Red Shutters

Yes, I did take a slight hiatus from posting to my Blog.  As a single dad my daughter who is about to turn 13 came before anything else.  Now with her being close to grown, or at least that is how it seems I have gotten back to producing new images and re-editing to older ones for fun.

This is from a series of images I originally photographed in Vietnam in 2006 and recently have re-edited to produce a more abstract image as the final result.

The image has ten layers using various blend modes to come up with this result.

It is titled Red Shutters.  

New Work

Just a few new images to post. I have a new section...oddly enough titled "Latest Photography". It seems I am venturing out into a new direction for me. I have to admit I love playing with Photoshop.

I have been trying out some new ideas with ACR in my RAW processing. Then working on some added details in PS. The new section on my website has about 20 or so images done this way...well more or less. Each image deserves and gets it's own unique process of course. That should go without saying.

Not all images respond to this in a favorable manor, meaning some images just plain old suck done this way.

Details

I admit it! I have not been here and posted anything in a while. I am in the midst of pre-production on a new project and it is taking up a lot of my time. Then of course there is time spent with my wife and daughter and trying to pick up some new ideas about photography.

Thus some new images I have just finished using some techniques I learned watching Calvin Hollywood. If you are not familiar with his work I suggest you search him out and watch some of his Photoshop tutorials on youtube.

Surfer Portraits at Dusk

I just got back from spending a few days in San Juan, La Union, Philippines, where I have spent many a day surfing some great waves. The main reason I went is that my daughter Jade, now going on three, has been wanting to go to the beach and I have been promising we would as soon as my shoulder was okay. It isn't 100% by any means but good enough to take her to the beach.

I had not done any photography since the motorcycle accident and knew I wanted to give it a try, see if my shoulder could handle it. I was thinking about just a camera and some cute photos of Jade.

But I have never gone anywhere without loading up more than I need so the night before we were to take off I decided I better put in at least a tripod, then well I better take a 580 EXII, well better take two just in cast one goes out. Hmmm? Probably better take a light stand, arm and knuckle...oh yeah and remote triggers, and a shoot through transparent umbrella, maybe a soft box, batteries, chargers, video camera.

Short of it is I loaded up still thinking I would only do some fun snaps. We stayed in a new studio apartment my friend Bob just finished, where two other good friends live. Sitting around drinking a beer with them the first night I asked if they would let me use them as models. They agreed although a bit reluctantly.

My idea was to shoot them as the sun set standing on the beach with their surfboards. The main obstacle was could I get down to the beach with the gear. I did trim it down to one camera body, a stand, shoot through umbrella, tripod, remotes and slaves and somehow managed to get to the beach with it all in hand.

I was so excited to do some photography again. I felt like a kid with my first camera.

As is always the case with late evening photos I was amazed at how fast the light fades and is suddenly gone, not a lot of time to work with but I feel very good about the photographs we got that evening.

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New Website Up!

I just spent the last week doing what I thought would be a fairly easy task, updating my website. That was not to be the case.

With a lot of time on my hands, my arm still in a sling, one thing led to another and the end result is that I completely redid my website. I added new images, which would have been easy enough but I decided to complicate this by going back over hundreds of older files looking for images I had not used for one reason or another.

Then since so much of my existing web imagery was a couple of years old and feeling like I know a LOT more about using Photoshop now I thought it wise to start from the original RAW file and re-edit almost every image.

Turns out I am really glad I did both. The downside to my new knowledge is there just seem to crop (no pun intended) up those images that I can spend infinite amounts of time on playing with variations.

A good example is this image. I shot it six months ago and before finally saying, “okay this is it!” I must have started from the RAW file 25 times at least. I have a new appreciation for landscapes and photographers that shoot them.

Then I decided to change the type face of my header. I thought this would be quick and easy but I turned it into a full day of looking at type faces on what seems like every website that has them. Good news is I learned a lot about type...man there are some awesome type faces out there...there are also some really weird ones to put it nicely. Towards the end my eyes started to glaze over and at one point I even considered this, well for about a split second.

Probably a good decision since I don't want people to think of me as the chain saw photographer as a friend of mine put it.

I am using http://www.sitewelder.com/ as my host company and I can't say enough about the good people that run things there. They are amazingly fast to get back to me answering any questions I have and are also great about tweaking things for me when asked.

Here are a few other new photos I added: