business portrait

I was asked to shoot a portrait at work and there was only one problem, it was mid august and my brain was on vacation. The only thing going for me was that the guy i had to shoot looked good no matter what i did. I shot in various locations throughout the building that he works and then we walked across the street to the location seen in this photo.
For me, photographically, this location was by far the best for background. When looking at this shot you first just see his face, but when you look past to the background there is alot going on. There were some distracting reflections of light in some of the windows which i had to retouch out and i did some work on my subject with the healing tool and the liquify filter.
I used one sb flash bounced into an umbrella and placed to the right side. I balanced it with the ambient for the background.
For starting off slow i ended up being very happy with the shoot.
I will be talking about vision, and lack of, in the near future.

different angle

While shooting my sons baseball game i decided to photograph the rest of his team also so that i could send them some action shots to remember their season. I had fun and played around alot, with different lenses and angles. I laid along the third base line for a few, the same for first base, and took lots from behind the mound. This was just one of the shots that worked out pretty good.

cs5 panorama

I was asked to shoot a new casino in moncton, nb over the weekend. I knew that it may be a bit difficult as the building is extremely long and not very high.
I knew i would be doing some panos and over the course of the day i did a bunch. I shot over 700 images, which i though was way too much, but i also did some hdr shots which ate up the memory quickly.
I opened the photos in lightroom and sent them to edit in - photomerge.
I really just added a curve for color and that was about it.

subtle changes

There will be two images to this post. They both were taken approximately one minute apart, used only natural light, and the spider did not move. The only thing that i changed was the exposure and my camera angle.
For the top image i exposed for the sky and let the spider go to black. I started by only having sky behind it and then included the trees at the bottom and left. For the image below i exposed for the spider and raised my camera up so that i got no sky and only trees in the background.
It was getting dark so i had to use an iso of 1250 and a fairly slow shutter speed. In photoshop i did a fairly heavy curve to each image. Mainly increasing the highlights and darkening the three quarter tones. I also added saturation to the top image to bring out the blue of the sky a bit more. In the original photo the sky was more of a baby blue and was really blah. I sharpened the photos quite a bit, amount of 50 to the bottom one and 100 to the top.
I have taken a pile of photos lately which i really like and i am truly surprised that i am posting two shots of spiders that i shot out my bathroom window about an hour ago. I had planned on posting an image i took this morning which used 4 strobes, two hidden in the scene, and which i did alot of photoshop work on. Guess that will have to wait.

masking black and white

My neighbor is always fixing or building something so i thought i would take some shots of his most recent project, making one good lawn tractor out of two. As i may have mentioned a couple posts ago, i am trying to change up the way i shoot a bit. This image may not reflect that but i shot alot and did have some progress on some of the other images.
In photoshop i opened an image that i had converted to black and white in lightroom. I then went back to lightroom and converted it back to color and opened that one too. In photoshop drag the black and white image onto the color image while holding down the shift key (this will center it). Since they are the exact same photo they are already aligned and the only thing left to do is to create a layer mask on the top (black and white) layer. I painted over the lawn tractor with a brush set to a low opacity, mabey 20% and just built it up until i had the amount of color i wanted showing through.

blending multiple frames

As i mentioned yesterday, i set my camera on high speed drive and these are the four frames i got. I didn't really plan for this but it all worked out quite nicely.
I opened all four images in photoshop and then selected all the layers together. I went to the edit menu and hit align layers. I then used layer masks on the layers to show through the guy doing the trick in his different positions. It is a little friggy figuring out what layers to apply the mask to first and to help me i turned the visibility off on the other two layers that i was not using at the time. That meant i had two layers visible and i could lower the opacity on the top one so i could see where to apply my mask. Sorry to be confusing on this one.

happy canada day

I had some fun today and shot a ton of photos.
It started with a basketball game in the driveway, on to a slippy slide on the lawn, and then off for a walk downtown to take in some canada day events. Oh, and photographed my friend and son taking apart two ride on lawn mowers.
So as i mentioned i have a ton of photos ready to post. I will be adding daily for the next little while.
I really enjoyed last months black and white theme and thought i would continue it for awhile. I will let the images decide.
The shot above is from our walk downtown today. I saw this kid do an amazing jump on his skateboard in front of his friends. I did the stop, watch, and walk away, when i noticed that he was heading up for another run. I rushed back and told him to hang on a sec. I did a test shot for exposure, set the focus, and put it on continous high speed motor drive. This was the first image of the series and it ended perfectly with him landing the jump on his board. He went through the faces of his friends however and i do wish that i had gotten as low as possible. Would have been neat to have him over their heads.
Part of my reasoning for shooting lots today is that i am trying to change my style a bit. This photo is not much of a change but it may take awhile. I want to add more movement and candidness in to my shots. We will see what happens.
In photoshop i put a much darker layer of the image on top of the original exposure and then masked out the people in the shot. I wanted everything in the image darker than it was except the people. I also put a bit of a vignette on it.
Happy Canada Day to you all.

trampoline shots

I like to fool around with mid air trampoline shots and tonight was no exception.
For the shot on the left I set up a sb flash on a light stand that was raised as high as it would go. I set the ambient light where i wanted it (shutter speed) and then waited for the action.
The shot on the right was just ambient light and i did a psudo hdr using the camera raw settings in lightroom.
I will quit stalling from the real work i have to do tonight.
By the way, the shot on the right is a skateboard that has all the hardware removed and then a pair of sneakers duct taped to it.

one light grad photo

I had a busy photography sunday today.
The image above is from a grad shoot with my niece. I really enjoy shooting these kind of images. I use one light and an umbrella (a small silver one because it wont blow over too easy) and walk around downtown and look for cool locations. I like the fact that i can play with my compositions and light and that i only have one person in front of the camera to worry about.
It was pretty much a stress free shoot compared to the one i did just before it where i had 60 people looking at me to make decent images.
Grads are also fun because i like to challenge myself to make them all look different. I may shoot in this particular alley alot, my favorite spot, but i always make it look different. My clients like this because they say i dont shoot "cookie cutter" grad photos. In defense of someone that shoots grads for a living, they dont have time to make them all unique. They have bookings every hour and need some kind of formula to make their business work.
I am all over the place here because i am watching zack arias live online giving a workshop at creative live.com, so i will finish this post up.
I shot this photo at f2.8 (to blur the background) at 100 iso and 1/250 sec (both of these settings were to darken down the ambient, which was cloudy). I used a 80 - 200 lens zoomed out to 80 but for the real shots i was zoomed closer to 200. Without the flash the image was not as good at all. I needed her lit and needed to over power the ambient just a bit.
I will post more of the photos as soon as i have a chance to play with them so you can see the real results.
Back to zack.

new look

Tonight i noticed some new templates on blogger and i was far overdue to change the look of this site.
Hope you all approve.
In keeping with my black and white month i have converted a very nice color photo. The sparks in color make this one but thats ok. I did not do much to this image in photoshop or lightroom but thought i would give you my camera settings in case you have the chance to recreate this one.
I used one off camera flash pointed directly at his face and set to the right of camera. This took care of him and i kept my shutter open to take care of the sparks. Remember to set your aperature for the flash exposure and the shutter speed for the ambient.
I used a 24mm lens and got in close, sparks were hitting me in the face and head but i did use glasses and a helmet. Shutter was at 1/20 sec hand held, f7.1, at iso 160. I have done shots like this before and just get the guy to weld a scrap piece of metal to something he is actually working on and then get him to grind on the angle you want the sparks to fly.

black and white

After my last post i decided to so some more black and white images. Mabey that will be my monthly theme for a change.
Black and white has always been my preference over color but for some reason i dont convert my images that often.
There are many ways to convert to black and white but here i just took the simple route and drug the saturation slider in lightroom to zero. I did do a curve in photoshop later to bring up the highlights and darken down the shadows and brought the clarity up a fair bit also. I added some bubbles from other photo as the original ones were pretty much just in a straight line. I just used the clone tool, as you can go from one image to another.
One thing i remembered after looking at the image i posted yesterday is that i left a bit of warmth in the photo, just added a curve is all. The one above has no color left at all.

im back

I just checked the date on my last post and it was a month and a half ago. Far too long to let this site go untouched.
I have been reading a few really good books which has absorbed my time (vince flynn is the author of them by the way).
I have also been taking lots of photos and have some good ideas for learning posts here. For example i shot a portrait the other night using two off camera small flashes and i want to show the full series from first to last. The first was not good but it got better by the end. I will get those images ready soon and discuss my thought process.
The one above is just me looking in the mirror. I got a new, used, 35mm f2.0 lens and was trying it out.
I did all photo adjustments in lightroom. Mostly heavy clarity, plus clarity in the adjustment brush. I did open in photoshop and did a much darker version and then masked back in the lighter parts i wanted.
In lightroom i did also do a vignette, tone curve, and sharpened.
Thanks for staying with me during my absence. I had over 1000 hits last month, and thats with no posts. Going for a few more this month.
cheers

lightning storm

I haven't shot lightning in probably 20 years, until last night. It was quite a show and when i finally decided to grab my camera and take some shots it was almost over. I was watching the hockey game and was nice and comfy so to get up and go to the car for the tripod, dig out the camera and blow the dust off, set up and shoot, was hard. I was happy in the end that i did so all was good.
I used a 50mm lens as i did not know where the lightning would strike, camera set to iso 200, aperature of f11 to f16, and a shutter speed of 30sec. I just kept hitting the shutter button as soon as the 30sec was over and hoped for a strike while it was open. I cropped the images, sharpened and that was that.

Decisions

This is a photo of my wife i took over the noon hour today. The decision that i mentioned in the title was not whether i would take her photo or not but how i would take it. What would i use for a background, lens, fstop, light, etc, etc. Our experience as photographers is kind of like a large bag of tricks. What have i done in the past on shoots, images i have seen online or in magazines, successes as well as failures i have had, all fill up this bag and give me options when i get to a shoot that i can draw from. Its rarely easy to walk into a shoot and take an exceptional photo right off the bat. You can think of it like sports, you have to warm up first. On this shoot for example we started in my wifes office. I tried some shots just using window light and adjusting her pose so the light worked. It did not work. Not enough light in the eyes. Nice background, foreground, everything else, except the eyes. It was her suggestion to move to the car next. I rarely turn down a suggestion from my subject, especially if the shot is not working for me. If the shot is working i will spend some more time at it and finish up that location and then move to the new one.
New location, new set of decisions. I started with composition on this one, decided on fstop, then set up my light for the proper power to achieve the fstop i had chosen. In this case I had chosen f1.4 (50mm lens) so the flash was set to something like 1/16 or 1/8 power. I used a sb900 with the dome diffuser on it and shot it through a very large umbrella. I placed the light in front of the car so it would go through the cars windshield. I set my shutter speed to 1/200 sec which, by trial and error, gave me the ambient light level i wanted. A good rule of thumb is to get your ambient set first and then build up the flash. I took about 10 frames or so just to get a good content expression on her face and then let her out of the car.
In photoshop i did a bit of retouching to her face and did a curve adjustment. I duplicated my background layer and used lens correction to add a vignette. I then created a layer mask and painted in black over the face so the vignette would just be where i wanted it. I ended up doing this twice as it was not dark enough the first time. I flattened and duplicated the background layer again and desaturated it. I then adjusted the white and black points to make a very contrasty image. I changed the layers blend mode to overlay and lowered the opacity to about 20. I sharpened and was done.
So, would i do the exact same thing on my next shoot. No, probably not. I dont know what trick i will pull out of the bag for the next one. I just hope that it is a good one and i will be as happy with the next shot as i was with this one.

interior in hdr

I shoot one building every year or so for a company that makes steel. I have shot a water treatment plant, a high school, an overpass, and now a gym. I am sure there were a couple more in there but i cant remember what they were now. I started using hdr awhile back because the interiors were very dark and you could always see to the outside, which was very bright. Before hdr i used different exposures and composited them together in photoshop. Hdr has saved me hours and hours.
In between my sons volleyball games saturday morning i took a quick run over and bracketed about 240 frames. I spent a good part of my sunday evening running them through lightroom and into photomatix. I used a mid light smoothing setting in photomatix and cranked up the luminosity slider to the far right to light up the ceiling. I used 5 bracketed images for this one which was shot with a 24mm lens, on a tripod, at 200asa. I was very cold and was worried about camera movement on the slower exposures but everything worked out ok.
I opened the tonemapped file in photoshop and did a curve, a sharpen and that was that.
I am very much looking forward to when the building is completed. I have two shots planned, one inside and one out, and they will both be hdr. I just need a helicopter for the outside shot but other than that it should be pretty straight forward.

interesting people

When shooting an event i always try to take my focus off what everyone is looking at so that i can look at them. I found this very interesting looking man who was also shooting the event and i had to take a few photos of him.
The sky was overcast which made it perfect lighting conditions for every angle. I tried to be a little bit sly while taking this photo as i did not want to attract his attention. I dont think he would have minded being my subject but i did not want him looking at the camera. I wanted him natural and relaxed and focused on what he was looking at. He did catch me later taking another frame and my shot has one of his eyes behind his camera and one looking straight at me.
I think my aperature was around f4 and i wish i would have shot it at 2.8. Most of the shots i was taking of the event needed a bit more depth of field but he certainly did not.
I did most of the work in lightroom. I added 4 graduated filters to darken down the sides and top and bottom just a bit and then opened in photoshop to crop and sharpen.

more flower photography

My wife unexpectedly had her gallbladder removed a couple days ago and as a result we have had a few bunches of flowers delivered to the house. This bunch was sitting on the counter and the light was nice. The background was crap though so i went to the garage and found the black cover for my cars hatchback. I rested it against my tripod and was ready to roll.
I shot the photo at f1.4 with my 50mm lens hand held and only used the natural light.
I prepared the photo in lightroom but once opened in photoshop i realized that i did a horrible job of the contrast and color correction so i applied a curve. I sharpened the photo and that was about it.
Creating an image is a process. Could be trial and error, usually lots of error, or preconception. For example the photo above falls under the latter. I had made all my decisions before i had taken the shot. I knew the background, composition, angle, depth of field, lens, etc. It is certainly not always like that but i prefer it when it is. I like to see an image in my head and then make it happen. Sometimes however i can be surprised with what i end up with when i go the trial and error route and get something totally unexpected.

flower photography

Sometimes, very often that is, I am in the mood to shoot a few photos. I typically dont want to make a big production out of it and turn it into work, so I shoot things that are close at hand. My, perhaps soon to be, brother in law brought my daughter and wife some flowers last week and they were very nice and colorful, and of course close at hand.
I put a close up lens on the camera and set the vase of flowers kind of close to a large window we have in the back of the house. It was nice, soft, indirect light. I was in manual focus so i grabbed a tripod and since i was all locked down, decided to shoot some hdr. I bracketed over a 7 stop range and did this for a few different compositions. I used iso 200, an fstop of around f16 and my normally exposed frame was at 1/8sec. I chose three exposures and ran them through photomatix.
When the tone mapping and processing was complete i opened the image in photoshop. In no particular order I; retouched a bit, sharpened, applied a vignette, burned down the midtones on the center stem, created a curve adjustment layer, and used apply image to bring back some detail in the reds. I have talked about this apply image technique in detail in some previous posts and highly recommend using it when there are reds in your photo.

nice light

I walked by this art studio, which is across from my office, this afternoon and noticed that the light was very nice. Very soft and airy with very muted color tones. My key just happens to work in that door so i accosted my good friend and brought him into the light. The photo on the left is what i had intended to shoot but i had walked in first and he stopped at the door which gave me the unexpected photo on the right.
I used natural light and played a bit in lightroom and photoshop.
I have been in the mood to do some portraits lately but just need some time and subjects.

larger image solved

It was photobucket that was resizing my images afterall. I must say though that for a free image hosting service they are amazing. I sent them a note to see why the images were resizing and within 5 minutes they had replied and told me what to do. It is in the upload options and you have to select the size you want your images. The largest size is 1024x768.

bridge in hdr

My main reason for doing this post was to see if i could get my images to show larger on this blog page.
It did not work unfortunately so i have some more playing to do.
I took this photo last weekend under a local bridge. I used a tripod and bracketed over a 7 stop range. I chose three photos and blended them in photomatix pro to get this result. Without using hdr techniques the bottom of the bridge would have been in shadow and featureless.
I am going to try very very hard to have more of these little photo shoots. I am challenging myself to see a bit differently lately.
As a photographer i realize that i am constantly evolving, learning, changing, maturing, etc. This has always been a conscious effort and battle but one that i have enjoyed.
Becoming a photographer is a great journey that i hope everyone reading this blog is on.

a bit of everything

I got almost an hour today to walk around and shoot in an area that i have never been before.
I took a walk under a local bridge and played with some different techniques, hdr included. I grabbed a 24mm lens and a tripod, for the hdr shots anyway, and ended up taking about 75 shots before i was done.
The comp you see above was just 4 of the shots i liked best from the day. I am not sure that they fit together in a comp like this but thats ok.
I will post the shots individually over the next few days and talk about what i did in each.
As a bit of a summary there is hdr, two images blended together, lightroom presets, three images stripped together, etc.
Plus some retouching as after downloading i noticed a pile of crap on my camera sensor.

group photo composite

I have adding to this photo for years now and expect to for many more.
It all started when i was asked to photograph all the managers from a local hotel for use in newspaper ads. I thought it might be fun to do a silly pose which i later decided to strip together into a group photo. I may have forgot to mention that i shot all the people separately on a white background.
I keep everyone on their own layer in photoshop and then when i have to remove someone i just turn off their layer. I can move everyone else around to make room for new people also. Where they end up in the shot mainly depends on their pose.
I had to take three people out this year and add five. That meant that the photo was going to be bursting at the seams so i asked a couple of them to give me a crouch down pose which worked out nicely.
To keep things looking consistent i try to duplicate previous lighting and even look up last years metadata to see the fstop and lens focal length. I have noticed however that the camera has changed. There are images from a d200, d300, and d700 in this shot.
It takes a bit of time to get looking right but so far i have been happy with the results.

crowne plaza

I went to a shoot tonight but it seems that i was a bit early in arriving. One month early that is.
I got there and thought i would take a really quick shot of the exterior of the hotel as the sky still had a bit of color and light in it. I shot this with a 24mm lens angled up which is why all the distortion is there. I then walked into the room that the event was being held and i was the only one there, because i was a month early.
Theres a first time for everything i guess, and i am sure not the last.

pano using autostitch

Two posts in a day, could be a record for me, at least lately.
I am still trying to get some work done and of course still playing around. This is a shot i took the other night while shooting a conference. I had already shot the stage close up and thought a nice pano would be in order. My 24mm would not cut it for the size of this room so i shot two rows of vertical images. I ended up with 25 photos in total in which to make my pano. I imported them from lightroom into photomerge in photoshop and this was not the result. It did not look good, not one bit.
I used autostitch instead. You can find it at www.autostitch.net but you mac users are out of luck as it is only for windows. I knocked the images down in size a bit as my computer is far from new by creating an action in photoshop and batch processing the 25 photos and saving as jpegs. I dumped them into autostitch and it gave me almost this. I say almost because i did have to clone in three heads that were very blurry. Other than that it looked really good.
If you try this program remember to go into the options tab and change the output size from the default of 25% to 100%. I also changed the jpeg quality to 100%. Then hit go and watch the olympics until it is ready.

really wide angle

I have alot of work to do this weekend so naturally i am playing with images that are not important whatsoever.
This is just a shot of my tv room that i took with a 24mm lens and a wide angle video lens held up to the front of it. I have done some shots in the past using this lens but more with a 28mm or 35mm lens behind the video lens so it does not give me a complete circle. You may be able to find some of these old lenses at yard sales or at friends houses that dont use them anymore. My dad just gave me a couple from an old kodak point and shoot. They are the kind that you screw onto the front of the kodak lens to make it a wide angle or tele.
I almost forgot to mention that this is an hdr image made up of three photos.

building at sunrise

I am not usually in a parking lot at 6:30 in the morning but today was an exception. I had a shoot in moncton last night and stayed at a downtown delta hotel. I had to be to work early today so i was up at 6 and loading my camera gear into the car a half hour later. As i was loading i noticed the sky and the amazing tones it had. I was tired, did not want to delay my trip home any longer, but had to take a photo. This building was the closest thing to my car so it became the secondary subject.
I truly wish i could enjoy and photograph the spectacular 15 minutes of magic light every morning, but that would mean getting out of bed. And i really like my bed.
I shot this at iso 800, f2 and 1/20sec with a 50mm 1.4 lens.
I much prefer this image viewed larger.

action shot

I shot a volleyball game saturday night and thought this was the best shot i took over a three game span. When this team would get a point all the girls would celebrate. As i observed the game however, I noticed that this girls celebration was incredible. I focused the camera on her and just stayed with her until i got this shot.
This to me says sports much more that a shot of her bumping or setting the ball. When i used to shoot sports for a local daily, i pretty well had to have a ball or a puck in the shot for it to be considered for publication. I am very glad that i dont have to worry about that anymore, or get players names that were in the photo.
I guess this post breaks the water drop theme. Whatever will be posted next hasn't been shot yet so it could be just about anything.
This image was shot at iso 3200 with a 80 - 200 lens. Fstop was f2.8 and shutter speed was around 1/250 sec. It was a dark gym and my main concern was freezing action thus i set my shutter speed first and then my two remaining settings.

more water drops

I guess i am staying on the water drop theme for now. I had no intention of continuing a theme but took a few shots of condensation on my window today and liked how it turned out.
I added blue to this photo and applied some contrast by way of a curve. The other shot i liked was a bit different and much more blue. I will post that one tomorrow.
I dont take many macro shots but i have always liked them. Kind of like landscape photos also, i never take them but i really enjoy a good one.

text tip

This is a small crop of a larger image i shot for stock a couple weeks ago. I finally got around to preparing the images for the web today and i thought i would play with this one just a bit.
Other than the crop i used the clone tool to remove another icicle on the left side. I sharpened a fair bit and also did a curve for contrast and color.
Then i did something i havent done for awhile and plopped some text on it. I found a really cool website that you can download movie fonts from for free. Just go to google and type in movie fonts, i think it was the first link. This was a font called signs and i thought it might work here. Why i dont know.
One little tip for text that i will pass on is reduce the opacity of your text layer a bit, like down to 75% or so. It just makes the text blend in better with your image and not look so pasted on. I also like to play with the formatting tab to make the letters closer together or spread further apart.
This image was shot with a 300mm lens at f4 and a fast shutter speed. When i see other people post their image info, aperature and shutter speed and iso, i often wonder why some choose the settings they do. For example, lets say i posted my shot info for this image and it was f8, 1/320 sec at 200 iso. Would you not look at that and say "what was he thinking". The f8 means that i was not going for shallow depth of field or everything sharp, its just middle of the road. The shutter speed probably would not freeze the drop sharp enough and its not slow enough for a blur. Low iso at least is good for sharpness and low noise. But as an overall recipe for a shot its bland, no taste, no reason. The program mode on your camera would rest around there for sure.
I guess what i am trying to say is make a decision as to what your trying to accomplish. Do you need to freeze movement, if so go for it, 1/500 sec or up. Do you need a shallow depth of field to isolate a subject, then crank it down, stay below f4 and your on the right path. Use your iso to help accomplish either one of these feats. A 100 - 800 iso will keep your noise down, depending on your camera, and if you need more shutter speed without sacrificing your chosen aperature then turn the iso up some more.
So the advice part would be to make a decision early on in the image creation of what you want and then set your camera to achieve it. You have three things that affect exposure and you can play them off against one another to accomplish your goal. Just try to stay away from that bland cuisine. Theres not as much fun in it.

halifax hdr

I made a whirlwind trip to halifax nova scotia and stayed one whole night. I had an early morning appointment and managed to wake up before the sun came up. I of course had to do an hdr shot as it might be another 5 years before i get up before the sun again. The sky was a great color of blue and luckily i had some buildings with tungsten lights on in front of me to really show some color contrast. I had shot some images late that first night and some more after the sun broke the horizon and neither compared even remotely to this one.
I had some other things i wanted to play with in this photo but i have a few real jobs to get out the door which will probably take up any spare time i have for the rest of the week. So this is my spare time, 1 in the morning, winding down from hockey, which was hard to go to tonight as my cars outside temperature was reading -24C.

hockey day in canada

This unfortunately was not shot today but yesterday. My whole family were in rinks however today as my daughter had a game tonight and we were the cheering section.
This is former nhl player mike danton skating by the unb bench. I wanted to see him play and get a couple shots but more importantly watch unb win.

old image reworked

I guess the photo is not really that old, but i have never really been happy with my initial adjustments i had applied. The image was too yellow in the past for me and that muted down all the other colors. I played with it a bit tonight and was much happier with the results. Basically just did a curve and added some blue. Sometimes a simple curve can make all the difference.
This image is lit by just the setting sun, no flash added. It was taken on a shipyard dock in boston.
This shot competed for tonight post with a photo i actually took tonight of hockey player mike danton.
I will try to get that one up tomorrow night.

boston hdr

I took a sec today to clean up my hard drive a bit and found some images of boston (photoshop world trip) that i have never really taken time to play with. I did a couple corrections to images that i liked but have never been happy with. I did a quick hdr of three images inside a boston uno restaurant. Actually i processed the tonemapped image twice to get this effect. How you do this is hit the process button the first time and when your image pops up all processed, before saving, hit apple (alt) - T, this will reopen the tonemapping window and you can play some more. When your happy just hit process again and then save your image. If you save after the first process and then try to hit apple - T it will not work.
I find i have to do a curve after i open the image in photoshop and sharpen a bit but thats pretty well it.

building on the hill

I was home sick today, stomach flu, and am very bored. I feel like i have been hit with a truck and all i want to do is sleep. I have dragged my butt out of bed to do a quick post on a photo i took last week.
This is a building that is quite difficult to photograph. I was out for a walk and noticed the tracks in the snow leading to the door at the top of the path. I ran three images through photomatix and then did a curve in photoshop.
Ok, back to bed.

cat photo

I really dont know why i am posting this photo, really. My daughter left the dryer door open tonight and the cat made it his bed. This isnt the first time. I didn't notice him in there not too long ago, mabey we were drying darks, and i shut the door before heading to bed. Luckily we always do a cat count before going to sleep so we dont have to get up in the middle of the night to the sound of cat nails against the back of a door. Luckily the dryer was not turned on and he was found shortly after.
I upgraded my camera firmware tonight (nikon d700) and if you have one you should do the same. Improved auto white balance was my main reason. It is already very good on that camera which is why i leave it on that setting but if they say they have improved it than great. I still find that the weakest correction is when shooting under tungsten light. It is still the only time i switch the camera to the tungsten setting.
This photo was shot at iso 3200 f2.8 and 1/20 sec. I used a 24mm lens as i wanted to get in close and show the inside of the dryer. Did you notice the sock that was stuck in the upper right corner. I used that as a fill reflector on the right side (ha). Ok, one light, off the sock, and so on and so on. You would get this joke if you saw the joe mcnally/scott kelby "light ya for it" video.
Thats it for tonight as i have to drive to a 6am hockey practice tomorrow. Off to read and hopefully sleep well.
One cat, two cats, ok, good night.

architecture hdr

I may have mentioned that i was playing with some hdr shots recently. This is the second image from that series out of five i prepared. I have been trying to dig the camera out a bit more this last week and get back in the shooting mode.
I photographed my daughters hockey game tonight but of course missed the shot of her first ever goal. I was in the warm area, but luckily could still see the ice. I did basketball last night, and shot some melting icicles this morning.
This shot was made from three images and ran through photomatix.
Now i am going to finish reading my new hdr book.

basketball stuff

I have a few more hdr images i like in the cue to post but thought i would put up a shot i took tonight of my daughter playing basketball. No, she is not getting in trouble here, she was fouled and getting told she has two shots coming.
I shot this at 2500iso with a 80 - 200 f2.8 nikon lens. I was having a little trouble with it focusing just a bit behind my focus point so for the first time i set the autofocus fine tune to -4. Seemed to help. Nice thing it that it will only apply to that lens. I will now start the process of checking my other lens' and adjusting where necessary.
Zero photoshop work here as i did all my raw adjustments in lightroom.
Looking forward to lightroom 3 coming out.

hdr in the snow

Today was quite snowy and everything was looking white and wonderfull. I took a stroll in hopes of getting some much needed winter stock shots but of course the area was like a ghost town. No one around to harass for a couple minutes of their time to walk through a scene or two. Then i thought, im out here, cold and wet, theres no one to shoot, good time for some hdr stuff.
I bracketed a few scenes through a range of 7 stops and ended up choosing three of the images to send through photomatix. I then played with the image a fair bit in photoshop. I retouched some of the dirty snow out and did a curve layer and a saturation layer. I used the dodge tool set to highlights and hit the overhead light and some of the snow on the walk to create a bit of a highlight line for the eye of a viewer to follow.
I have a few more in the cue so stay tuned.
I tried to use a bit of a slow shutter to get the snow drag more so than having it tack sharp and floating in mid air.
I also used a tripod. I dont usually carry one but i thought i could set up a scene and then wait for people to head in my direction all prepared to model. Oh, and they would be wearing multi colored scarves, cool hats, and be very happy and throwing snow around.

inspiration

The title of this post is not really attached to the photo above. I haven't been blogging for almost a month now as i felt a touch burnt out and really needed a break from shooting, photoshop, and the computer in general. My camera has sat in my bag in its little lens coat pouch and i know it is lonely, longing to be held, ok, i will stop before i get started.
Long story short, i had a break and now its over. I want to shoot again, very much so. Every christmas break i go through the same thing. I reflect on the year before, mainly on what i have done photographically, and i look for new inspiration to start the new year. I am always exhausted by the time christmas comes as i try to stay pretty busy at work not to mention trying to shoot some fun stuff in my spare time. So i recharge my batteries and i reflect.
This year i took a bit more time than usual and to try to reenergize my mojo i looked at a lot of photo web sites, many magazines, and bought a new book on hdr shooting by stuck in customs Trey. I then lost the book and it is being shipped back to me as i write, but thats another story. I still haven't shot much yet, mabey a thousand frames or so but i am due very soon.
I had planned to write much more on this subject but it is one in the morning and i have been home for a total of about 15 minutes today.
About the photo above. I really did not have anything on my hard drive except a wedding i shot on new years eve. I really liked this shot for some reason. The little guy on the left looked up and the camera focus was tack sharp on him and nothing else. I shot ambient light with a 80 - 200 lens at 2.8. This church has windows lining both sides and it was cloudy. Perfect setting for great ambient shots.
Mabey he was looking for some inspiration too.

band action

I thought i would post one more photo from the band shoot the other night.
The colors were horrible as they had red gels on their stage lights, thus the conversion to black and white.
You would have to know the singer to know that this is a classic pose for him.

band photo

I got a last minute call tonight to shoot a band, the downtown blues band, before they went on stage at a local bar. I had 15 minutes with them from the time that they all arrived until they went on stage. I first of all had to find a background setting in the bar that worked for me. This is always the hardest challenge for me, where to shoot. I had the dj frig with the lights in the background until they looked good. Initially they were red which i liked, until the band members stood in and it spilled on their faces. Blue looked better on them and we went with that.
I set up two sb flashes bounced into umbrellas, one to the right of them and one to the left and a little behind. I set another sb flash on the floor behind them for a bit of rim but I think it died shortly into the shoot. Its an old, really old sb25 and is really slow to charge. Not sure if the batteries in that one were fresh either but no worries, I didn't really need it.
I used a 24mm lens (as i had no room and was actually standing through a doorway to another room), iso 400, f5.6, and 1/6 sec, handheld of course (ha). There was really no light on them so a slow shutter speed would not blur the people at all. I could live with a bit of blur in the background and was not worried about that.
In the end the only thing i wish was that they were more animated. They are a really fun group and i felt that may not have shown in this series of photos. I still like the shots though.

frozen portrait

It hit -25 C today so of course it was the perfect time to do an outside portrait of a friends sons. I had the bright idea of heading downtown to a really cool alley i walk by all the time to go to lunch. I started on the other side of the alley and set up one sb24 flash bounced into an umbrella. It was so cold that by the time i had the light balanced with the ambient, about 2 minutes, the batteries mush have chilled and it was slow to recycle.
I only took a few shots on that side of the alley and then moved to the other side, that you see here. I turned the lights off and went with ambient. It was giving me a bit of cross light and i liked it so i stuck with that for the rest of the shoot. I couldent feel my fingers so i just got them to move around a bit and i held down the shutter button. If i was that cold i would well imagine that they were twice as bad since their mom was holding their winter coats.
I used a 24mm lens, iso 400, f2.8, and 1/60 sec shutter.
I opened the image in lightroom and did most all corrections. Here are the settings i used in lightroom:
exposure -40, recovery 4, fill light 22, blacks 6, clarity +100, vibrance +32, saturation -10. The rest were pretty well at default.
I then opened it in photoshop and sharpened, and did a curve. Shucks, i forgot to do a vignette, just a subtle one would have been nice. I laid down one of the grunge borders i talked about yesterday and transformed it to fit.
I wish it was not so cold and i could have taken more time on this one. I would have worked more on the pose i think.

just foolin around

I was testing a lastolite 1 stop trigrip diffuser the other day and thought i would play with the images a bit today.
A lastolite trigrip diffuser is just something you can shoot your off camera flashes through to soften the light. If you follow strobist or joe mcnally then you have heard of it a long time ago.
I did a test with direct flash and compared it to shooting thru the diffuser and it really did soften the light. I have some more experimenting to do, like comparing it to a shoot thru umbrella among other things.
I brought the photo into lightroom and hit the cold tone preset and then played with the exposure and other sliders to get it looking how i wanted it. I opened in photoshop and did a curve to up the contrast and then applied a grunge border. It is just one i downloaded from NAPP i think and it just sits as a layer on top of the image. I had to transform scale the image to make it fit in the border and then flattened. There was more to the image than what is here but i wanted a bit of a tight crop.
Actually here is the link to the grunge borders
http://www.640pixels.com/articles/free-photoshop-grunge-borders.aspx

another pano

I shot this pano a while ago and placed it online for when i needed a filler.
I cant remember how many frames i took here, probably 7 - 9, but i do remember i shot them fast while the players were set and not moving around. I sent them to panorama through lightroom and then did a curve on the finished, flattened file to taste.
They call this gym "the pit" by the way.

not famous

Its not me their reaching for but for money. Our downtown has an annual dollar drop and people come out of the woodwork to try and catch a few. Its actually a really good, fun event and my kids even participated in it for the first time. I was there shooting anyway so why not. My son caught $30 and my daughter and her friend managed to snag $35. Then we had to go shopping of course.
I managed to negotiate my way up on a balcony of a museum that the event was held in front of which gave me a perfect vantage point for the event. I shot alot of frames and caught some great expressions.
Nothing done in photoshop except resizing the photo. Everything done in lightroom.

rink pano

I did a pano of a hockey game i was at last weekend which was made up of 9 vertical shots taken with a wide angle lens (a 17 i think). I actually did one pano with the images exposure set for the ceiling and the crowd and one pano with the settings right for the ice. I put one on top of the other in photoshop and created a mask to have the darker ice show through the image with the lighter crowd and ceiling.
I had to do a bit of retouching because the two panos were not exactly the same. I guess it can be a bit random when they are generated. It all worked out pretty well in the end and was just a bit more work than i had counted on.
I sent the images to be made panos straight from lightroom. Just go to PHOTO - EDIT IN - MERGE TO PANORAMA or something like that.
When shooting i did it as fast as i could before someone moved too much. I also waited for a faceoff for this reason as well.

event photography

I was shooting an event, outside, today and saw this wee one enjoying a cookie. I got fairly close, after asking her parents if they minded me taking her photo as it may get published, and took about 10 shots with my 80 - 200 lens set to 200. After about 10 she had had enough of me and climbed up in her fathers arms.
It was a very overcast day which make the light incredible for shooting outside without adding any flash.
I did all camera raw adjustments in lightroom and then opened the image in photoshop. I didn't do much other than a curve for color and contrast, a heavy vignette (i created a mask after to remove the darkening from her face), sharpen, and lastly i dodged her eyes with the dodge tool set to highlights at 15%. I burnt down the cookie a bit too with the burn tool set to midtones.
I have been shooting lots these days and am going to try once again to post an image a day for this month. My goal over the christmas break is to get a cool shot of my son for his newly decorated room and to get better at hdr.
Even though i have been busy i am itching to get out and do some shooting.