Box Car Series, Updated

This post is mostly for my and perhaps Naomi's referance.

Laying them all out side by side reveals that the 6th one needs lightening and contrast, and that the 8th one is not framed just right. These will be corrected before printing.

Spring Break

Only got a chance to shoot 300 or so shots over spring break, a lot of HDR stuff so that 300 can be considerably boiled down because of the immense bracketing involved in high dynamic range photography. Here's some of what I got a chance to shoot.

HDR

Forgotten Spaces

Non-Series Photographs

more, More, MORE!

I love doing this. I'm going back out to shoot some more. I'm sick so I didn't get to ambitious today, but this is the afternoon's work.

P.S. Click on the images to see them in detail.

More HDR

So I was out under the most beautiful sky we have had this year so far, in my opinion, without my tripod... why oh why do I make bad decisions? So I decided it was a conducive situation to do a little hand held HDR. Keep in mind that this is a compilation of 5 exposures, and I was hand holding my camera, thus the lack of alignment of some elements of the photograph. Anyways, I'm getting better at this... Sky's the limit.

High Dynamic Range

I've been working at understanding HDR for a couple of months now. I've been out shooting with it in mind many times and finally got a good enough grasp on it to share with you fine peers of mine. I need to bracket lower instead of so high, to get more shadow detail, but I am resonably happy with this first good result.

P.S. this damn blog messes with my contrast and brightness. It is not washed out at all in the image.

PS:CS3

Ok, I don't really know where to start, besides stating that I'm overflowing with tears of joy over Photoshop CS 3, I just downloaded the 2 day beta (which can be cracked easily so you can keep if for good, suprise suprise), and I havn't gotten further than opening a raw image and.... oh man. Talk about refinements. I am capable of making my shot just about perfect now before even entering photoshop.

Using the dialague box above you have increadible control of the tones in your shot.

Besides the Adobe Camera Raw 4.0 there is also a revised bridge, which is dark grey and very intuitive, it looks more customizable as well. I have noticed a new selection tool, and a "black and white" tab in the Image > Adjustments or Layer > New adjustment Layer paths. I'm sure there is much more.

Considering this program will be our next 5 years or so, I suggest we all get to learning it as fast as possible. Proficient is a great thing to be early when it comes to photoshop. Go get the beta folks!

Critique?

• The trees on the left... yay or nay? I can get rid of them if needed, I think they might crowd the shot a little too much.
• The blog made it a little darker than it should be, the image isn't naturally this dark.
• The tree on the right nicely frames the light, but should it be treated differently? Again, I can get rid of it if necessary.

I just was having some trouble finalizing this image. Shot it tonight, north point light station in front of a waning gibbous of a moon. Still plenty of reflected light.

Do any of you know about earthglow? The reason we can dark part of the moon as a hazy, dark, remainder is that the sun is reflecting off the earth at the moon the same way the moon is reflecting at us. So the dark part of the moon that faces earth will see the earth, lighting its night like the moon lights ours. Oooo.

Isn't science great?

Night Light

Another moon lit, late night waterscape. Barely pulled this one off, the moon was moving way too fast, so glad I got the shot though, this is one of my favorite night shots so far.

Snowbow

What? Snow makes rainbows too, but I figure its dumb to call a rainbow, which is in fact not made of rain, but snow, a snowbow.

Well it turns out it was in my best interest to drop everything at 12:00 on friday and leave at 12:10 to drive for 8 hours or so to Michigan... So I did, packed like a lightning bolt, got in the car, drove to madison with Howie, dug a car out of the snow for about an hour, and then drove straight north until we were in Houghton. Did some shooting on the way up, got dropped off at my Aunt and Uncle's house in Laurium Mi. Had a very late dinner with my cousin, and hopped in the guest bed. How and why did I suddenly go to Michigan? Well we drove up in a blizzard, and Howie was going (without telling me prior to dinner on Thursday) and his folks decided it would be better if someone went with him, to help drive etc. So I was offered an all expense paid ski trip, to my favorite place in America, the U.P. (Yeah that's right Amanda, don't knock the U.P. it is simply the best place around. I of course couldn't pass this up, so I said good bye to the girlfriend, packed the essentials, which included 2 cameras, some Velvia, various battery chargers, my laptop, skis, boots, poles, and of course some cloths.

Saturday was a day of knee deep powder overlooking Lac La-Belle and the channel out to Lake Superior. With 16-20 foot waves on Friday smashing in to the eastern coast of the peninsula I was expecting to go the extra mile... or 400 extra miles in this case, and get some waves crashing for Naomi's class and my crit on Monday, but with a bay full of pack-ice on saturday, the waves had expended all their energy before reaching anywhere near photographable areas. But this certainly was ok, there was skiing to be done.

Long story short, a lunar eclipse, another great lake, burning muscles, a home made jump, a cliff climb, a couple hundred photographs, a few bowls of soup, a game of scrabble, a visit to the hospitol for Howie (Ski's are sharp and landing just short of 720 degrees of rotation onto a very steep grade can be a painful combination), and 400 more miles later... I'm back, its late, and its time to get to work on some school work.

Here is what the weekend produced:

For Jonathan: A Barn Owl flew out of that barn right after my 10th or so frame of it, I know you love birds.

For Howie: You look fairly at peace, despite the gash in your knee and the blood staining the snow red.

For Amanda: You already got made fun of for talking smack about da UP eh.

For Sarah: That barn, I know you like them.

For Me: The abandoned drive in, I'd happily drive back to shoot it again when it isn't lit by moonlight.

For anyone else that actually reads this.... comment, prove you read it... I don't believe any of you!

Great weekend Howie, we'll do it again soon.