On a hill

I took this in upstate New York, it was in between rain showers and I just loved the storm clouds. This is an HDR image, I combined three differently exposed images with Photomatix PRO to create this effect.

HDR

High Dynamic Range (HDR) is a technique many photographers use to combine several differently exposed photographs to make one amazing image. I used Photomatix PRO to combine 3 images which were all exposed about 1-2 f-stops apart. One was darker, one was correctly exposed and the other was over exposed. I did some finishing touches in Photoshop CS4 and the end result is.....



This was my first HDR photo, I am sure I will be doing more with HDR in the near future.

My first Quinceanera

I had a lot of fun with this Quinceanera! The young lady was beautiful, she was dressed like a princess. The family was fun, they sure know how to throw a party! Here are some of my favorites and a couple are more artsy - people who know me also know that I love to play with photoshop.

I didn't have much time to catch this photo where this young lady was standing alone. Many people were eager to jump right in and get their picture taken with her. I had to stand around and wait for a free moment. I like non-posey pictures where the subject isn't always looking right at the camera, these make more creative photos.


I loved how this little girl stood out amongst the big girls, I decided that I wanted the focus to be on her only so I cut off the heads of the older girls (I know, sounds violent) and kept their fancy shoes in the photo.


If I really wanted all of the focus to go to the flowers, then I would have cut off her head (more violence), but I did like her blurry smile so I kept her in tact :)


I tried something different in photoshop, I wanted to hide the background because there was a person standing off to the left of the photo. Although she was blurry, my eyes were still drawn to her and I didn't like that she took some of the attention from this young lady. I will continue to experiment with this one down the road.


This is my favorite photo of the bunch. She put on a beautiful smile and looked very comfortable in front of the camera - she could easily have a modeling career. I have a spot meter on my camera so for this photo, I was able to point it at her skin so that it was perfectly exposed while the background was bright. It's very important for backlit subjects, otherwise I would have had a silhouette shot - which wouldn't be the worst thing, but I wanted her smile to show up.


I'm a fan of silhouettes when they seem appropriate, this young lady took plenty of opportunities to make her little sister feel special and I could tell that little girl loved her!