Monday, June 26, 2006

Cone Flowers



This is actually two views of the same shot, the second one is just cropped a lot tighter to bring out the details more. They are cone flowers from my yard.

Friday, June 23, 2006

Thursday Night Storms




I tried my best to get a good lightning shot of some storms that rolled by Thursday evening, but this is the best I could come up with. I basically tried a few different approaches, first shooting in Aperture priority mode and craking the aperture up to 22 so the shutter would stay open a really long time. This produced the blue tinted sky effect in the first photo. Next, I just switched to all manual, set my aperture to 5.6 and my shutter time for five seconds and tried just shooting and hoping something popped up in that time frame.

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Angles


I had thought about posting this as a mystery photo, but the fluorescent lights pretty much give it away. It's an awning on the front of a local grocery store, but it's a good example of lighting color temperatures. The camera is balanced for the fluorescent light, so it looks white and the color is accurate. However, the blue looking part at the top is the front of the awning that is lit by the evening sky. It's actually a brownish color, but the evening skylight gives it a bluish tint.

After the storm


We had a pretty good storm roll through Monday evening, which made for a really nice sunset afterward.

Monday, June 19, 2006

Tiger Lily


I know I haven't posted in a while. Sorry about that. Anyhow, since I like shooting flowers so much, I decided to create a gallery of just those shots on my main web site. Hope you like them.

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Monday, June 05, 2006

Yet another sunset


Here's a shot of the sunset from the other night. I've found a really good Photoshop technique for enhancing silhoutted sunset photos for anyone out there who cares about the technical end of this stuff. It's really simple, too. I copy the background layer that is the original photo, then change the blending mode of the new layer to multiply. This really makes the colors dark and bold. If the effect is too much, then lower the opacity of the new layer to tone it down some.

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Close Encounters


What happens when your backlighting is too bright and you expose for the foreground? Here we have direct sunlight coming in from the window behind my son. I thought it looked like the scene from Close Encounters where the aliens first come off the ship.