fun night

Had a great time at state of the city address tonight and got a few good photos too.
I will post a photo in the next couple of days to explain why i have not been posting lately.

Movember

Hard to show the stash as it was very light in color but did some selective burning and dodging and put two heavy vignettes on it and masked out the areas i wanted light.
Just used one light here, softbox up high to right side. I retouched it out of the glasses.

hdr at dusk

I shot this building for a client and they requested it be done at night. That to me means go just before the sun goes down and shoot until its dark out. There is a time when you can get that nice blue in the sky and still have it look like its at night. On this one i blended 9 images in photomatix and then played with the photo quite a bit. I cant really remember what i did as i was just playing. Now i want to photograph my son and his friends on their skateboards at night and strip then into the scene.

quick portrait

This portrait took all of about 2 minutes to shoot. I set up an off camera flash and when i took the first photo i turned it off. The remainder of the shots (about 10 in total) were with natural light. The raw photos were really flat and blah. I spent far longer in photoshop tying to go a little into the dramatic. First of course was a conversion to black and white, and then multiple layers. I would duplicate my background layer and then darken it, or whatever, and then create a mask to bring her face through from the original layer. I probably did this 5 or 6 times and then went into gaussian blur and did the same thing. I blurred everything except the face and a bit of the shirt. I then did some selective burning and dodging and sharpening and pretty well had it. I really was not sure on how to crop it and still not 100% sure that this one works. The birch tree in the center of the frame really throws the composition for me.