On Thursday I got a couple shots of the county courthouse.
McLennan County Courthouse
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Tag Archives: Waco
Return to Dynamic Imagery
It has been a while since I did HDR imagery. I made a book of the Galveston Images and used some in a calendar for next year. I have been meaning to start some of locations in Waco. So, yesterday, I decided to get started on that project. I shot around the suspension bridge, the courthouse, and the hippodrome.
For this post, I want to post the shots from the suspension bridge/Indian Springs Park area.
Wisdom exists for a purpose
There are times when one should heed common wisdom. I almost always shoot using Aperture Priority. I think most serious photographers do as it allows you to determine the depth of focus. That having been said, most sports photographers would argue that shooting in Shutter Priority is better for sports. It allows you to choose a shutter speed appropriate to freezing the action of your subject.
Saturday we went up to Denton to watch Mathias play football. This season, he is splitting time between his established position as corner back and his new position as running back. Saturday, he played a significant part of the second half at running back. He had a couple good, long runs and even scored a touchdown. Of course, I had my cameras and shot the game.
I began in Aperture Priority and selected f/8. It was a bright sunny day, and that allowed me to get good depth of field at a reasonable shutter speed. I had the 70 – 200 lens on my a550 and the 500 on my a700. Somehow at halftime, without my being aware of it, the aperture on my a700 got changed from f/8 to f/22. As a result, almost every pic had motion blur because I was now shooting at a shutter speed of 1/50 sec. Here is an example:
This is one of the better ones. I should have paid closer attention, but I didn’t. I should have shot using Shutter Priority, but I didn’t.
Commercial Real Estate
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.
Cozumel
The third stop on our cruise was Cozumel. We have been there several times before, making it easier to just head out on our own. We took a cab into town and shopped, stopped at Palmeres and had a margarita, then stopped at Margaritaville for lunch before going back tot he ship. The port area is much more built up than the last time we were there.
Another shot of a boat, this one not as stylized as the one from Belize. This was taken in downtown San Miguel.
Altun Ha Ruins and Belize
Our second stop was Belize, and we took a tour to the Altun Ha Mayan ruins. It was unbelievably hot, and the “guide” (as typical) went on and on and on about trivial details. There were about 40 people in our tour and two other groups besides us. So, getting reasonable pictures without lots of people was a problem. However, by using photoshop, I was able to produce some pretty good images.
On the road, as we drove along the shore, I noticed there was an old boat leaning against a tree. So, I took a quick picture of it as we passed by. With the use of a variety of NIK effects, it turned out to be a pretty good image.
HOTPPG Shoot Out
Last night, I had the pleasure of being a guest at the Heart of Texas Professional Photographers Guild open shoot out. The event was held at Airport Park. The HOTPPG is a group of professionals in the area. In this meeting, they allowed local photographers who were not so professional to tag along. I had a great time.
They had a variety of models representing different types of photography, and, there were so many I did not get to photograph them all. They had a family, a bride, a teen age girl, a ballerina, a “tween” girl, an infant and a bride and groom. We each took 10 minute turns with the models.
I had a great time, but it was hectic. Ten minutes does not give you much time to find a location, build a report with the model, and get some shots. Additionally, the circumstances made it difficult, if not impossible to use any kind of lighting. The even was in the evening. So, there was a pretty good sunset, but it didn’t really play into the even that well.
Anyway, it was a great experience. I will be posting images as I get them processed. This is a group I would like to continue to be associated with. However, I may not quite be in the same league, professionally, as they.
HDR Images
High Dynamic Range photography is a process that combines elements from several images and produces a single picture that has increased detail in both the shadows and highlights. I was impressed by a picture that someone else took, and asked him about it. He told me how he did it, and I have been investigating the process.
In some cases, the resulting picture is not too different from a regular one, it just has more detail. The picture above was generated from a picture I took of Galveston Bay a couple weeks ago. It looks pretty much like a normal picture, only a little more detail and more vibrant.
By modifying some of the parameters of the photograph, the resulting image has a somewhat more abstract or artistic characteristic. This picture has some characteristics that make it look more like a painting.
Belton Junk Yard
There is a junk yard in Belton that specializes in Classic Cars. The Temple Photography Meetup Group held a group shoot there last Saturday.
To me, these represent the certainty of decay. All of these were once bright, shiny, and new. Now they are in various stages of decay.
There were far too many cars there that brought back memories – cars I owned, cars owned by someone I knew, cars I wanted.
Derelict Farm, B&W Images
I have converted some of the pictures of the old farm to Black and White.
I really like the atmosphere of these.
