I had a little spare time on Friday. So, I ran over to the zoo. I knew I did not have enough time to do the entire zoo, so I went to the Asia and Africa areas. The female orangutan gave birth not too long ago, and she and her baby were out.
In the Africa exhibit, the flamingoes were all next to the water, and that made a nice reflection shot.
Finally, right next tot he Flamingoes, there was a flock of Black Vultures in a tree.
Another image of mine received a second place in the Associate’s category of the Heart of Texas Professional Photographers Guild image competition on February 11. This is the original version.
However, in order to improve it for competition, I removed some of the distracting elements. The speaker, Mark McCall did a critique of all the images and suggested a couple of small additional changes. He also said that images should always have a border. So, that said, this is the final version of the image.
We had some substantial rains last Thursday and Friday. As a result, Monday, there was a patch of rain lilies in the yard.
I got another call to do a Commercial Real Estate shoot. This was for a local motel. They wanted a variety of shots of the exterior and interiors of their three different room configurations. They wanted the exterior shot during the day and after sundown to show the lights. Here is after sundown.
This was not a simple picture. I started out intending to do an HDR, but the processing seemed to add noise to it. So, I used the normally exposed frame. I adjusted exposure and black level, added contract, and sharpened as I would normally do, but there were distractions. They were in the process of installing something in the grass between this place and the one next door. There was an orange net fence. So, I cloned that out. There was a street sign that was distracting. So, that got cloned out as well. Then there was the street in front of the place. It was a large grey region in the foreground. So, I burned it in to darken it and then blurred it to reduce any definition.
This was the view of the double room configuration. The interior shots, too needed a great deal of help. First of all, there were no drapes in these rooms. The only thing to control the ambient light was mini blinds. I used my two LCD video lights and set those up in the corners behind me. Even at that, the exposure was dark. So, I corrected exposure and black level, added contrast, and vibrancy and sharpened the image. It still had some shadow problems, so, I moved the shadow slider up as far as it would go, and that really opened up the shadows. The final thing was the perspective. Every frame of this shoot was taken with a 10 – 20 lens, and there were serious perspective distortions as a result of the lens. So, I took the images into photoshop and transformed them to remove the distorted perspective. Now, all the lines are straight, and the end result was a usable image.
The “child” model for the HOTPPG Shoot Out was Rachel. She was an 11 year old girl. I asked her what she wanted to do and she said “Get in the water.” The look on her mother’s face was of concern. So, I told her she get in as long as she didn’t get her dress wet.
The sun was going down quickly, and she was not really all that interested in posing any more, but I got a couple nice shots of her.
Saturday, I watched a video of Peter Hurley doing head shots of various people. He took some amazing shots, but the video was really about his “process.” Debbie was doing a bunch of things and heard it more than watched it. She hated Hurley. He was loud and abrasive and even somewhat abusive with these people. He would say things like “You’re eyes aren’t the same size. Turn your head so the beady one is closer to the camera.” but, he did do something quite interesting.
He had a chart called “How Does Your Inner Child Feel Today?”. It is a bunch of faces that correspond to emotions. He would look at it and randomly choose one of the emotions. He would say, “Show me innocent.” He explained that the expression he got might or might not be something interesting that he could photograph, but he said that the person would always realize they made a silly face and break out with a huge smile.
OK so, today I decided to try some beauty lighting. I powered my beauty dish with the Polaroid PL135 as the key light with a reflector underneath in a clam shell orientation. I added a Qflash T4d as a hair light. I had to power both down as low as they would go to shoot at iso 100 and 1/100, f/2.8 with my 85mm lens.
So, I told Helen to give me Joy.
Then I told her to show me pain.
Then, I asked for wistful
OK. Rather plastic. So, I sat down.
Serious.
Apprehensive
Anticipation
Relief that this is over.
I have been doing quite a bit of HDR imagery using Galveston locations. We were down there the weekend of the 8th. I didn’t really feel in the mood on Saturday morning but then remembered we joined the Galveston Historical Society. That meant we could get into The Elissa for free. So, I decided to go down to the harbor and shoot a little and go on The Elissa and shoot.
In looking at one of the magazines, I saw a picture take roughly in the same place as this. Only, it was a night photograph, and all the winds glowed brightly. It was an effective picture, and I would like to try a similar thing at some point, but this was just take from behind Willie G’s looking back at it.
While we were in the harbor, this fishing boat came in. It made an interesting subject for an HDR image. Then I noticed that a woman on the boat was quite busy dealing with the catch and got a nice picture of her.
We then went over to The Elissa and walked around the ship.
A post in a Facebook group asked for a photographer for a wedding. It was from another photographer who was in the wedding party and was going to do the miscellaneous shots before the ceremony and at the reception, but just needed someone to photograph the ceremony. We settled on a price and met and discussed it. The bride was her sister. The wedding was to be outside at Whitehall Park in Woodway. Their family was mainly biker types, and the wedding was to have that atmosphere. The night before, it rained fairly heavily. I got to the location early to scout things out, and the ground wasn’t too bad. Given the logistics, I decided on three lenses – 10 – 20 f/3.5, 24-70 f/2.8, and 70 – 200 f/2.8.
I got a new Macro lens, and wanted to test it. So, I went over to the arboretum for a couple flower and insect shots.
I had a free afternoon, and I had been told that there were lots of really interesting places in Hico. Hico is a small town on Hwy 6. It is apparently the home of Billy the Kid because there is a statue of him in the middle of town, and apparently a museum as well. I drove around the town and saw lots of interesting locations.
There were alleys behind buildings that had back doors like this. It was really cool.
I can imagine these as great places for a bridal shoot.
This shell of an old building had tons of character.