a stroll downtown

I have always said that i want to take a vacation in my own town. I rarely get a chance to walk around and take some photos and i really, really enjoy it when it happens. Today unfortunately was not one of those days but i was downtown and did take a photo. I had some business to do at lunch and this building was right beside where i parked my car. I have never noticed it before and thought it was just kind of out of place and weird. I shot some bracketed frames and ran three of the exposures through photomatix. I then upped the contrast quite a bit and the saturation a bit too.
I now want to do some more walking around and shoot a bunch more photos. I have to shoot my neices grad photos and think i will just drag her around with me and shoot some funky, overly dramatic photos. I plan to use one light and overpower the ambient. My plans by the way are not usually written in stone.

not every studio is perfect

I shot 9 full body shots and portraits on location last week. I was taken to "the only room that is available" and lets just say i was less than excited. It was a lovely board room, dont get me wrong, but it was small with brown walls.
I have shot in alot worse, really really worse on occasion. Like your subject in the room with a light and you out in the hallway shooting through the door. But i did not have to do full body in that situation and last week i did.
I set up two lights, one as a hair/rim and the other as the main. I used a dx camera and a 35mm lens to shoot the full body shots which made them look a bit on the wide angle side for my liking. I also shot some waist up shots which i was able to use a 70-200 lens for. Everything worked out alright but it got me thinking of many of the places that i have been led to set up for a photo session. I have moved more chairs and boardroom tables than most people will in a lifetime.
For this pano i took 7 vertical frames with a 17mm lens, and sent them to photomerge from lightroom (in lightroom go to photo - edit in - merge to panorama in photoshop).
I just thought of a fun little test. I am going to do a shot in a closet with two lights and see what i get.
I will post the results.

falls closer

Wow, a three post day. That just dosen't happen in my world.
I moved in nice and close with a 24mm lens for this one and shot at iso 100, f22, and a shutter speed of 1sec.

falls in hdr

We went on a little hike yesterday (rememberance day) to a place called hays falls near woodstock nb. Its about a 20min walk in from the highway on a pretty nice trail. The falls were great and i spent too much time taking photos, many, many photos.
This image was well bracketed and then 5 of the images were loaded from lightroom into photomatix pro. I am not entirely happy with the image but thought i would post it anyway as i have been slow on posts lately.
I was trying to blur the water as much as possible which meant putting my iso on the lowest it would go, aperature to f22, and then setting my shutter speed to get the exposure right. I had a tripod in the water and was set fairly low.

night shot

I have been wanting to do this shot for some time now but just needed both the time and the subjects.
We went to a downtown street and i set up two sb flashes on the sidewalk. The main light was to camera right and bounced into an umbrella. The rim or back light was a flash zoomed in a bit and shot direct. I used a 80 - 200 lens at f2.8 and zoomed pretty well to 200. I used 2.8 so the lights in the background would be round and i would not see the hexagon shape of the lens aperature. I cant remember the iso and shutter speed but i will post that here soon. I think the iso was up pretty high and the shutter speed was slow.
My models were perfect for this shot as they tried to stay warm on a night that was quite cold. I photographed them for an hour and a half in 4 locations before their ceremony which started at 7pm.

shallow depth

I have been playing around, in my spare time, with some shallow depth of field close up kind of shots.
Not much to show or really talk about yet. Hopefully soon.
This was shot at 2000iso.