Photography

I have always liked astronomy.  In fact, my  interest in photography and astronomy go hand in hand. When I a senior in high school I took a science class that was half the year photography and half the year astronomy. That class changed my life. I stayed in touch with my high school teacher until he passed away several years ago...

Check out my interview on "Tamron Recipes: Great Chefs in Photography." 

...I started down river early, doing my morning Facebook Live session. If you don’t follow my private page on Facebook, Lewis Kemper, you may not get notices when I go live. Every morning I go out kayaking I start off with a 5-15 minutes ride down the river live on Facebook. There wasn’t a lot to share that morning, but near the end I observed a lone otter swimming upstream. I mentioned that I could not possibly follow it since I was paddling with one hand while holding the phone for the Facebook Live in my other hand. It seemed like it was going to be a low yield day.

...I noticed some movement on a log up ahead and saw it was the single otter hauling a salmon up on the log for breakfast. Fortunately for me the log is at a spot in the river that is like a small bay with very little current. I was able to make some great pictures and shoot some nice video during the 35 minutes I spent watching...As I photographed the light came out from behind the clouds and made some great backlit images. Turned out to be a nice day after all!

I spent several hours following these otters around this morning...

There is an old saying "The best camera you own is the one you have with you." These days we all carry our cellphones with us wherever we go.  If you have a cellphone that is newer than a few years old, it most probably is capable of taking raw files, if you use the correct app.

I am a big fan of auto ISO when photographing from my kayak, because there are many times, I don’t have time to make the in camera changes I want. Between split second action and the fact that I need to try and keep the kayak pointed in the correct location, auto ISO usually get me close enough to get a good picture without having to think too much about my exposures. But sometimes it fails...

As you have probably heard, there is a comet in view in the night sky. Comet Neowise will be with us until the end of the month. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend you make an effort to do so, it is a beautiful sight.

Here is a short slide show of images I took on the American River between July 1-5, 2020.

Lately I have been playing around with video.  For years, I have switched my dSLR over to video mode every once in a while, to record some of the wildlife I was seeing, but recently I have been doing that more often...

...For the last show, I chose to do river otters, my favorite animal on the river to photograph. I have about 12,000 otter images in my Lightroom library. Probably 10,000 more than I need to keep, but I have a difficult time eliminating otters.  Each picture brings back fond memories of the countless hours I have spent watching them. I hope these 15 minutes you spend watching the otters give you a little insight into why I find them so fascinating.