I was on Route 66 last week when I stopped at the casino outside Albuquerque and captured this with my iPhone. The file did not have the dynamic range as a RAW file so I had to do some work on it and also remove a section of car on the right that was parked there and clean the cracks and such on the pavement.
Take my class on Architecture and Real Estate Photography here.
I have told myself more than once that I am burned out on Grungy looking HDR and dont want to look at it let alone create it. But that appears to never be true since I continue to create a few HDR images from time to time. This is Death Valley at sunrise and it made for a great HDR and it is not to grungy, at least by my definition of grungy. Which is hyper color and lotsa noise and halos on the edges.
Fortunately for those of us using HDR software, you can create images that look perfectly normal and even push them a little without hyper color and noise and halos. That was my goal here. Add substantial drama. The ground here is not dark like this but rather very light salt pan. The clouds weren’t that dark either, but HDR is famous for making them look threatening.
So carefully moving the settings added a lot of drama here while avoiding over-done color and noise and other HDR issues that can arise. It is almost like a negative effect, and I am happy with it.
Look at all these beautiful models! Posing right before my camera, all shapes and sizes and beautiful they are.
It was stormy day so I added some processing punch to make them standout much more and adding some drama to what was really pretty flat lighting.
What an amazing place and thanks goodness for digital photography we can bring out the otherwise subtle colors and male the scene amazing.
This looks like an amazing contest. The photography on there is stunning. What is different is that the 5 top winning images are marketed to 1000 art buyers and some winning images have been seen and published.
I am pleased to say I have judged it three times. The price is right as well: $25 for 5 image entries.
Enter here: Chasing The Light
Watch this video:
I took an afternoon hike in the middle of the day, mostly for exercise since I was on the computer all day. I saw this cracked mud and had to shoot it.
I processed it in Photoshop and added contrast and a slight brown tone to exaggerate the colors.
It is said by many, and hard to argue, that we live in a surveillance state and world these days. Everywhere you go physically and virtually, you are being watched.
Well you can imagine my surprise when I discovered while photographing in the Colorado Rockies, that I was….YES….being watched.
I couldn’t believe it! In the middle of the forest all alone, and these eyes staring me down.
I recently photographed my friend Kim and her husband and kids in the studio. This is the first image I processed of Kim herself.
This is what could be called a white on white which is a subject that is very light in tone on a white background. This would be her blonde hair and white blouse on a white background. Here’s the lighting diagram:
A lot of time there is only so much you can do in camera and that is basically capturing the data as it is presented. It’s when you get into post processing where the magic is and this image is one example.
I photographed Kim and her family last week at their home. We shot in mid-afternoon and this made for lighting challenges. It was hot and humid and bright and sunny, so the light was far from perfect.
There are a million ways to make light work for you but it all depends on how much time you have. You can erect panels that block light from hitting your subject, or in the case of this shoot, work in the shade. Unfortunately there was only a little shade that time of day, so I made it work.
What I like about post processing is that you can go anywhere and everywhere. Here I am experimenting with blended color overlays which sneaks in small amounts of yellow and green in specific spots. It looks sorta like cross processing of days past. More to come once these guys make their selection of images and I process them.
Learn portrait photography here.
I recently had an architecture shoot in Washington State to shoot a beautiful custom home. Here is one image from the shoot. I was asked to get 10-12 scenes of the home, which is a lot but also pretty common these days.
I have determined the best way to do this is using selective lighting and Photoshop, which is lighting specific areas and then compositing a lot of images for the final result. This image had 20 layers.
I teach these techniques in my class on Architecture photography here.
