29/52 - Homeless

When I was walking around New Orleans a few weeks ago, I really wanted to try to get out at night and do a little bit of people watching and possibly try 'street photography' a bit.  What I mean by 'street photography' is simply to capture a candid image of a person or people, without them knowing I was shooting them.  Hopefully, in New Orleans, I'd be able to get an interesting person or group of people that could make an interesting image, so I thought I'd try it out.

I made a couple laps around Bourbon Street, trying to find something of interest...I know, being on Bourbon Street, there should be plentiful opportunities to find something interesting.  I shot a lot of pictures, a couple of them decent, many that were just boring, but this one really caught my eye.

I passed this guy the my first trip down the street and thought that he would make an interesting image.  I'm nervous shooting pictures of complete strangers and even more nervous that they would catch me shooting them, which could get akward.  So, I didn't stop right away and take his picture.  I kept walking down the street, but the further I got, I convinced myself that I would regret not taking the picture.  So, I walked the couple blocks back towards the guy and stopped in a doorway to an apartment or something, half hidden, and composed my picture.  I snapped off a couple of shots and was really pleased with the way it came out.  I felt this whole scene really makes this guy look like he feels lonely and isolated from everyone else.  Although there are a lot of people out on the street, there isn't anyone close to him.  I felt like it made a pretty good scene.

So, happy that I got the picture I wanted to take, I kept on walking, stopping every now and again to grab pictures of everything that was going on.  This ended up being my favorite picture from the trip.

Let me know what you think.

T.

28/52 - New Orleans - Tilt Shift

I know that I say this a lot, but this is another picture that I've been wanting to attempt for a little while now.  I've seen this effect done many times before and never knew that I could do it, using a standard lens, until just recently.  There are lenses out there designed to produce this effect, specifically the Lensbaby line, but I didn't realize the same effect could just be applied in Photoshop.  I'm sure the effect isn't the same as if you were to capture it using a special tilt-shift lens, but I thought it still looked kind of cool.

My example here isn't a great one for a few reasons.
1.  I don't have very much height compared to the subject I'm trying to bring the effect on: the people down on the street.  To really achieve this the best way possible, I'd need to be higher up.
2.  I took it during the night and its' not an overly well lit photo.  I know you can still get a good tilt-shift photo done at night time, but I'd need a little more light on the subjects to make it better.
3.  I think I might have over applied the effect.  I think that I blurred out the other areas of the photo a little too much. 

But, the effect is noticable still the same.  The result of the effect is to make the subject look almost 'miniature' or look like a small model replica of the scene you're shooting.  There is one single band of the photo that is in focus and everything else is out of focus, which, for whatever reason, makes the subjects look small or fake.

So, a few weeks ago, I was traveling through New Orlans visiting a customer.  Luckily, we stayed in a hotel right on Bourbon Street.  It wasn't quite as crazy as I thought or had pictured it was going to be, but it was still farily busy for only being a Wednesday night.  I walked around for the evening with my camera, snapping pictures of whatever I could find that I thought was interesting and got some decent ones.  Then, I decided to go up on the balcony of the hotel and try getting pictures of the crowd with the intention of putting together this tilt-shift photo.  I was using my 50mm lens, so that on top of my cropped sensor camera body resulted in about a 85-90mm zoom in my veiwfinder.  Being that I was only on the second level of the hotel, I didn't have a very wide angle or zoomed out shot that I could put together.  I decided to try it anyway and took several photos with multiple different exposure times from 1/30th second all the way to 30 seconds, just seeing what the difference did on the people walking around and the feel of the picture in general.

I ended up deciding on using a photo with one of the quicker shutter speeds (1/30 - 1/15 second) in order to somewhat freeze the movement of the people on the street.  There is still some blurring and visible movement, but for the most part, the people are still defined.

From there, I used a technique that I looked up on-line to mimic the tilt-shift style and applied the effect to the photo and this is the result. 

Let me know what you think.

T.

Follow up:

I went back in to the image and tweaked the blur to lower it a little bit.  I think that it looks better this way.  Let me know what you think.

27/52 - Morning Run

When we first got Ellie, I used to take her out for walks or runs in the morning. I wanted to try to burn off as much of her energy as possible because we were going to put her in her cage for the rest of the day while Paige and I were at work.

We got her in October, so for the first several months, our morning walks / runs would be in the dark. We bought reflectors to put on her legs so that she would be visible to cars. Our neighborhood doesn't have many streetlights and doesn't have any sidewalks, so we would have to be on the road. I would wear my own reflectors and carry a flashlight so that we could be as visible as possible while walking down the road.

I wanted to get a simple picture of Ellie and I just standing together with our reflectors on. I didn't want our bodies to be in it, just our legs and feet. I've seen pictures where runners will just shoot their shoes or race tags or whatnot and I kind of wanted to emulate one of those pictures.

Let me know what you think.

T.

26/52 - A Woman's World

OK, I'm a bit behind getting pictures posted here.  Not necessarily behind in taking them, but I've been pretty busy the last few weeks and haven't been able to get any posted.

Here is a picture that I put together with Paige a few weeks ago and just forgot to get it posted.  I had the idea that I wanted to do a silly photo that was exaggerated.  The first thing that came to mind was the old macho saying that a woman's place is 'barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen'.  Since my wife is pregnant now and routinely walks around the house barefoot, I thought that it was really funny and would fit.
So, we set up the kitchen to make it look a mess, threw some flour around and had Paige wipe it on her face, shirt and pants to make it look like she was working really hard, then got the lights all set up.

It was actually a pretty easy picture to take and was kind of fun.

Sorry for the short description, but I'm still incredibly busy with work now and need to get back to it!

Let me know what you think.

T