One of the things I’m always looking for when out shooting is a puddle – something that can be used to shoot reflections.
Here’s a shot based on a big puddle – a hotel swimming pool – shot shortly after sunrise. I loved how the palms were shimmering in the surface of the pool’s water.
I used Lightroom and one of Trey Ratcliff’s Lightroom presets to process the image- Infrared Morning to help create the effect. Naturally, I also flipped the image upside down so that the trees look semi-normal!
For the past few years, I’ve been heading to San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge for some photography. I’m not much of a football fan – and after the holidays it feels great to get out and walk with camera in hand!
This past New Year’s Day, I went up the Great Highway and stopped at the Cliff House. The morning light was very nice and I captured this shot looking down the beach just down the hill a bit from the Cliff House. I processed it to black and white using Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2.
Another monochrome image treatment from last Saturday’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade in San Francisco. This image was shot with my Nikon D600 at the corner of Second St. and Market – where the head of the parade assembles. Lots of San Francisco Police were preparing for the parade’s start – and catching up among themselves!
I used Photoshop to convert this image to black and white – and used some highlight and toning layers to add a bit of depth.
One of my favorite things about Flickr is how I get to see some of my older images – just because someone else found them by searching on Flickr or Google! Each day, I enjoy looking at a report that Flickr provides of activity on all of my photos.
A couple of days ago, an earlier color HDR image of this photo turned up. It brought back memories of that place – on the Big Island of Hawaii on the road heading east of of Hawi. I shot this as a 3-image handheld bracketed shot with my Canon 5D Mark II. The original image I posted on Flickr was processed in Photomatix Pro.
Tonight, I opted to process the HDR using Photoshop’s Merge to HDR Pro. I then brought it into Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2, added some control points for tweaking before finishing it back in Photoshop with some dodging and burning using some new techniques we’ve been learning.
I find this composition very pleasing to the eye – with that gradual slope on the hillside, the beautiful angle of the tree and the foggy skies above. Ah, Hawaii indeed!
Here’s an image I shot at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Saturday morning as I was heading to the annual San Francisco St. Patrick’s Day parade. The whole Yerba Buena Center complex is a photographers delight – chock full of interesting people, some amazing textures, waterfalls, trees and lawn – you name it, it’s all here in a bit less than a city block!
For the last several years, my primary camera has been a Canon 5D Mark II DSLR. It’s a wonderful camera and has done an amazing job for me. I’ve got a collection of Canon prime and zoom lenses for that camera that work beautifully and have helped me capture some beautiful images. I have lots of wonderful memories of trips to venues around the west with my Canon! (Check out my Cool Tools page for details on my favorite gear!)
In January, Doug Kaye and I headed to Havana, Cuba to participate in a person-to-person cultural exchange program organized by the great folks at Santa Fe Photographic Workshops. Along with our workshop colleagues, we had an amazing week in Havana – and I had a blast getting into the world of street photography which was pretty much a new experience for me.
A few months before the Cuba trip, I bought a new Nikon D600 – shortly after this new camera body was introduced. In particular, I was interested because of the early reviews and reports about the D600’s Sony sensor – and its wider dynamic range. Dynamic range describes the range of the camera’s sensor in accurately capturing whites to blacks – and the D600 ranked very highly at being able to capture one of the widest dynamic ranges. For a lot of my kind of photography, that dynamic range is important – so I opted to get the D600. I was also stimulated by my friend Doug Kaye’s Nikon passion and the fact that on many of the photo shoots we do together he brings along his wide assortment of Nikon lenses!
For the Havana trip, I mostly shot with the D600 kit lens – Nikon’s 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5 zoom lens – and it did a fabulous job. I mostly left the D600 on auto everything (ISO, Focus, P mode, etc.) and just shot away. I got some great shots – the camera did an wonderful job.
Recently, I decided to get the Nikon lens that seems to be everyone’s favorite for street photography on Nikon DSLR camera bodies – the Nikon 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6 zoom lens. On Saturday, I took this one lens up to San Francisco to shoot the annual San Francisco St. Patrick’s Day parade and, along the way, snapped this self-portrait image in the window at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. This is a great lens for street photography – the combination of its ability to go reasonably wide along with its ability to do a long zoom make for a near perfect lens for daytime street photography. Here’s another example of using the reach of this lens.
I’m still trying to master the autofocus options on my D600 – especially for street photography. The “double vision” in this image has nothing to do with those – it’s just the glass! – but I’m convinced that once I master those the D600 and this 28-300mm lens with be my ideal street photography rig. I’m anxious to do more exploring with it!
Here’s an initial monochrome version of the Camperdown Elm photo from my walk at Filoli a couple of weeks ago. Handheld shot with my Nikon D600.
For this version, I used Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2 do to a black and white conversion, darkening the lawn area up front and adding a bit of color to the highlights.
The “bones” of this tree are so beautiful – and the morning light that morning at Filoli was just right to light it up.
Does a viewer’s context matter to photo appreciation? Seems that it does.
I had a discussion today with a friend about looking at photographs and how they’re appreciated. Seems that there’s a difference between appreciating great photographs for what they capture vs. those photographs you might want to have printed and hanging on a wall in your home or office.
A few years ago, I took the shot above across the subway platform in the Brooklyn Bridge subway station in New York City. I titled it “Bookends” because of how the folks on the bench remind me of books on an overstuffed shelf where the books on each end are tilting outward.
Everyone who has seen “Bookends” tells me what a great image it is. But it seems that it’s not an image they’d want to have hanging on a wall in their home (although it does hang on the wall in my home office!).
People in an image seem to be part of the issue here. “Do I really want to be looking these folks?”
Images without people in them – at least not as major features – seem to be more suitable for prints hanging on walls. These images naturally have a bit more mystery and a much less personal interaction with the people in images like “Bookends” – and seem somehow more appropriate as fine art prints for wall display.
It’s an interesting distinction – one that I’m learning more about. I love the “Bookends” image – but I’m beginning to understand why some folks might say “Wow, that’s a great shot – but I don’t think I want it hanging on a wall in my home.”
How about you? Do you feel that difference between “wow, that’s a great shot” and “wow, I’d like a print of that hanging in my home”? What’s your filter between the two?
Over breakfast this morning, I stumbled across a recommendation for the iOS application (both iPad and iPhone) My Sketch – which costs $1.99. I installed it and tried it out on one of my recent photos – which took all of about 30 seconds for me to complete and save! I liked the look of the pencil sketch lines coming into the image very much like the rays of light behind him actually did at the time I shot the image.
See more of my shots from Havana and Cuba here.
Here’s another image from our evening out in Havana at the Tropicana Club. This was near the end of the floor show – shot with my Nikon D600 and the Nikkor 85mm f/1.8 prime lens, ISO 3200, 1/250 at f/4. Post-processed using Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2 and a number of other tweaks in Photoshop CS6.
One of the best times to go out shooting pictures is right after it’s rained.
Rain adds saturation to colors – and the rain also leaves behind these magical looking glasses called puddles.
For me, photography is all about this kind of magic – those special elements that come together at a venue and surprise us with a new point of view. Puddles bring reflections – and reflections bring magical ways of seeing.
Being out on a morning after the rain is one of the best times for a photographer. You just have to be open to it – open to seeing it, right there, on the ground before you. Mostly, you need to get lower – to fill out the reflection, to combine the upper (real) and lower (reflection) portions of the image into the right balance.
This image is from a recent photo walk with Doug Kaye at San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center – one of our favorite venues. It was shot with my Nikon D600 and tweaked in Photoshop CS6 using Nik Color Efex Pro 4 (Detail Enhanced and Pro Contrast), Topaz Simply 4 (Black and White II present – mostly in the reflection half of the image) and Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 where the final tweaking was done – adding midtone structure and the color.
I thought about taking out that patch of fog in the upper right – but, somehow, it works for me just to leave it alone as a point of interest. Actually, for me that patch of fog is part of the magic!