Devilish Smile

Title: Devilish Smile by Me

This is the result of an attempt to turn my bedroom into a makeshift studio last January-ish. Lighting is a combination of natural light streaming in through a window on her left, on camera flash, and a remote SB-800. The window light was coming through as a slant and wasn’t high enough to illuminate her face, and as I don’t have a stand for the SB-800, it was stuck at table height. The result isn’t terrible, but my photographer’s eye sees the problems with the lighting right away. (Her sheer beauty makes up for it though).

Moral of the story: I need me a real studio…

They’re better to eat you with…

Title: My what big teeth you have! by Me

This was taken in New York’s Museum of Natural History – one of my very favorite places on Earth (I was one of those kids who was a dinosaur nut, and it’s something I never really grew out of. But even if you weren’t a dinosaur obssessed eight year old, I should hope the subject of the photo needs no introduction.

The photo itself was shot with my 50mm at f/1.8, the wide aperture creates a very shallow depth of field – keeping that front row of teeth in sharp focus while letting everything else blur in the background.

Trapped

Title: Trapped by Me

A leaf that got caught in between two parts of a fence. Surprisingly (to me, looking at the metadata now), I didn’t use all that wide an aperture for the depth of field. But it still came out just right, and that’s what matters isn’t it?

To Dream the Impossible Dream

Title: To Dream the Impossible Dream by Me

 

This is a shot that I’d include in any running for my “best photo”. I just think it’s unique, and pretty creative.

 

It’s a shot of  parking lot puddle, with a solitary tree being reflected – due to the angle, the blacktop is more visible at the top than at the bottom, though I think it actually adds to the composition. But what really makes it for me is the leaf, which due to the inversion seems to have fallen up from the tree.

Stormy

Title: Stormy Weather by Me

Here’s an example of why it pays to always have your camera with you. It was a very rainy day, too heavy to really even think about pulling my equipment out. I had spent most of the afternoon in a coffee shop. Shortly before I left though, the rain finally broke and the clouds broke for the sun. Remarkably though, they only broke at the western edge of the sky, just enough to let the sunlight shine through on everything below the cloudscape. So the tower was in direct sunlight underneath storm clouds – really cool lighting, as you can see.

The image is a five frame HDR tonemapped with Photomatix – it was the only way I could preserve the amazing cloud details while preserving how the tower looked.

Photoshop Express

Title: The Wall

Yesterday Adobe launched a Photoshop Express (beta, apparently for Web 2.0 street cred), its first into the world of web based image editing.

The name is a bit misleading; it offers but a tiny sliver of the features and functionality Photoshop offers or even those of the watered down Photoshop Elements (though I’ll note that the correction tools that are present are excellent). It’s basically a fun sort of toy – a way to apply a bunch of neat special effects to photos, but it’s nothing that’s about to supplant Adobe’s desktop applications. I won’t attempt a full review here – instead I’ll just suggest you go play with the test drive to see what it can do.

I’ve begun playing with a little, it’s certainly a slick application – not surprising, since part of Adobe’s goal is no doubt to showcase their Flash and Flex technologies. In that vein, there’s no doubt there’s an Air version in the pipeline too.

It’ll be interesting to see when and how Adobe integrates this into their existing suite of desktop products. Integration with Lightroom, for example, could make this into a killer product (for me, anyway), depending on how they do it. For the moment though, there there’s nothing here to steal me away from Picnik, which I’ve recently become quite enamored with.

Weekends

Title: But a Whisper by Me.

I’ve decided that I rather like taking weekends off from blogging, and in that vein I took this past weekend off again (in case anyone noticed the lack of posts on Saturday and Sunday). Weekdays are pretty easy for me; I usually write these posts either when I’m at my desk in the morning or at lunchtime at work (on rare occasions, I’ll even write them the night before). But on weekends… well, I just don’t feel like doing anything when I get up in the morning, and remembering to do it otherwise on a Saturday just seems like a PITA sometimes. So for the moment, I’m just going to take weekends off – five posts a week should be more than enough.

The photo effect above is a simple warming of the white balance to get the orangish color tone.

Marketing

Title: To Meditate by Me

I’ve gone through and replaced everything for sale in my Imagekind Gallery with uncompressed TIFF images. I doubt that there’s the slightest discernible difference from the JPG’s that were there, but I figure I owe it to anyone who does buy a print to get the very highest quality image that I can possibly offer.

Which brings me  to my question of the day, in case any of my few readers have some good ideas – how can I better market my work? And by that, I don’t necessarily mean “make money”, but rather how can I bring more traffic to my Flickr stream and/or this blog? I’m about as active as I can possibly be in terms of commenting and such, and getting reciprocal traffic (appreciating others’ work is something that I happen to immensely enjoy doing anyway), and consequently the traffic I get is pretty flat. Does anyone have any good tips or thoughts as to how I might actually grow my traffic? It would be much appreciated.

The photo, unbelievably, was shot in between a shopping mall and a highway.  It’s a little slice of something beautiful in the suburban landscape.

Wall of Water

Flickr broke today. Mind you, it’s not the whole site that broke, but I think most people see the message and then opt to go do something else, which accounts for why the site seems a little quiet today. At least, that’s the excuse I’m using for why the stuff I uploaded today has views in the single digits (as I write this, anyway).

This, is a pretty cool shot (pun unintended), I think, just because I really like the transition from water to mist to ice. There’s really nothing else special here, though it did take some post processing to bring out the contrasts.

Exposure: 1/320″
Aperture: f/9

Spooky

Although it doesn’t appear in the shot, it was pretty much pouring rain when I took this (I shot it from the relative dryness of my car). It only started when I got there, which kind of put a damper on my photo taking plans. Still – it kicked up a bit of fog and the wet trees absorbed what light there was, making them darker and more distinct.

Exposure: 1/100″
Aperture: f/5