2023 Quad Cities Marathon Photography Team: Mark Stegmaier, Erin Gehn, Ryan Gaines, Leanne Wildermuth, JR Howell, Erling Larson, Larry Engstrom, Don Henderson and Tom Moye. Not Pictured Mark Steward, and Mark VandeWiele.

We have a great team to capture the 2023 Quad Cities Marathon in photographs. In alphabetical order we have:

Larry Engstrom
This is Larry's 6th year capturing the Quad Cities Marathon as part of the official team. I'm sure he has done a few more before 2018 as well. Larry has also captured many of UTHS running events over the years and will be capturing lots of the weekend's festivities except for the 1 mile run on Saturday, when he
Ll be participating.

Ryan Gaines
Ryan is a sports photographer that will be capturing images on the Rock Island Arsenal … a location we've neglected in the past, in part due to the government restrictions of photography on the island. This is Ryan's second year on our team.

Erin Gehn
Erin lives in Rock Island and is shooting aerial pictures from the Arsenal Bridge. This is her second year volunteering.

Don Henderson
This is Don's seventh year as a member of the Quad Cities Marathon Photography Team. Don typically shoots along Ben Butterworth Parkway and historically did photos "The Wall" when it was located there.

JR Howell
I've been shooting the Quad Cities Marathon since 2012 and have had the honor of leading the photography team since 2016. I typically shoot at the Start Finish Line, but I also set up videos of the Start, Finishes, and some Drone Video and still shots of runners on the I74 bridge and other areas. I also handle most of the other shooting assignments outside of race weekend.

Erling Larson
This is Erling Larson's sixth year shooting the Quad Cities Marathon as part of the Photography Team. He started in 2017 and missed the COVID year 2020. Erling typically shoots the start from the overpass at the Moline viaduct to the Arsenal and the Finish line. He also shoots events on Saturday of race weekend.

Tom Moye
This is Tom's third year shooting the Quad Cities Marathon after shooting in 2019. Tom plans to shoot around Lindsey Park in Davenport this year,.

Mark Steward
Mark Steward is a videographer that I met while shooting for Brooke Maroon's Breaking Limits Dance Workshop. I'm excited that I was able to talk him into joining our team to shoot some drone and handheld video of our event.

Mark Stegmaier
Mark is a long standing member of the Quad Cities running community and this will be his fifth year shooting the Quad Cities Marathon as part of the official team.

Mark VandeWiele
Mark is a retired judge that took up photography in his retirement. I found him shooting the UTHS Panther Pant and convinced him to join our team year. This is his second year shooting the Quad Cities Marathon. He'll be capturing images as the runners cross the new I74 bridge.

Leanne Wildermuth
This is Leanne's seventh year shooting for our Quad Cities Marathon Team. She specializes in runners "jumping" for their pictures. I'm not sure if it's joy or delusion … she has historically done photos around John O'Donnell Stadium (Modern Woodmen Park) and will be shooting around the Centennial Bridge this year.

We plan to have thousands of photos of participants and the events surrounding the Quad Cities Marathon weekend. I hope we capture everyone that participates. These will be available sometime the week following the race as free digital downloads and will be searchable by Bib Number.

We have a great team to capture a great event.

#QCMarathon
#QCM2022
#OMSystem
#HowellPhotographicArts

Tags: QCMarathon

Self Portrait.

#OMSystem
#HowellPhotographicArts

My top photos in 2022.

A few of my favorite photos from 2022.

#dji
#GetOlympus
#HowellPhotographicArts

Did some drone mapping of Short Hills Country Club 10th hole to show new bunker layout.

787 Images in a grid pattern from 180 ft. Automated using dronelink, processed with WebODM.


#SHCC
#dronelink
#WebODM
#HowellPhotographicArts

Tags: SHCC

2022 Quad Cities Marathon Photography Team: Mark Stegmaier, Leanne Wildermuth, Mark VandeWiele, Larry Engstrom, Darrell Terronez, Phil Cunningham, Erling Larson, JR Howell, Tom Moye, Don Henderson, and Josh Wilhelm. Not Pictured Ryan Gaines.

We have a great team to capture the 2022 Quad Cities Marathon in photographs. In alphabetical order we have:

Phil Cunningham
This is Phil's first year capturing the Quad Cities Marathon as a member of the "official" team. However he has quite the experience as a professional photographer over the past 4 decades and he has captured this event in the past for Hola America. Phil will be capturing the start from ground level and will help with capturing runners at the finish line.

Larry Engstrom
This is Larry's 5th year capturing the Quad Cities Marathon as part of the official team. I'm sure he has done a few more before 2018 as well. Larry has also captured many of UTHS running events over the years and will be capturing lots of the weekend's festivities except for the 1 mile run on Saturday, when he
Ll be participating.

Ryan Gaines
Ryan is a sports photographer that will be capturing images on the Rock Island Arsenal … a location we've neglected in the past, in part due to the government restrictions of photography on the island. This is Ryan's first year on our team.

Don Henderson
This is Don's 6th year as a member of the Quad Cities Marathon Photography Team. Don typically shoots along Ben Butterworth Parkway and historically did photos "The Wall" when it was located there.


JR Howell
I've been shooting the Quad Cities Marathon since 2012 and have had the honor of leading the photography team since 2016. I typically shoot at the Start Finish Line, but I also set up videos of the Start, Finishes, and some Drone Video and still shots of runners on the I74 bridge and other areas. I also handle most of the other shooting assignments outside of race weekend.

Erling Larson
This is Erling Larson's 5th year shooting the Quad Cities Marathon as part of the Photography Team. He started in 2017 and missed the COVID year 2020. Erling typically shoots the start from the overpass at the Moline viaduct to the Arsenal and the Finish line. He also shoots events on Saturday of race weekend.

Tom Moye
This is Tom's second year shooting the Quad Cities Marathon after shooting in 2019. Tom plans to shoot around Lindsey Park in Davenport this year,.

Mark Stegmaier
Mark is a long standing member of the Quad Cities running community and this will be his 4th year shooting the Quad Cities Marathon as part of the official team.

Darrell Terronez
This is Darrell's fifth year shooting for our Quad Cities Marathon Team. For some reason we always seem to get his name misspelled … I should have it right this time. ;-)

Mark VandeWiele
Mark is a retired judge that took up photography in his retirement. I found him shooting the UTHS Panther Pant and convinced him to join our team this year. He'll be capturing images as the runners cross the new I74 bridge.

Leanne Wildermuth
This is Leanne's sixth year shooting for our Quad Cities Marathon Team. She specializes is runners "jumping" for their pictures. I'm not sure if it's joy or delusion … she has historically done photos around John O'Donnell Stadium (Modern Woodmen Park) and will be shooting around the Centennial Bridge this year.

Josh Wilhelm
Josh has been part of our team for three years shooting the Quad Cities Marathon working around his participation in the races himself. While he won't be here for the weekend events this year, he did capture some photos at our kickoff party.

We plan to have thousands of photos of participants and the events surrounding the Quad Cities Marathon weekend. I hope we capture everyone that participates. These will be available sometime the week following the race as free digital downloads and will be searchable by Bib Number.

We have a great team to capture a great event.

#QCMarathon
#QCM2022
#GetOlympus
#HowellPhotographicArts

Tags: QCMarathon

Top Photos 2021

A few of my favorite photos from 2021. Is it weird that I'm in over 10% of them? ;-)

#GetOlympus
#DJI
#HowellPhotographicArts

It was hard to pick the top 9 photos for the year, so I'm going with the top 20 for 2020!

It is refreshing to see that even in this lock down pandemic year, there were a lot of things going on.

Individual photos can be browsed here.


#GetOlympus
#HowellPhotographicArts

2019 Favorite Photos. JR Howell, Howell Photographic Arts LLC.

My favorite photos of 2019. Mostly sports and concerts which I love to shoot. I've included captions and photo info in this album. All shot with my new Olympus OM-D gear!


#GetOlympus
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I had the opportunity to learn from David Hobby "The Strobist" so I jumped at the chance. Here are a few photos from his Portrait Lighting workshop in Sandy Spring, MD.

The above photos show the build of lighting using ambient light (left), ambient plus fill (center), and ambient, fill and key lighting (right).

#Strobist
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As you may know, I switched entirely from Canon gear to the Olympus OM-D camera system this year. There are a ton of things I like about this system, but one really stepped out this week. That is the incredible image stabilization with the IBIS (In body imaging stabilization) as well as the image stabilization in some lenses. Here's a perfect example. This image was shot with the Olympus OM-D E-M1X and Olympus M.Zuiko 300mm f4 IS lens. As the Olympus OM-D is a Micro Four Thirds system, this becomes an effective focal length of 600mm. I've found that I like to shoot concert photos at The Rust Belt from a short ladder half way back close to the sound and lighting control pit. Typically I use a 40-150 mm f/2.8 lens (80mm-300mm effective focal length) for wide shots and the 300mm f/4 for close ups. Sometimes the lighting isn't the best, but I still manage to get pretty good shots with this Camera system.

This photo of the mandolin player in the Still Shine band is an example of a photo in challenging conditions. It was shot at ISO 3200, at 600mm effective focal length, f/4 aperture and hand held at 1/25th of a second. Yes, that's not a typo, one twenty fifth of a second. Kind of blows the guideline of one over the focal length out of the water doesn't it???? You can find this full frame / full res photo in an album of a few of my Olympus OM-D shots in this Olympus Portfolio.

Needless to say, I'm pretty happy with my decision to switch to Olympus!

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I had the great pleasure of attending the Peter Read Miller Workshop on Sports Photography this past week. This was a full 7 days of presentations, critiques, shooting, and editing. As part of this workshop I shot 10 different sports, thousands of frames, and had 62 images critiqued. Needless to say I put in a lot of time and effort and was really rewarded as I learned a lot, met a bunch of very talented individuals, and greatly improved my photos. While I learned of lot, the single most important thing was what makes a great sports photo. This shot of the baseman running drew great praise as Peter suggested it could be a Sport Illustrated magazine cover. He should know as he has more than 200 covers to his credit!

One of the photographers sharing instruction duty with Peter was Grant Leighton who specializes in Portrait Photography. I took the opportunity to have him review some of my Portraits and he generously gave me a number of suggestions for improvement. I can’t wait to put them to use.

I shot somewhere between 500 and 1,000 frames of each sport. The motor drive on my camera was humming right along … I reduced this to my favorite 5-10 for each sport for the critique session. Take a look:

Mountain Biking
Roller Derby
Softball
LaCrosse
Tennis
Baseball
Basketball
Football
Track & Field
Boxing