Reflections

Here's a couple more favorites from my recent outing with my son.  

Most of the time, in images with a strong reflection, I like to place the horizon near the center of the frame, making things more symmetrical, and giving an abstract feel to the images.  In this first image, there are enough elements that work against that, so the horizon just didn't feel right in the middle.

This is a good example of the horizon working well in the middle.  This area is up around the 9000' elevation, so even though it was shot in late may, it is still early spring.  In fact, there was still a fair amount of snow in places.  I'll be back up there in another week, it will be interesting to see how much green there will be on the aspens.

Aspens

While wandering the Uinta Mountains with my son this weekend, we found all sorts of great stuff to shoot.  I knew when I came across this grove of aspens next to a small pond, that I'd really like the resulting images.  I was right.  My only problem now is to decide which I like more, color or black and white.

The Kids

Took some new images of the kids the other day.

Laguna Beach

Recently, my wife and I had the opportunity to spend a few hours with a good friend in California.  We headed to Laguna Beach to see what there was to see.  It was a warm, sunny, SoCal afternoon.  The sun was high in the sky and the light was pretty harsh.  The harsh lighting made for some tough photographic conditions, however the resulting images worked really well for black and white conversions.

Headshots

A bit of recent headshot work

Red Fox Kit

Yesterday afternoon, I had the opportunity to meet up with a couple of friends and head out to get some images of some baby foxes.  Though there have been as many as 6 kits out playing this week, we weren't quite so lucky.  I think the fact that it was pretty windy wasn't helping things.  We did have one guy that spent a good amount of time out of his den for us.  I hope to get out again in the next few days.

Light Painting with Mickey

Recently, my wife and I took a few days and headed to California to celebrate her birthday and our anniversary.  We spent two of those days at Disneyland.  One of the evenings, we watched the World Of Color show at California Adventures.  While waiting for the show to start, we had a nice view of Paradise Bay and the big Ferris Wheel.  It was a great opportunity to do a little bit of long exposure photography.  I was traveling lite for this trip, so instead of a DSLR, lens, and tripod, I only had a small point and shoot with me.  It just so happens that the Canon SX260 has some pretty good manual controls so I was able to shoot in manual, setting the camera (after a little bit of experimenting) at ISO 100, f/8, 2.0 Seconds.  These settings allowed me to capture these cool patterns.  I didn't have a tripod with me, so I relied on the wrought iron railing in front of us for support.  By the way, you'll notice the missing sections in the patterns, the lights on one of the spokes of the wheel were not working.

World in a World

I tried something a little different with this one.  This time, I used two similar images.  I started by placing the two images, one above the other with the lower one flipped vertically.  I then duplicated the two images and flipped them horizontally  placing them next to the originals.  In essence, this gave me four images.  I re-sized the image so that it was square, and then applied the polar coordinates filter.

It's A Small World

I built myself a little planet tonight.  Looks like a fun place to visit.

Playing Around A Little

Recently, I've been seeing a few images posted on Facebook that are created by making orbs out of ordinary images.  When done right, you can end up with some pretty cool images.  I've played around with this a few times before, and I thought it would be fun to do it again.  I've been digging through some older images lately and I was able to find a few images that worked pretty well for this technique.

So, the trick to these images isn't too difficult, but there are a few steps you have to follow.  The first thing you need to do is make your image square.  I don't usually crop it, I just adjust the size in Photoshop.  Then, you use the most useless filter to be found in Photoshop: "Polar Coordinates".  For the life of me, I can't think of a good reason for this filter to exist, other than for this.  That's it, well, at least the simple steps.  There are some other things that you can do to improve the results.  It helps to have an image with a strong horizon line , somewhere near the center of the image.  I actually use the straightening tool to ensure that the two ends of the horizon line are even.  I added a step tonight that seemed to help the results.  After making the image square, I doubled the canvas, duplicated the image, and flipped it over onto the extended canvas.  This gave me a single image that is mirrored down the center.  It also means that the left and right edges are duplicates of each other, allowing them to line up perfectly.  The final step is to again, re-size the image to a square and then run the polar coordinates filter.  Oh, depending on the image and the desired result, you may want to flip the image vertically before running the filter.  That's it.