Archive for July, 2009

Nikon D80 Challenge #80 – Hands

Here’s the photo I submitted, for the Nikon D80 Challenge #80 – Hands. It didn’t win, but I thought the picture came out pretty good. My wife was the hand model (thanks boo), so I wrapped a black towel and sheet around her as the background. I took a couple of pictures from different angles and chose the angle I liked the best. During post-processing, I added some contrast and used the picker under levels to get the dark background. Then I added a circular vignette around the hands to get the fading effect. Pretty straight forward, huh?

Afterwards, I started eating the props. I like Skittles. Feel free to leave comments or questions.

Original Photo

Final Photo

Better in Black & White

There are times when a good idea for a photo goes wrong. I’ve had many of those moments and most of the pictures get deleted. But there are those times when I’m able to figure out a way to turn a bad picture into a better one.

The first one is a photo of my office hallway. I happened to be walking down the hall and thought, “this would make a cool picture”. I stood at one end of the hall and shot a couple of images at 55mm, then I zoomed out to 18mm. The shots always look decent on the viewfinder, but when I got home all the shots didn’t look right. Then I decided to rotate the image and convert it to black & white. I cropped, adjusted the contrast and added a vignette to darken it up a little to get the image below.

This second set of pictures was taken at a church pumpkin patch. My idea was to get the sun flare behind my son with him looking into the camera. Well, he was getting fussy and looked up instead of at the camera. I took a picture just so I could get something and move on. When editing the picture I tried a couple of things, but nothing worked. I couldn’t get the color to look right, so I took a couple of days to think of something else. Once again converting to black & white helped again. I also adjusted the contrast and got rid of some of the sun flare in the right top corner.

Here’s the picture on a magazine cover that I got done at Walgreens. I would have liked for him to be on Jet or Ebony, but TV Guide worked for now. He really is going to be an entertainer. The kid loves attention.

Stop, Look & Listen

This photo got some pretty flattering comments, which led me to write a post about it at theotalks.net. I honestly do believe life will past you by if you let it and I refuse to let that happen. I’ve included the blog post below with the image.

There’s a passage in the Bible that reads “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun, which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion, like a champion rejoicing to run his course. It rises at one end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the other; nothing is hidden from its heat.” Psalms 19:1-6 NIV.

I made a promise to myself earlier in the year to spend more time outdoors when the weather got better. I spend the majority of my week in front of a computer, doing a job that I truly enjoy. But there are times when I get sucked in to my work and it’s easy to get stressed out when deadlines need to be met.

I’ve also found that achieving that home-church-work-life balance thing, is not such an easy task. One can easily get caught up in the rat race and lose focus of the little things. When that happens, it’s important that you take some time to step out of the race and notice the little things around you. You can take a minute or an hour. You can be by yourself or with a group of people. All it takes is a commitment from you to do it.

For the first time that I can remember I watched the sun set. I wasn’t at a beach on vacation and to be honest, it wasn’t even a planned event. I just happened to drive around the corner on my way home from work and thought, “that would make a good picture”. I never realized how fast a sunset occurred and I plan on seeing more from now on. The world we inhabit is an amazing place and there are many lessons about life in God’s creation. So take the time to stop, look and listen sometimes. You might be glad you did.

DIY T-Ball Photos

This year my oldest son played his first team sport. We had to buy all the equipment he needed and also got some parent team shirts made. We were excited to see him play and he really enjoyed himself. As parents we had a lot of fun watching the team play and I honestly have to say it was the most comical thing I’ve seen in a while. After the season, they took a group team and an individual photo. I thought the photos game out nice, but the different packages were a grip and I wanted to see him in some more poses. So, I did my own baseball photo shoot and got what I wanted.

Here are a few of the pictures I took:

Ridin’ Solo

I blogged about one of theses photos on theotalks.net and wanted to share the rest of them on this blog. I was excited to see my son ride by himself and it was definitely a moment I wanted to capture. The shots came out pretty good in color, but I thought the black & white would be something different. I’d seen some other people on flickr shoot in b&w, so I thought I’d give it a try also.

For the post processing I added some contrast, cropped and a circular vignette. I thought the vignette caused some of the pictures to be darker than they should, but I think that may be due to my monitor. My favorite picture out of the group is the one of my youngest son walking over to help his big brother with the bike after a crash.

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