A little expedition

Today I had some time away from home without kids. Just free time to go exploring.

I went to one of my favorite places to take pictures.

Here is a little something I shot out there.

I set the exposure extremely long and my densest neutral density filter has a terrible purple tinge to it, but for this image I think it worked just great.

Let me know what you think.

2015 – An old favorite of mine.

I started going through my archives.  They begin in 2008 when I switched to digital.  I bought my d60 that day my first daughter was born and have shot over 25000 frames on 3 different cameras since. 
I have to say I still need to go back through my film shots too but looking back 6 years and a handful of months my photography has improved by miles. 

That being said I still captured aome great moments, memories and stories.  If you follow my 500px account you may recognize this old photo I dug out of my archives and post processed again.  Im sad to say I switched to shooting raw about 3 months after this was taken.  But the tools in photoshop still allow for huge adjustments to jpgs as well. 

You decide if you like this image better the original way or the new way

Link to original:
500px: https://500px.com/photo/18663955

The new version:

It is 2015…

…and there has never been a better time to go back through my archives and clean up the gigs of storage and post process a few hidden gems.  2 of my favorite shots that I shared on 500px this year were from my archives and I suspect I am sitting on a few more gems that just need the right boost from post processing. 
I hope to share the process a bit but in the meantime I highly recommend taking a trip through your old archives to find those pictures you previously overlooked.  Please share in the comments below.

Here is one of mine from 2013 that I processed and published last year.

Check out this awesome photo from 500px: https://500px.com/photo/84185457

Dec 2014 – Only the beginning

I apologise for my lack of writing this past year.  I feel like my whole 2014 project was supposed to focus on a more cohesive process of photography and what I found was that most months I do not have time to properly engage every aspect.  Conceive of setting up testing reshooting post processing and publishing take a huge amount of time.  Most months I was luck if I even got one day to shoot post process and publish.  I have learned so much about photography my own process and how hard it is for me to carve out time to pursue this hobby. 

All that being said I feel as though I had arrived and while at the beginning of the year I had hoped I would have a collection of 12 really unique photos that I loved I quickly discovered not every shot or every experiment works.  Walking through that sometimes painful process has brought me here.  I can be much more selective about what I publish and much more excited about my own personal acheivements and not so concerned with reproducing photos I had seen dozens of times before. 

This truly is only the beginning. 

So how did I shoot the last photo of 2014?

I had an off camera light about 280 degrees facing directly across the frame to the subject.  I had the subject facing about 230 degrees.  I placed a lit sparkler about 1/3 into the frame. 

I played around with the fstop and iso and slowed the shutter to lengthen the exposure of the sparkler as well as the background lights. 

I ended up shooting iso 200 f8 and shutter around 1/30. 

This is what I got out of the camera.

Its not bad.  I did crop the fingers of the sparkler holder out of the frame. 

I then used a technique to create a bit of a magical feel with a duplicate layer that I blurred to about 30 pixels and then blended with the layer option “screen”

You can see this created a very cool effect but softened the edges and overexposed some of the skin.

Then I applied a layer mask to the skin and sparkler.
Adjusted the contrast and played with the curves and shadows to try and balance the light a bit better. 

I also adjusted the brightness of the eyes and added some highlights.  This is especially dramatic in the full resolution image but the scaled version here still shows some benefit to the process. 
Lastly I did some minor color correction and sharpening. 

Happy New Year!