Thursday, May 31, 2007

And for the perfunctory nature photos...



Naked limbs

Picture of the Day 5-31-07



This is my favorite of a series of portraits I took of Ian.



I used a spotlight effect on this photo to draw his face a bit out of the shadows. I like the way it makes the tree behind him look like plastic.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Picture of the Day 5-17-07

Saturday, May 12, 2007

LIVE! In the RAW

Although I sincerely doubt W.A.S.P. was thinking about RAW photo images when they named their tour LIVE! In the RAW, it nonetheless is my new motto. At least for the time being anyways.

I broke one of the first cardinal rules to professional photography - I forgot the check ALL of my settings before beginning my shoot. My WB was still set to the custom setting from inside the control room at the studio so needless to say, very blue, indeed. It was pretty much slightly different than Tunsten, but not at all apropriate for full sun shooting. Now, to my advantage, the camera was also still set to RAW, so I was able to correct the WB on those images shot before I changed to settings.

Now what I truly loved about the RAW pictures was that when I went to adjust the WB, I first just selected the "proper" WB setting of Sunny and the white house I had shot looked yellowish. Next the Auto setting, and it was yellow, Flourescent - green. So I went back to "as shot" and played around with the warmth setting and I was able to get a perfect white.

Now that I have a 2 gig card, I plan on shooting in RAW. I really just enjoy having more compensation options.

On a different topic, I took a lot of pix of the falls using a slow shutter speed, but there was still some additional object blur in most of them, even with the use of a monopod. I think for shots like this a tripod is almost certainly a MUST.

Stone Arch Bridge









Labels: ,

Minnehaha Falls









These are a few pictures I took of the falls yesterday.

Labels: , ,

Friday, May 11, 2007

A Gaggle of Elvi



It was one of those, "damn I wish I had brought my camera with me" occations. I was wondering around the Mall of America, and although I usually do bring my camera with me wherever I go, I didn't want to carry it around the mall, so I left it at home, only to discover that there was an Elvis impersonator contest taking place. There were Elvis of all shapes, sizes, colors and eras. A Mexican Elvi, several Hawaiian Elvi, young and cute Elvi, fat, old and sporting jumpsuits Elvi. The best I could do was take a picture with my cell, which, isn't the greatest quality and is hard to operate outside the plain point and shoot setting, but I was at least able to get a shot off.

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Tree blossom buds all macrofied

Picture of the Day 5-8-07

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

The camera has arrived and it's kickin ass!

After the initial irritation over the CF card, I got the camera up and running. Damn does it take awesome pictures! Of course, set on the largest setting with my current undersized 256MB CF card, I only get about 50 pictures - tops. I'll need to get a couple new cards. This card I had for the camera I was using 2 cameras ago, which only had 3.2 megapixels so I was able to get about 300 or so images out of that. Now with 10.1 megapixels it really eats it up fast! I have 2 512MB cards for the S2IS but they are a smaller size. That sucks. I'm so happy happy happy happy happy!!!!

Picture of the Day 5-1-07