To this day, people around the island stop me and ask, “weren’t you the guy taking pictures of that truck?”
John (J.K.) Putnam
The Easy Inspiration Project really made things… easy for me by giving me such an awesome looking subject, a sunburst-orange Toyota Tacoma. This thing turned heads. To this day, people around the island stop me and ask, “weren’t you the guy taking pictures of that truck?” Despite having such a stunning subject I did run into some problems. Typically, when I’m out with my camera, I am working hard to avoid pavement, cars, trucks, and most anything manmade. For this reason, shooting for the Easy Inspiration Project challenged me. I had to completely reverse my thinking and figure out how to create compelling landscape photographs that included a Toyota Tacoma as the subject! Since moving to Mount Desert Island I have spent day after day hiking the trails of Acadia National Park and the surrounding area in search of what have become my favorite locations to shoot, but with a truck as my subject I had to start pretty much from scratch and begin location scouting all over again.
Once I started finding locations everything fell into sync. I was able to use my usual techniques when photographing landscapes. Out came my graduated ND filters, my polarizing filter, my strobes. It quickly became just another day at the office for me… in the best of ways. I prefer to capture a scene with one single frame. Rather than combining images to create properly exposed photos I use filters in front my lens to control the exposure. From there everything goes into Adobe Lightroom for basic editing. I love teaching this technique. I want to show other photographers who are just starting out that it is possible to create stunning, well balanced images without relying heavily on photo editing software.