hanging off a 3,000-foot cliff, it is still quite cool to stand on top of a modern wind turbine and take in the view.

Of note, the only internet browsers that will work with HTML 5 websites at this point are Safari, Firefox and Chrome. In my testing, Chrome rendered my images the sharpest and surpassed all of my expectations. Safari, on non-Retina monitors, rendered my images quite soft when compared to Chrome and Firefox. Hence, to get the full experience of the new website, I highly recommend viewing it in either Chrome or Firefox. Also of note, the new website is optimized for Retina screens on the MacBook Pro and it looks phenomenal on those machines in all three browsers.

One of the main attractions to the new HTML 5 format was that I could have full screen images cycling on the home page as can be seen in the following three screenshots. These images appear fullscreen and I made sure that the menu and top logo was still clear and readable as the images cycle through.

One of the main reasons I switched over to the new HTML 5 template was that the images load incredibly fast – much faster than they did on my Flash website. Basically, as fast as you can hit the “next” arrow the images load without hesitation and these images are even larger than those on my Flash website! The images are sized so that they look great on a 27-inch monitor or the new 15-inch MacBook Pro laptops with the Retina screens. Below are a few new images on the new website.

Below is the opening image and a screenshot of the new “Industrial” web gallery. This image was shot while on assignment for NEXTera Energy in Kansas.

I have to say that the fine folks at APhotoFolio are continually improving their offerings and they are so great to work with that I can’t imagine using any other website service. My thanks to Rob Haggart and the folks at APhotoFolio for the new template and working with me on this new updated website.

A modified version of my Photoshop Insider blog post entitled “Embracing Risk” went live a few weeks ago on asportinglife.com.

This article takes three paragraphs from my book Exposed: Inside the Life and Images of a Pro Photographer and expands on the “Embracing Risk” theme presented in that book. It also tells the story of how I started out as a pro photographer. It wasn’t always an easy or financially pretty path in the beginning, but few freelance stories are a cakewalk.

Also of note there are quite a few other very interesting guest articles on asportinglife.co from well known sports photographers Brad Mangin, Chase Jarvis and others. My thanks to asportinglife for featuring me on their site.

Visit asportinglife.co to read the full blog post.

Click here to purchase Location Lighting for the Outdoor Photographer

I am very happy to announce my new e-book entitled Location Lighting for the Outdoor Photographer. This e-book is a 277 page e-book and is packed with pretty much everything I know about using artificial lighting in the outdoors. If you are looking to take your photography to the next level and want to incorporate artificial lighting into your images then this book will give you all the tools to do just that. This e-book is filled with detailed lighting diagrams and examples, an extensive chapter on equipment and flash accessories, advanced flash techniques and so much more.

There are so many lighting books to choose from these days you might be wondering, “How is this one different?” This is the first book that I know of that concentrates on lighting techniques for the outdoor and adventure photographer specifically. This book gets down to the nuts and bolts of using artificial lighting in remote locations. As with my other books, I hold nothing back and tell it like I see it. The opening chapter has a detailed analysis of all the battery-powered strobes on the market today and compares them head-to-head to help you make a smart decision when considering new gear. In that chapter, we also discuss flashlights, reflectors, and Speedlights. I can honestly say that I have not seen any other book on the market today that includes as much detailed and comprehensive information as this e-book does on using artificial lighting for the outdoor photographer.

If you have read any of my other books or e-books then you know I pack as much as possible into them and cover all the bases. This book is no different. I have held nothing back and in this book I share with you all of my lighting secrets and techniques.

This Location Lighting e-book discusses a wide range of topics including:

Download this e-book and take your photography to the next level. If you’d like to see a sampling of what is included in Location Lighting for the Outdoor Photographer you can download the intro and table of contents here.

This e-book is best viewed in Adobe Reader. Also, please note that this PDF is searchable and the Table of Contents are linked to the pages for quick and easy access to any part of the e-book.

The e-book is a downloadable PDF file that can be purchased for the low price of $21.95. It is an entire week-long workshop in book form.

Below are a few sample double-page spreads from the new book. As you can see the layout and text has been optimized for reading the book on an iPad, iPhone or a laptop computer. And of course the e-book is also a high-resolution document and prints very well.

This issue includes an editorial about how the learning process never ends, an equipment review comparing the Nikon D800 and the Phase One IQ180, an article about an assignment I shot last fall for NEXTera Energy Resources, a perspective article entitled “It’s Not About the Camera,” and much more.

The Michael Clark Photography Newsletter goes out to over 6,000 thousand photo editors, photographers and photo enthusiasts around the world. You can download the Winter 2013 issue on my website at:

http://www.michaelclarkphoto.com/winter_2013.pdf

If you’d like to check out back issues of the newsletter they are available here.

Please note that the newsletter is best viewed in the latest Adobe Acrobat reader which is available for free at www.adobe.com.

Late last year I was contacted by a green energy company about photographing a few of their wind turbine sites in Dodge City, Kansas. That company, NEXTera Energy Resources, was looking for different types of images than the standard beauty shots of wind turbines and the surrounding landscape. Of course, I still had to come back with some stellar images of the wind turnbines themselves, but the landscape in Kansas wasn’t exactly exciting.

Dodge City is one of the windiest locations in North America and there are at least 1,000 or more wind turbines surrounding the city. As an adventure sports photographer this assignment was quite far off the beaten track for me but I was keen to help promote green energy and also to climb up to the top of a giant wind turbine. Strangely enough, in the past few years, I have shot three energy related assignments. As you can see from the image below, my rock climbing skills came in handy even on an industrial assignment like this one. For this assignment with NEXTera Energy, I spent three days shooting at three different wind turbine sites. As usual, each day had me out shooting well before dawn to get the best light on the wind turbines.

Having never shot wind turbines before I was blown away by how elegant these giants are and how beautiful they appear on the landscape. The giant Seimens wind turbines at two of the sites reach up to an amazing 436 feet (130m). The blades are each 174 feet long (53m) and the tower holding the hub and the nacelle is a whopping 262 feet (80m) above the ground. When the baldes swish by you at the base of one of these wind turbines they are remarkably quiet for such a huge device. I have to think that these are one of mankind’s most beautiful collective works of art and hundreds of years from now these wind turbines dotting the landscape will be just as remarkable visually as the old windmills from the 1800s.

It is great to see so many wind turbines going up and the increasing amount of green energy being produced here in the USA. It was also quite nice to learn about how these wind turbines work and to see them up close. These wind trubines are technological marvels and they are already a significant percentage of our energy production, along with solar energy, here in the USA. Working with NEXTera was a great pleasure. The art director was very engaging and responsive to my ideas and I checked in with him several times during the assignment. My thanks to the fine folks at NEXTera Energy, the site managers and everyone that helped me out to create these images.

Look for a more extensive article with a larger selection of images from this this assignment in my Winter 2013 Newsletter, which will be out soon.

It is a great honor to have an 8-page feature article and interview about my work in the January 2013 issue of Digital Photo Magazine (Germany). The article features quite a few of my images (as can be seen in the double page spreads shown here) and has a lengthy interview (in German) with Ana Barzakova. The article includes some very kind comments on my work. The sub-title on the opening spread states, “The American photographer Michael Clark is one of the most well-known extreme sports photographers in the world. Why he chose this dangerous genre and how he creates his spectacular action shots, he reveals in an interview with Digital Photo.”

The first paragraph continues, “Michael Clark wants to be open and has no fear to share his knowledge and experience to all photo enthusiasts. Hard work and a pinch of self-criticism are always for him the essential ingredients for successful images. For over 16 years, he has been one of the most prestigious American action photographers.” This opening line refers to my latest book Exposed: Inside the Life and Images of a Pro Photographer, where I am quite open about the trials and tribulations that have gone into my career over the last 16 years.

These quotes were translated from the German text. If you speak German and would like to read the entire article you can download a PDF of the article from my website.

My thanks to Ana and the editors at Digital Photo Magazine for tracking me down and featuring the me and my work in the magazine.

Dates: April 3-6, 2013

REGISTER ONLINE

For more information or to register by phone, call (505) 983-1400.

Adventure photography can be an adventure in itself, involving breathtaking locations, extreme conditions, and working with elite athletes in risky situations. It requires a host of skills, including technical excellence with the camera, familiarity with a sport, and the ability to be mindful of your goals and your safety at all times.

This workshop concentrates on creating unique images of rock climbers, mountain bikers, and the activities of a working ranch. Using elite athletes as our models and northern New Mexico’s incredible landscape as our backdrop, we explore innovative ways to express the excitement of each sport and location. Topics include research and preparation, composition and camera angles, equipment selection, use of natural light, fill flash, and battery-powered strobes, and autofocus techniques. We also learn how to work with athletes who routinely put themselves at risk, and we discover the best methods for capturing the intensity of their exploits. Location days find us working with athletes who are as daring as they are skilled.

Classroom time includes daily editing, review sessions, and one-on-one meetings with Michael. In addition, Michael shares his insights and experiences regarding career development, portfolios, and photographing for stock, editorial, and commercial clients.

Who Should Attend: Advanced Amateurs and Professionals

For more information visit the Santa Fe Workshops website.

Tuition & Fees: Tuition: $1,095.00, Model and Location Fee: $120.00