Picture of the Week 6-25-2009

This week’s photo subject is the Mandalay Bay hotel. I shot this last weekend after our trip to the Shark Reef Aquarium. As we walked down the hallway we stopped to look at the impressive water park style pool and luckily I looked up and saw this shot. The clouds were perfect and the reflections just made it all the more spectacular. Can you tell I shot this through a window?

Photo Info: Taken with the 5D Mark II at ISO 200, F8 at 1/500 of a second.

Shark Reef Aquarium

This past weekend we drove out to Las Vegas. Since we got there late on Friday night and left on Sunday morning we really only got a full day to do stuff. We gambled, we ate, we watched a movie, we ate, we hit up the jacuzzi and we ate some more but one of the highlights of the trip was the Shark Reef Aquarium at Mandalay Bay. We took our friends Claudia and Jimmy along with us which was cool because they had never been to that aquarium before. This aquarium is smaller than some of the aquariums we’ve been to in California but don’t be fooled by it’s size because it’s main attraction, the shark exhibit, is a 1.3 million gallon tank and the whole place has over 2,000 animals inside. Even though our trip to Vegas was short we all had fun walking through the aquarium and taking our awesome group photo (see below). Of course no trip to Vegas would be complete without a visit to Dunkin’ Donuts, Bryan ended up buying a great souvenir T-shirt.

Picture of the Week 6-18-2009

Earlier this month I decided to experiment with long exposure shots. I chose the full moon as my subject. I set my camera up on a tripod and pointed it at the sky. The moon is very difficult to photograph, at least for me. It’s constantly moving, which means your shutter speed can’t be too long or else the moon will be blurred. I had to use a remote to release the shutter so I wouldn’t shake the tripod in any way. The thing I liked about the sky that night was the clouds around the moon and the eerie way they were being lit. Ideally I wanted a perfect moon exposure and a perfect cloud exposure in the same shot. However, there are limitations to what you can get the camera to do so I just had to settle for a happy medium between the two. As you can see in the shot below the moon is overexposed on one side but I love the way the clouds look.

Photo Info: Taken with the 5D Mark II at ISO 200, F4 at a 1.6 second shutter speed.

Photographics: Final Portfolio

Our final project for Photographics required us to put together a portfolio of images that we created in the class. The portfolio was to be 8-14 images, mounted with some kind of theme or uniformity to them. Some students chose a flower theme, some did all lumen prints, some did a variety of different tones. I was really impressed with the quality of work from our fellow classmates. Some of them are masters in the darkroom and many have a great eye for composition, most of them blew my portfolio away, they were just so good. Bryan chose to use his best images that he had turned in throughout the semester for his portfolio. I decided to do a batch of fresh images. I took two older film photos and reworked them digitally. For each photo I did a sepia toned image, a sabbatier, an applied color, a high contrast and a lith. The professor and my fellow students liked the idea and thought it was interesting to see a variation on one image side by side. Below is my portfolio.

Picture of the Week 6-11-2009

Since I missed a week I wanted this week’s picture to be something special. I had been using my camera’s auto exposure bracketing feature for this shot. I took the images I bracketed and made an HDR (high dynamic range) image. HDR allows you to take multiple exposure shots of a single image and merge them into one image in a photo editing program. There are a few different programs that can do this, I used Photomatix, as you can tell by the water mark on my photo below. Right now I am using the trial version so any HDR’s I create will have that mark. I kind of have a love/hate relationship with HDR, on one hand I love the effect that it creates with images. It is great photo art. On the other hand it tends to look very fake, but if I just look at it as a piece of art, like a painting, I can see it’s value. One of my favorite website’s to visit to see great HDR images is The Windy Pixel, their HDR images put mine to shame even though they use Photomatix as well. Here is my image below, hopefully as I use this program more I will create even more specatcular images.

Photographics: Lith

Our last assignment for our class was to do a lith print. Lith printing done in the traditional wet darkroom requires the use of a special developer to produce a print that looks grainy. I don’t quite understand the point of lith printing but the results do have a nice look to them. For our lith prints we once again chose to do them digitally. We first desaturated and sepia toned the images in Digital Photo Professional and than added noise to them in GIMP. We also adjusted the highlights/contrast to get a more lithy look. I really liked the final results of our photo manipulation, it makes them look like old photographs.

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