Rocking the One Stars!

I got a little extra creative today. I've always enjoyed mixing hobbies, for instance I love shooting concert pix (music and photography). As there was no concert to shoot I decided to use my own drums and play around a bit. The set up was tricky. See my Week In Review blog to see a picture from my cell phone showing how I set up the camera if you are interested in that sort of thing - here is the link to that blog.

I wanted to show action by having my right foot and the bass pedal kind of blurred. In a real concert the light is so low that it's easy to do this. In a basement under controlled light it's much harder to do. I tried, but the best I got was a faint blur. I will have to play with that some more in the future. Once I had the shot I wanted, I edited it like crazy in PhotoShop. Enjoy!

Shot spex: RAW Image, Pentax K10D, ISO 400, 27mm, f22, 8 sec., off camera flash.

PhotoShop spex: Smart Sharpened, cropped, adjusted Contrast and Brightness, added some Neon Glow.

Tunes listened to while editing: Angels & Airwaves, Love Part II. (Awesome album!)

Feel free to visit my Week In Review blog using pictures I've taken with my cell phone. If you want to follow that here is the link.

Getting Back In The Flow

Well, week 2 is here and it took the whole week for me to figure out what to shoot. Hard to get back in the mindset of shooting again. I remember shooting this waterfall at about 103rd and Metcalf, but it was during the summer and I even commented in that post that I would need to revisit the waterfall in the winter. One reason I'd want to do that is in the winter it freezes up and the ice formations can be very nice. Today I decided to use this as my object. What I didn't account for was the fact that it was a bright and sunny day - therefore the image I wanted to create was much more difficult. To make the water kind of cottony or wispy you need a longer shutter exposure. To get that you need a pretty small aperture. Well to get a small aperture I had to move way back and zoom in so instead of shooting the whole waterfall I was forced to only select a portion of it. Well, as the Christmas decorations were still present this made more sense - less to edit out!

I think I liked the end result, but I look forward to Spring when outdoor shooting is more interesting.

Shot spex: RAW Image, Pentax K10D, ISO 100, 195mm, f45, 1/6 sec., no flash.

PhotoShop spex: Smart Sharpened, cropped, adjusted Contrast and Brightness, created a second layer for the water so I could adjust it to my liking without affecting the rest of the image.

Tunes listened to while editing: Blink 182 - Neighborhoods

In other news I've started a Week In Review blog using pictures I've taken with my cell phone. If you want to follow that here is the link.

A New Year - A New Project

I can't believe it's been well over a year since I last posted here! I guess I kinda got burned out on Photography for a while so I took a long break. I still shot pictures, but the self-inflicted grind of shooting, editing and posting something every single day took it's toll, and I only did it for 100 days straight (whereas some do a picture a day for a whole year)!

Well, this year I have decided to set some New Years Resolutions, and one of them was to start using the camera and PhotoShop again. In my wisdom as an older and hopefully wiser person I decided that with all the other things I am trying to accomplish this year I should restrict myself to a Picture A Week project. So once a week, I plan to post up an image that I shot that week, and edited with PhotoShop. I am hoping to sharpen my skills once again so I can be a better photographer and PhotoShop editor.

This week we had Cameron's first Basketball game of the season with Upward. Another thing different this time around is that I am not coaching. I get to enjoy the game as a parent and that gave me the opportunity to shoot pictures as well. Shooting in a gymnasium is very tricky and the images are very challenging. This was a nice shot I happened to catch just as Cameron put up a shot. I love that I caught him as his feet left the ground so he is in mid-air. Cameron's team won their first game and Cameron made one of the 8 baskets which was very cool!


Shot spex: RAW Image, Pentax K10D, ISO 1600, 82mm, f4.5, 1/90 sec., no flash.

PhotoShop spex: Smart Sharpened, cropped, adjusted Contrast and Brightness.

Tunes listened to while editing: nothing today, unless you count listening to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows unabridged Book on "tape".