karate action

This is a little different image for me today.
I shot this against the dojo wall but it included some of the ceiling as well. I wasn't happy with the background to say the least but liked the lighting and action, post looked cool too (upped the clarity and ran it though photomatix).
All i did to darken the background down was to create a new layer and then ran the vignette three times on it set to max. I then created a mask and dodged it out a bit.
I am still not happy with the background and will perhaps try the image again, not sure.
I am excited and very much looking forward to a big shoot i have tomorrow so i may just have to move on.

colors

Tonight i am trying to finish up a job i shot a couple weeks ago and have been doing alot of hdr on the photos since then.
I really enjoyed the shoot and am enjoying the photos even more, thanks "A".
This is a crop of a chair image that was in someones yard downtown. I ran the single image through photomatix and then sharpened heavily. I also added +33 to the saturation to get the color to how it felt to me when i shot it.
I have alot of images to prepare and once my clients website is live i will direct you there to view the rest.

football action

This is a shot i took at my sons football game today.
I thought the image was a little quirky with the ref, guy in the air, ball half in, etc.
Thus it had to be posted.
When i shoot sports by the way i like to be lazy. By lazy i mean that i turn my brain off and use aperture priority on my camera. This of course is not being lazy i know. The light seems to change so much that you could miss a great shot. The clouds blocking the sun just as your scene is unfolding would be one example. Aperture priority setting usually solves this and gets your exposure close enough. I also use the largest aperature on my lens (f2.8) to blur out the background.

car hdr

I took a couple minutes today on a visit to my parents to shoot a quick hdr of my car.
I used a tripod of course and bracketed 9 exposures. I chose three of the exposures and exported from lightroom to photomatix pro. I then added a heavy vignette and spent some time on curves to get the look i wanted. I also sharpened about 100.
I created a mask on my vignette layer and painted through to the unvignette layer underneath in the areas that i wanted to show through bright, like around the car and a line up to the top of the image through the trees.
The left image is the normal exposure with nothing done to it.

swimming action

I shot some swimming action photos tonight and ended up being happy with a couple of them. Swimming is not the easiest sport to shoot i have found. First my camera and lenses were in my car for an hour or so before i went to the pool and as such were cold. The second i stepped on deck the lenses fogged and 15 minutes later were still fogged. I spent the next five minutes wiping them off with a lens cloth and was then able to shoot. I found out a few years ago that they do not like it when you bring in a couple off camera flashes, thus i was shooting in a fairly dark, wet area. My iso setting ended up being 2000 and my camera settings were f2.8 (70 - 200mm lens) and 1/400 sec. I ended up using aperature priority mode as the light fell off about two stops as they got closer to the edge of the pool. It worked out pretty good shooting horizontally but was a bit dark when i switched to vertical. The next tricky part was the focus. I used continuous focus tracking and continuous high motor drive. The camera however liked to focus on the water being splashed up in front of the swimmer. I think if i were shooting this sport for a living i would play with my cameras fine tune focus to tweak it just a bit further back. The only other problem i encountered was a huge splash on a swimmers turn that covered me, camera, and lens.
I shot 4gb worth and ended up with a few keepers and wet jeans from the knees down. Just another day at the office.
I played a bit in photoshop too by the way. I bumped up the clarity, sharpened, and lowered the saturation for a more muted look.

yet another gull

Another seagull. I know.
I have so much real work to do but yet it is 11:30 at night and i am sitting alone in the dark masking out this seagull that i shot today during my daughters soccer game. Crazy i know.
Its times like this that we often ask ourselves why we do the things we do. The answer for me is enjoyment and the satisfaction of creating an image that i am happy with. Everyone would have their own reasons of course but i think the one thing that photographers would share is the need to create images. Its like an addiction but worse, its part of who we are. Be it photos of seagulls, people, landscapes, or whatever. The subject itself does not really matter.
For this photo i made a duplicate layer and bumped the contrast way up with a curve and then changed the layers mode to multiply. This gave me a pretty funky sky but made the gull pretty well black. I masked out the gull from this contrast layer so it kept its detail in the underlying layer. I sharpened the photo and thats about it. The masking took awhile but i thought in the end it was worth the time.
Looking at the photo now i realize that i should have darkened the bottom right corner some more so your eye would stop there and bounce back into the image. Some sleep right now is more important however.

back to hdr

The sky last night was amazing. This photo does not do it justice unfortunately.
I walked out of a building beside this one after a shoot and i was tired. Actually tired may not be a strong enough word, you get the point. I got in my car and i drove 20 feet. There i sat and debated if i was going to go into the trunk, dig out the camera, set up a tripod, and do an hdr of this scene before me. It was a toss up, did i mention that i was tired, but in the end the sky won.
I set up a tripod and put a wide angle lens on the camera. I shot 9 bracketed shots, several times, and then hopped back in the car and came home.
I planned to wait and photoshop the image when my brain was functioning but again the scene won out and i had to download and process right away. I ran 5 images through photomatix pro and then opened it in photoshop. The building was distorted like crazy from shooting it at a low angle with a wide angle lens. I worked on a curve first just to see if i could make the image look good and then moved on to transform skew. This worked for the building but the lamp post on the right hand side looked like the leaning tower of pisa, but worse. I made a loose selection around the lamp post and then hit copy and pasted it to a new blank layer. I then hid the layer and retouched the post out of the background layer (selected it and filled using content aware). I turned the new layer back on and rotated it until the post was straight. I retouched in some problems with the grass in the center of the image, added some yellow to the lamps, and did a vignette. Sharpened the image and i was done.
I was still tired in the end but was glad i stopped the car.

night wedding

I shot a wedding this past weekend that started at 6:30pm.
Thus when the wedding was over the days light was also almost over. I really, and i mean really, did not want to shoot group photos in a hotel ballroom against a blank wall so i quickly set up two sb nikon flashes and went to work setting up groups. It is amazing how fast you can get them done when it is really cold outside and it is getting darker by the second. It was so dark in fact when i shot this one that my camera was having a really hard time finding the focus.
The ground and trees in the background were black so i had to lay on the ground, in my freshly dry cleaned pants, and use what little light was left in the sky to break up the black. The shutter speed on this one was 1/3 sec, f3.5, and iso 500. I used a 35mm lens so i could get closer to the group and shoot up at a steeper angle. Of course the camera was hand held.
If it wasn't so dark and cold i would have adjusted this group a bit. I would have preferred some of the people in the back to be a bit higher but i really had to compromise on this one.
The wedding was great, i was happy with the photos, and i slept very well when i eventually got home.

no idea

I have no idea why i take photos of seagulls.
Even more so, i dont know why i post them on this blog.
Oh well.

street buskers

This is a shot of some street buskers that we watched during the harvest jazz and blues festival which was this past weekend. I played around with longer shutter speeds on some of the shots to create patterns with the fire. I should be able to post a few more this week.

photo effect

This is a filter that i recently found called pixel bender.
I am going to bed so i will explain it and give a link in my next post.

seagull portrait

I took this shot recently in bathurst new brunswick in between soccer games.
I am not much of a wildlife photographer but what i liked about this shot was the background and the color tones in the shot.
Since this one i have seen a coyote, in my subdivision, a moose, and deer. No other photos however.

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.