January 6, 2012 – A year of portraits – Bill McReynolds

01.06.12 Bill McReynolds and Daisy

Today’s portrait is of Bill McReynolds and his dog Daisy.

I’ve known Bill for several years now and stopped by his home this afternoon to get his help in identifying a flower that I was running in today’s paper. The weather has been so unseasonably nice for this time of the year that some are starting to bloom already. Bill served in the United States Air Force during the mid-50’s in the medical field and after leaving the service worked in the forestry field for a good part of his life and is always in the know about plants and so forth, so he was my go to guy today. I also wanted to look at some of the flowers that were in bloom around his house to see if there was anything better than what I got of a Phlox in bloom.

As I was leaving Bill and I were talking about this and that and I noticed his flag in the background and captured this shot of him and Daisy as we talked.

Photo was shot with my Nikon D700, on Matrix Metering at 1/250 sec at f/4 with an ISO of 640 using my Sigma 24-70mm lens (at 36mm). Post processing was done in Photoshop CS5 with some slight levels adjusted and the Topaz Adjust filter Clarity was applied to sharpen up the photo.

January 5, 2012 – A year of portraits – Tabatha

01.05.12 Tabatha

Well, after a hectic day of shooting and my primary 16gig Compact Flash Card dieing on me after my last photo shoot I kinda scrambled around for my portrait last night as the one I had planned on was of the boys basketball coach at Madisonville-North Hopkins. But alas, it was on the card, so that picture will come down the road.

I had another picture that I shot of Mike Stunson, one of our sports reporters, that I had planned to use since the other one wasn’t to be, and no this isn’t a picture of him… sorry Mike, but Tabatha won the contest last night. I figured I could easily get a good portrait of Mike, but as we all know cats aren’t always so cooperative.

I captured this with a new iPhone app that I’ve been playing around with and starting to love. It’s called NightCap and the nice thing about the camera is that it will take photos with shutter speeds down to 1sec on the iPhone (shoots in color). A really great feature for those of us that really don’t like the look that flash photography gives us, especially with a smart or dumb phone. It’s available in the iTunes store for 99cents if I remember correctly.

Post processing work was done with SnapSeed, where I converted it to black and white and did some sharping with the details filter before bringing the photo into ShakeitPhoto to apply the final Polaroid look.