October 29, 2015

A Few Birds

I'm traveling this week, spending a little time in St. Louis.  This afternoon, we had a little time between commitments, so we stopped by the World Bird Refuge to see what we could find.  In addition to wild birds, the facility treats and cares for injured and ill birds.  They have a lot of these birds on display for easy viewing.  We didn't have a lot of time to shoot, but it was fun to spend a bit of time with these cool birds.
By the way, I was traveling light on this trip, so these were shot with my EOS M3 and the EF-M 55-200mm lens.  It was fun spending a bit of time getting more familiar with this kit.  I haven't looked through all of the images yet, but I'm pretty happy with what I've seen so far.






October 18, 2015

Flaming Gorge

Last week, I had the opportunity to spend a couple of days fishing at Flaming George with my dad, my uncle, and my son.  All I can say is that it was absolutely fantastic!
By the way, you should put in the effort to click on these and look at them a little larger.













October 14, 2015

A Wander Around Town

The other day, I took a wander around downtown Ogden to get some fresh air and to take a break from work for a bit.  I grabbed the Powershot SX710l and completed my team's current photo assignment while I was at it.  It's been a while since I've brought up these assignments, so as a reminder, my team at work has photo assignments that we complete every two weeks.  The intent is to stretch us a bit and keep us shooting with a variety of gear.  The current assignment is to take ten and only ten images.  If you've never done this, you should.  It is a fantastic exercise that comes from the olden days when that stuff called film came in small quantities and you didn't have the luxury of a 32 gig card to fill up with piles of images.  It makes you slow down and think about what you are shooting and if it is worth using one of your ten frames.
Anyway, here's what I came up with during my wander around downtown Ogden on a warm October afternoon.











October 7, 2015

Strange New Worlds

So, I have been playing around with some different techniques for distorting images and turning them into new images.  Some of these techniques I've played with in the past, some of them are new.  Mostly it's been fun to try some new techniques.

This is the starting point.  I shot this the other night while wandering the Uintas with my youngest daughter.  The campgrounds in this area were closed for the season, so we spent the night in this parking lot at the Crystal Lake trailhead.  Since the night was clear, I figured it was a good excuse to shoot some stars for time lapse and for star trails.  This was a couple of days before the full moon, so there was plenty of light on the surrounding landscape.


This is the result of stacking 300 images that look like the one above.
This is the image I used to create the rest of the images in this post.


These next two images used a technique I've used before, creating tiny planets, though this is the first time I've used an image with star trails.



The next two images were created using the same technique as the two above, except I left out one tiny step.
Funny how what seems to be an insignificant step can drastically change the final outcome.



This is a new technique I've been playing around with.  Basically, you transform a scene from its natural state, into a a nice, square world.  The effect is easier to see in the second image, but it is there in the first as well.  The curved lines of the star trails really distort the view as well. 



Last but not least, these two images use a completely different technique that uses a combination of filters, blending modes, and rotations.  The combinations are endless.


As a reminder, all of these images were created using the second image in this post.  Crazy.

October 6, 2015

Uinta Fall Colors 4

Here's the final round of images from my recent wander in the Uintas in search of fall colors.  Not a bad way to spend the day.








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