Jon Woodbury Photography Fine Art Prints and Canvases!

I am so excited to finally announce my Online Photography Gallery!
After literally years of work, I have collected many of my favorite and most popular images into an online gallery where you can browse, share, and purchase your favorite images.
You'll notice many images from my trips to Europe as well as many locations from around the United States.
You can share your favorites on Twitter and Facebook or comment right there on the site. I'd really love to hear your feedback!
Enjoy it, it's been years in the making.

PS. If you follow my photography page on Facebook or Twitter you can get a code for a discount on purchases through the end of September!

{Photo IQ: I'm going to talk about the image of the leaves for the instructional part of the post. Sometimes the most important aspect of photography is simply being in the right place at the right time. I went out for a walk with my camera on an autumn day after a frost and saw these leaves trapped in ice on the pond near my house. It's a rare and beautiful phenomenon and only lasted about 30 min before the pond melted again and the leaves sunk to the bottom. The tip for today day is simply to SHOOT! Get out there with your camera and make images. Take photo walks, either by yourself or with a friend. If you're in Utah you can go to http://www.photowalkingutah.com/ or organize your own. I'd LOVE to go shoot }

For those of you on smart phones who can't see the video below, click here to be whisked directly to the album.

See more at www.jonwoodburyphoto.com

Prague, Before and After -- Europe Fine Art/Travel Photography

I've been enjoying the wedding off-season by doing a little of the work I've been piling up for years. Lori and I went to Europe in 2006 for the World Cup and I came home with about 4500 images. It was the next year that I started my photography studio and haven't taken a breath since. So for years I've longed for the time when I could do some editing and perhaps even launch a web store on which to sell my travel and fine art prints. Well, I'm still a ways away from it but I HAVE begun editing some of my favorite images from Europe and my other travels since. For fun I thought I'd show both the original file as well as the finished product. For those of you who are not used to the editing process for fine art photography, it is a LONG, tedious process. It takes hours and hours and I'm still rarely satisfied. It's a long journey from the limited data the camera can capture to the dynamic image that shows the viewer the scene as it was in my head at the time.
Anyway, this is one of my favorite places on the planet, the view from Prague castle.

Milestone Image #3

Here is another significant image from my time in the Czech and Slovak Republics. It is my very first ah-ha moment about depth of field. It is a shot of a couple of kids shopping at a Christmas flea market in Prague. I didn't know that much about depth of field at the time and I didn't actually do this on purpose. It worked out because in such a complicated scene, shortening the dof brings the focus to the kids and minimizes the distractions. It gives the impression that the kids are looking at specific puppets as opposed to just browsing.
You'll see a consistent scratch running through all of these shots. I'm not sure where it came from but I actually think it came from the machine that scanned these here in the US as opposed to over there when they were originally developed. Hmmm.

A couple of other shots from the same era as well. The first is one of my favorite shots I've ever taken. Not incredibly significant but I love it. I have a thing for old statues. There's something about shooting a "portrait" of statues that I really enjoy. It's a lot like a person posing for the camera.

The second supplementary shot is a slice of life shot from our apartment in (I believe) Zilina, Slovakia. It's kind of fun.

Milestone Image #2

A time of great progression for me, both spiritually and photographically was when I was serving a mission in the Czech Republic, Prague Mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I had taken with me a standard point-and-shoot film camera that did a decent job. I don't remember the brand but it had an extra wide-angle lens which ended up being very handy and I remember it was on sale at Kmart. (After all, my sister left on a mission to Romania the week before I left so money wasn't exactly plentiful.) While I was serving in Zilina, Slovakia I bought a beautiful Russian Zenit 35mm slr. It weighed about 4 tons and its solid steel construction was basically indestructible so I hauled it around on all of our many adventures. (At' zije Hra Vlaku!) Being a poor servant of the Lord however, I didn't have tons of money for film. Cue a miracle in the form of a case of bargain basement out-of-date Russian b&w 800 iso film! I am hoping I kept a package from this film because I'd like to scan the box and post it--it lasted me about a year and a half of picture taking fun. You'll see that the skill with the fully-manualmatic auto-nothing camera was sadly lacking but the images are fun. They have so much character. Old emulsion, Soviet engineering and a complete lack of care by eastern European film developers left them with no contrast, oddly vignetted, scratched and spotted with dust. In short--I LOVE them. There are several which I consider influential images for myself so I'll be posting quite a few in the next little while.
The first is an old street performer on the amazing Charles Bridge in Prague. He looks haggard and a little bored as he plays the accordion in below-freezing temperatures. Everything from the stone bridge wall behind the musician to the people in the background paying him no attention made me realize how important the context is to me.. Even now I shoot with shorter lenses and smaller apertures because the location and context is so important to me and the style of the images I like to make.

To fit with the theme, here are a couple of other shots of Prague street performers on Charles Bridge from the same roll.