34/52 - Doorway Silhouette

As with most of the pictures I take, I saw one similar to this on-line and really liked it, so I figured I'd give it a try.  However, I like the one I shot a lot better because I really like the front door / entrance way of our house.  It worked perfectly for this picture.

I've done a couple of silhouette, back-lit pictures of Paige before, standing in front of the bay window we have at the house.  So, that idea wasn't new.  But, doing one with the open doorway and blowing out the lights outside was what really caught my eye with the picture I saw.  As soon as I saw it, I knew I wanted to shoot one at our front door.

I got home from work that Friday and had Paige change into her black dress.  The dress worked perfectly because it is somewhat form fitting and really shows off the curves of her body, especially in profile with the belly sticking out.

I took a few test shots to figure out which shutter speed I needed to blow out the lights in the window and doorway and moved around a little bit to find the best perspective point to get as much of the entrance way in the scene as possible.  Then, it was just putting Paige in the doorway and snapping a few off to seal the deal.

I really like the way this picture turned out.  My only regret is not masking out the rail, trees and bushes outside the doorway when I dialed up the contrast to make those a little less visible.  But, I still like it regardless.

Let me know what you think.

T.

33/52 - Floating

This is a picture that I've had in mind for a while.  I've tried this type of a picture before using myself as kind of a joke, but really liked it, so I figured I would do it with Paige at some point as well.  It's a pretty simple multi-picture composite.

One shot is just of the background - empty living room with the coffee table and couch.  The second shot was of Paige sitting on the coffee table.  The third picture was of me holding the pillows in mid-air.
I layered the second and third picture on top of the background image, then erased everything except for Paige and the pillows.  I then moved Paige up a little bit to make it look like she was floating and that was about it.

It was a pretty easy picture to take and the most difficult thing to do was masking out around Paige's body and around the edges of the pillows.  Other than that...easy peasy.

Let me know what you think.

T.

32/52 - Belly Shirt

A friend of Paige's recently had a maternity shoot done and got a picture that looked like this one.  Paige saw it on Facebook and showed it to me.  I really liked the picture a lot and asked her if she wanted to take one like it.  I immediately knew where I wanted to shoot the picture and just needed to get her on board with standing out next to the house to let me capture it.

Her friend's picture was next to an old barn or something because the background was of worn, cracked, faded wood.  I knew I didn't have anything like that around our house, but we do have a brick wall on one side of the house that I thought would look great behind her.

So, I set up the light out in the drive way, got the lighting set the way I wanted it and had her come out.  She was a little embarassed to be standing outside with her belly hanging out while I was shooting.  Every time she would see someone coming down the street, walking by or going past our house, she would run back into the garage so that they wouldn't see her.

After a few shots, I got the one that I wanted...all in all, it took about 5 minutes to set up and 5 minutes to shoot (including the time she spent hiding in the garage).

In post-processing, I turned up the contrast a little, darkened the colors of the bricks and added a little extra blur on the background, so it would fade out a little bit and not be so pronounced.  Then, I just cropped it the way she wanted and that was it.

Let me know what you think.

T.

31/52 - Stormy Sunset

Throughout the late summer in Arizona, it is pretty typical for a thunderstorm to develop almost every night.  Some are longer than others and some don't amount to much, but they come through quite a bit.  We were in Phoenix the first week of August and got to see these storms 5 of the 7 nights we were there.  I guess this time of the year is their 'rainy' season, so they get pretty frequent storms.  They don't hit the city very much because the heat radiated off of the concrete downtown rises and pushes the storms away.  But, if you're in any of the outside suburbs, you usually get hit.

We were on the north side of Phoenix in Scottsdale, and I guess we were far enough away from downtown because we got hit a lot. 

One of the last couple of days we were there, we got back from dinner around sunset and I thought it looked really pretty with all of the clouds coming in for the nightly storm.  So, I went in, grabbed my camera, tripod and shutter release cable, and headed out onto the balcony.  As the sun set further and the colors really started to come out, I snapped off quite a few pictures.  I got a couple of panoramic shots of the sunset which turned out nicely, but this is one of my favorite shots from the evening.  The clouds coming in really made the colors pop and you can see several different areas in the frame where it is actually raining. 
I got a few more pictures of the crazy clouds that were coming through and even a few pictures of lightning, but none of those were good enough to really post.

It was fun standing around for the hour or so that I did, just watching the sunset and trying to get different images that really showed how pretty it was. 

Let me know what you think.

T.

P.S.
Here is the sunset panoramic picture that I got. You can see more of the rain in this picture in several different areas.

30/52 - Grand Canyon

I've always wanted to go to the Grand Canyon.  Especially more recently, as I've gotten more into photography and have a better camera.  As I've posted a few times on this blog, I really like taking panorama pictures.  I'll grab a bunch of frames and stitch them all together in Photoshop to put together different panos.  When I hiked a couple miles down into the Grand Canyon, there were plenty of opportunities to get great photos, especially great panos. 

This picture is a combination of 11 different pictures all stitched together.  Technically, I didn't really need 11 pictures, but I overlapped them quite a bit, just to make sure the image didn't get screwed up when I went to stitch it together.  That's happened to me before, where I've missed overlapping a picture slightly, and it messed up the entire picture.  I didn't want that to happen here, so I erred on the side of caution.

Paige's dad and I hiked down into the Canyon on the South Kaibab trail from the South Rim.  I believe the South Kaibab trail goes all the way down to the river, but since we were only there for the morning, we just went a short way in. 

This photo was put together at the 'Ooh-Aah Point', named after the fact that when you get there and look out at the vista, everyone naturally says 'oooh' and 'aaah'.  Kind of cheesy, but it works.
We continued hiking for another half hour or so downward, decided to call it quits, since it was going to be a steep hike back out and headed back.  We were on our second day of hiking at this point (after hiking 10 miles with 7,000 feet elevation change the day before) so we were already tired.  We also had a 4+ hour drive back to Phoenix that afternoon and didn't want to over extend ourselves.

The two days of hiking were a great time and this photo really doesn't do the Grand Canyon justice as to how enormously big and beautiful it is.  It is a spectacular place and I can't wait to get back and hike even further down into it and get some more great pictures.

Let me know what you think.

T.

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.