Pixelpost

Classic Lamp

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:13 -0500

While looking for other suitable subjects for light-painting outside I realized I have a treasure trove of interesting objects in my house. For this shot , I dragged the dinner table into the doorway to the sun room, placed the lamp on the table, set up my tripod on a timer and let it fly. and the the results?..... absolutely terrible! I must have taken 40 or so shot before I decided that the flashlight I was using was just terrible. But hey, I bought the darn thing at the Dollar Tree. So I went out to the garage, got a screw driver, hack saw and some electrical tape. The finished product could only be described as a Frankenstein-like light source. But it produced the desirable light streak that I wanted. for post processing I did a little editing in Camera Raw of course. Then opened up Nic Software in Photoshop to finish up the finished look I wanted. Hope you All enjoy!

Lompoc Vines

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 07:00 -0500

Back on HWY 246 on my way to visit my brother at the vineyard he works at, i decided to take my camera along and see what catches my eye. This is shot number 2 in a series of roadside pics I had taken. The fog had split up and was quickly moving through this valley. The only problem I had with this shot was there were a lot of telephone and power wires hanging everywhere. So I had to crop most of it out. I've been doing my homework and have found some pretty neat techniques for photoshop to clone out distracting things like this and other undesirable elements. maybe I'll revisit this one in the future. hope you all enjoy!

The Road to Lompoc

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 17:18 -0500

Over winter break of 2009 I decided to travel up the California coast to visit my brother in Lompoc. This photo was taken on the 246 going towards Solvang. I got a call early from my brother that the road was covered in some amazing coastal fog and I should hop in the car and take some photos. By the time I got dressed and was out the door, half the fog had moved on. so by the time I was in a decent position on the road, almost all the fog was gone. bah! but this composition was pretty good. even if I would have liked a little more fog. hope you all enjoy!

Laser Shooting Space Heater (of doom)

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 11:17 -0500

Hmmm, whats more odd than setting a space heater on a wood chair then dancing around it with a flash light that has a water bottle taped to it? Not much probably. Ha. But hey it was pretty fun.

Swirly Cactus of Doom

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 21:14 -0500

So I decided to try light painting. Grabbed my trust high lumen flash light from my car, decided to ductape a empty water bottle to it to make a more interesting light pattern and set out to find an interesting subject. Wondering around the yard for a while I remembered I've got this super awesome cactus in the front yard. Super Sweet!!! So I set up my trusty tripod, set exposure to manual, set focus to manual, pressed the shutter button and ran around the cactus with a ghetto light-saber like a crazy guy. Did that for about 2 hours, probably freaked the neighbors, but the results were totally worth it. After the first couple of shot, I realized that I wanted to make the red that was natural on the plant more vibrant. Brought out the space heater from the living room on an extension cord and set it to high at about 4 feet away. Not bad eh? Post processing was simple. Boosted some clarity, touched up tonal contrast. Hope ya enjoy!

Massive

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 01:30 -0500

So I've recently taken to investigating the quality differences between shooting jpeg and tif. I've realized that for my photography, there is a significant noise difference in the file formats. tif files clearly come out miles ahead. infinitely smoother across the color range and very little noise. while during the day in ideal light conditions the two formats are identical, when it comes to low light or long exposures tif is superior. The only downside? Currently I only have a 2GB compact flash card. memory capacity was no issue when shooting jpeg. At the large resolution setting and fine quality setting I was able to get around 378 photos on the memory card. For a typical photo shoot for me that's plenty of space. tif on the other hand, my memory capacity seems very much anemic. From 378 down to 52 with all other settings the same. OUCH. I believe it's time to upgrade memory capacity. OK, back to the image. This shot is a pano. but you might be wondering; that doesn't look like a pano? panos are wide not tall. Well true your typical pano is a collection of shots to emphasize the vastness of a scene that wasn't able to fit into one frame. But do all panos have to be wide? They can be tall as well. this image is comprised of 4 tif files from my recent trip to Red Rock Canyon. this image stitched together in photoshop with no effect added was a hefty 189 megs. Yeah, I thought that was massive too, until I looked at the final image size after post processing. 396 megs! my poor laptop. I felt sorry for it. It was having to work extra extra hard for this file. So hard in fact, when it came time to save the file in a format for the web it crashed my computer 3 times before i tweaked the memory settings, closed all other running processes to eek out a little more memory and CPU power. So now that I've decided to start shoot in tif file format for superior quality, I've realized that my memory capacity and computer power have to match. I'll just add that to my ever growing Christmas wish list....

Red Dawn

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 01:30 -0500

Can't believe your eyes? maybe you need to check the previous post again? but nope no error here. For a first on my website I'll have a series of three photos all from the same location. I've always been opposed to series shots because most times the photography simply feels obligated to post photos with no regards to the quality of the image. This trip I took to Red Rock Canyon had lots of promising photos. I actually found three that I liked so much I've decided to post them. This photo was taken early in the morning the sun was on its way but no rays yet. I planned all night to make this trip. got everything organized ready to go then realized when I got there that I didn't bring any gloves, and it was a windy, chilly chilly morning. After standing in the cold for hours you'd be surprised how hard it can become to so something as simple as pressing a shutter button with frozen fingers. For the post-processing I didn't do any dodging or burning, I simply adjusted the saturation of the red rock and tinted the sky a little more purple. Hope you all enjoy

Giant Ant Hill

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 14:29 -0500

OK, so the tittle is misleading. This isn't some photo of a really giant ant hill on some safari expedition to Africa. It's from Red Rock Canyon in Southern California. The desert of SoCal are prone to the same weather conditions as any other desert. It doesn't rain often but when it does... it pours buckets and fast. Flash flood warning are common warnings pretty much every time it does rain. So you are probably wondering what this has to do with the photo? Well... what your really looking at it what amounts to a really really large dirt clod that has been ravaged by flash flooding over the course of thousands of years. Pretty neat eh? OK now for the post-processing fun. I actually did something I usually never do. I originally took this photo in monochrome. I never do that, and anybody who shoots digital knows why. Why through out all that color information when you can just convert it later in Photoshop? Don't know why, but to preserve optionality I always recommend shooting color to convert later. So in the end I opened up Photoshop and loaded my favorite plug-in, NIK software color-efex. I love this plug-in. I barely use the settings in photoshop anymore. I almost work exclusively in NIK. adjusted some tonal contrast, added a little color back in to make a bit of a duo-tone effect. Hope you all enjoy.

Ghost Sands

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 23:07 -0500

I've been eying this sign for weeks. I drive by it every day going to work thinking, someday someday... i rolled around in my head how i would compose the shot. i had a couple of ideas but nothing really satisfying really came out. till one day i noticed that the sign is set up just right to take a picture of the setting sun behind it. so i figured i'd wait for a day that was cloudy and head out and see what happens. but this being a really windy part of the desert in southern california i figured that would probably be a while. but the next day some clouds rolled in and it was time to see if i can get the shot. i was out in front of the sign long enough to have the owner of the motel come walking out to see what i was taking photos of. and even long enough to have another photographer to run in front of my composition and take a photo. hence the ghost in the left side of the frame.... hope ya guys enjoy the image.

The Long

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:43 -0500