God light paints too.....

It's called lightning and it's quite deadly, but lots of fun to photograph. I was out for about 20 minutes last night and got my "holy grail" of a picture before the rain started to pour. My trick was to set the camera to Manual, use auto focus on the lens to find a light far away and focus on it, set it to manual focus, set the aperture to 5.6 and set the shutter speed to 30 seconds. I zoom out as far as possible to get as much sky, I point it up so there's very little land (it's just black anyway and a waste of space) and then start shooting. It was a real trick to guess where the next strike would be, the storm was all around me.

Here are my two best shots.....

Light Painting

Light painting is fun! It requires a camera, tripod, and a light source. I had 2 different flashlights and a flash that I could turn into a strobe. It also should be dark outside. In a nutshell, I set my camera to be open for 30 seconds (slow shutter speed), about f/8 to f/10 aperture, ISO 100 and just jump in front of it with my lights. I can draw in the air with the flashlight pointing at the camera or "paint" something else I see. Here are my results......





We came across some skater boys, they were very interested in what we were doing and I asked them if they'd hold my flashlights while skating. They were awesome!








One of my favorite shots, I painted the bridge with my bright light.




Here's a neat tutorial on how to light paint....


And a really neat video of some people who obviously love light painting...

The love tree - in HDR

I am quite fond of this heart in the tree so this time, I took a few shots and made it into an HDR image.

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!

This is a technique called "tilt shift photography." There are tilt shift lenses you can buy to create this effect, but a cheaper way to do it is to use photoshop. Tilt shift photography is a way to make real life appear to be a miniature model. It's best to take a photo from a high place and shooting down. Trains, automobiles and people work better as the subject. You can check out the tutorial here.



I think the fact that I don't show up in the reflection of this bubble makes this photo unique. I was in every other bubble reflection except this one.

Odds and Ends

I've been out with my camera lately just driving around town, here are some of my favorites....

I won 2nd place in a local photo contest with this one, the title of the contest was "reflections"








I couldn't decide which I liked better, the black and white or the color version so I'm posting both.

My latest baby photo shoots....

Twins!! These two were adorable and fun - especially because they were so sleepy.

Vintage Photography

Here's a really neat method that I've never used before. One of my friends brought her Kodak Duaflex camera with her, it's an antique and has a large view finder.



I took my digital camera, zoomed in as much as I could and then pointed it at the Kodak's viewfinder (while pointing the Kodak at my subject). It creates this really neat effect.....


Technically, these pictures would all be in black and white or maybe sepia if I wanted it to look legit, but these beautiful little girls had orange dresses and I just loved them. Can you blame me?