Archive for July, 2009

Obama Election Night

The night Obama was to be elected, I was invited to blog at an election watch party at Friendship West Baptist Church. The place was packed and Fred Hammond was going to perform later that night. Everyone was excited and cheering as the results came in and at around 10pm it happened. Fred was in the middle of his song and people were going crazy. Obama had won the election! Fred and everyone in the church started singing “This is the Day”. It was great.

Here are some pictures from that night. I didn’t have a flash at the time, so I had to post-process a lot of these to make them brighter.

Duck

This is one of my favorite pictures. It was taken at a local park near the pond. The original picture included more of the duck, but I found a good way to crop it down where it brought out the color in the eyes. After that I added a little contrast, brightened it up some and added a frame. It was on this photo that I learned how much cropping can affect a photo. If you can find a good way to do it, you can make an average photo look a lot better.

Sang Patti!!!

Earlier this year, I got the opportunity to see Patti LaBelle in concert. My church’s male chours was invited to open for her in Garland and I had to play trumpet on a couple of songs (yes, I opened for Patti). I’d never seen her in concert and I can honestly say, I had a good time. She seemed to go off the cuff and got the audience involved.

What I liked was that she WANTED people to take pictures. She invited people on the floor to come down while she posed. We were on the left side of the stage in the first couple of rows, so I used my 50-200mm lens. It was dark and I didn’t have a flash at the time, but I managed to get some decent shots.

Inspired By…

This is a picture of my dad behind the camera. If you’re the one in to taking pictures, you rarely get to be in them so I really like this one. Photography was a life-long hobby for him and it was something that most of his brothers and sisters also enjoyed. Everywhere he went, the camera was sure to follow and when I was with him I usually ended up being his sidekick. I had my turns behind the camera, but never fully understood why he enjoyed it so much.

One thing I’ve learned is that people enjoy looking at pictures. It allows you to capture a moment in time to share with others around you. I plan on getting in more pictures because I want something for my boys, grandchildren and their kids to remember me by. Thanks dad for passing the photo bug to me.

First Photo

This is one of the first photos that I took with my D80 that I thought came out pretty good. I was just snapping pictures of my son playing in the park and I caught him just before he started rocking back and forth. It just so happened the sun was in a good place and didn’t affect the lighting. I did crop and add a soft glow in Gimp during post-processing.

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