Recent Work

B&W Flower

While downtown yesterday evening, I saw a bush full of these flowers.  I am not sure what they are, but the bush had white on one side and pink ones on the other.  It was far too windy to photograph them then, so I waited it out for a better time.  This morning I woke up to virtually no wind, so I grabbed the camera and ran out for a shot.  This is a white version of the flower, and the way it was nested in the shadow screamed black and white to me.  I mounted my 105mm macro lens, set my composition and then locked it down on the tripod.  Took a few shots at a couple of different apertures, using Live View to check my depth of field.

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Water Tower

There were rain clouds rolling through the area off and on all day Friday.  As sunset approached, there was another bank of clouds to the north moving towards town.  I grabbed the camera and headed to the lake, looking for some shots.  The lake proved to not be the better view of the clouds, as they were past it by the time I got down there.  But when I turned and looked at the water tower, the clouds were bearing towards it.  I setup the tripod, used the 24-105 and captured the following images.  The first, was at 24mm, and shortly before, the second was 80mm.

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Mailbox

I took a couple of hours yesterday afternoon to get out and shoot some.  I was down near the historical center in town, and saw this mailbox.  The mailbox alone was interesting, but the building behind it gave a good background for it because of the condition of the barrel the mailbox post was in fit the building beyond it.  I ended up having to HDR the image because the overhang on the building put the door and wall too deep into shadow in comparison to the mailbox which was in direct sunlight.

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Sunset

I decided to head out for some sunset show earlier this week.  The clouds were pretty thick until about 30 minutes before sunset, when they started to breakup quickly.  This shot was taken facing the north, about 15 minutes after the sun had fully set.  The color didn’t last very long, just a brief few minutes.

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Rosary

My wife has her childhood rosary wrapped around and hanging from the lamp sitting on the nightstand.  On Sunday morning, she was up before me and when I woke up, this was the first thing I saw.  I reached over and turned on the lamp, lighting the rosary and base of the lamp nicely.  The light falloff was nice, as it let the background (a shelf in the corner) slip into darkness.  I grabbed the camera and took a quick shot, seen below.

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History Center

A couple of nights ago I went out looking for some shots.  I ended up down by the local History Center.  I actually went there to try my hand at a timelapse of the sunset on a Veterans Memorial Statue there.  Although the timelapse didn’t work out as I planned, the way the streetlights fell on the History Center caught my attention.  The sun had set 40 minutes earlier, so the building was primarily lit by the streetlights in the parking lot.

Knowing I was going to have a wide dynamic range, I shot 5 images, 1 stop apart, intending on processing as an HDR.  I used Nik HDR Efex 2 to process the HDR, then pulled the image into Photoshop for some cleanup.  I also took the chance to try out a new plugin from Topaz Labs called Clarity to work the micro contrast, masked to just effect the building itself.  Below is the final image.

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