Tag Archives: commercial

Down the Hatch

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The Heart of Texas Professional Photographers Guild has monthly image competitions.  Each month, anyone in the guild can submit images to the competition.  Additionally, in a separate competition, there is a specific theme, and the images must be in that theme.  For September, the theme was “a product.” I had planned on doing an image of pouring beer out of a bottle.  I was going to have a glass and above the glass, at an appropriate angle was going to be the neck of the bottle, and I was going to have beer coming out of the bottle into the glass.

August is the month in which Hatch Chili Peppers are harvested.  The “season” is rather short, but the green chilis are special.  Debbie was at the store and saw they actually had a beer that had Hatch chilis in it.  So, I changed my original concept.  I wanted to photograph that beer.  Next to it was a glass.  Some beers are trying to distinguish themselves by having some form of garnish – usually a slice of a citrus fruit.  I used that and had a garnish on the glass of a slice of a chili pepper, and surrounded the bottle and the glass with peppers.  My image can in first in the competition.

Down the Hatch

Commercial Real Estate

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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.

SONY DSC

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.

SONY DSC

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.

 

Vision

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I just came back upon Don Giannatti’s “Project 52” web site.  I had seen the site several months ago, but it slipped from my memory.  I have been a member of the flickr group for a long time, but, I can’t remember the last time I actually visited the group page.  On this site, there is a weekly photography assignment. The assignments for this year start on February 1.  So, I looked at the 2012 assignments.

The first assignment is to create a Vision Statement.  This is basically a statement describing why it is that I take pictures.  As described on the web site, “Tell us with a single paragraph what you want to be able to do with your images. Tell us what you do without telling us you are a photographer. Accompany that message with a single image taken around your home.”

To me, the reason I enjoy photography is it differs from other modes of expression, and there is something that is transcendently stimulating when I see a really great image I have taken. In 2012, my Aperture Library has over 7700 images.  Every once in a while, as the image would come up on the screen, there was a moment of awe.  Kind of, “Oh boy.  That is good!”

It is becoming easier to take technically perfect images – those with proper exposure, composition, lighting, whatever.  I can look at those and think, “That’s a good image.”  But there is the added, intangible element that is included in an image that is really great.  I take photographs because I enjoy that feeling of producing a picture that is really great.

Now, what kind of image around the house can I make that illustrates that?