Recent Work

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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While Walking

My wife and I went out for a walk one evening late last week.  I grabbed the camera before leaving.  The clouds were rolling in pretty thick, and I saw this as we were on the way home.  The contrast of the cool light in the clouds and the warm light of the sunset is what caught my attention.

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Frosty Trees

Last weekend we had a pretty dense fog form overnight, which produced some frosty trees the following morning.  The fog burned off quickly due to the clouds breaking and the temps to warm up quickly.  I was able to get out and shoot some before the frost melted off of the trees.  This image was taken in the park area behind Paul and Babe.

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Smoke

I have started to look at other things to photograph after tinkering with the water droplets I tried last week.  Over the weekend, I decided to try my hand at smoke trails.  We picked up some incense sticks, as they leave a good trail of smoke, making it a good option to photograph.  I took some time this evening to take a crack at it.

I setup a small table, a stand to hold the black cloth for the backdrop and a single off camera hot shoe flash and proceeded to do some test shots.  The big problem I had at first was focus, with the smoke moving around and me shooting with a macro lens, I was not getting a sharp image.  I decided to focus on the incense stick, close down to a smaller aperture and turn up the flash power, which was still only at 1/16 power due to it being so close to the subject and zoomed in to 50mm.  Below are some results of my first shot at it.

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Water drops

With winter in full swing, I tend to not be outside much…I am not a fan of the cold, and there has not been many chances for decent shooting since the days are so short.  I started digging around the web for some ideas to shoot indoors during the short cold days of winter.  I ended up taking a crack at photographing water drops.  I have learned quite a bit from the first couple of times I have tried it.  Below are a few images from today’s attempt.

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301

I went out in the early morning a couple of weeks ago with the intent of photographing the foggy sunrise.  Unfortunately, the fog was too thick for any color to work way through. I decided to just take a walk around downtown and see what I could capture.

On one of the side street I was able to photograph theirs building number.  It was the lines that caught my attention and caused me to stop.  Once I started to look for the composition I tried to accentuate the texture.

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