I love it when I come across a picture that has great contrasting colors such as these two rolls of orange pipe. I actually came across it yesterday and revisited it today as I got another picture I liked yesterday. When out looking you should always keep your eye out for things that have good contrasting colors as they can really help make your picture pop.
I shot this using the App called ShakeItPhoto and just let it do it’s thing, nothing else was done with the photo.
After the overnight ice storm moved over our area I ventured down off my hill in search of pictures, even though I planned to stay in all day, I’m glad I did. I came upon this scene completely by surprise and came to a skidding halt when I saw it, of course that wasn’t hard on the ice.
I found this stream flowing with water at the Madisonville City Park. I usually walk over the bridge in the background every morning during my walk, but today we skipped due to the weather. I’m glad I went out there as it was a perfect scene for today’s challenge photo. One of the hardest things about shooting pictures in bad weather is getting out the door! Dress according to the weather and get out there as there’s some great pictures to be made! Just be careful!
Photo was shot with the built-in iPhone camera and some post processing was done in Photoshop using Topaz Adjust.
Today, members of our local photography club, gathered at The Crowded House in Madisonville, Ky for lunch and I captured this picture of their beer tap in the bar area. I’ve always liked the old American Flag that they’ve used as the background and today decided to use it for my iPhone Challenge of the day picture. Not a beer drinker, but I can drink in pictures like this all day long!
Photo was shot with the iPhone 4S and post processed as a RAW file in Photoshop CS6 and applied exposure correction and details in Topaz Adjust.
Today I went and wandered around in the snow with fellow photographer Tom Wortham, looking for something that talked to me for my iPhone photo of the day and as we were traveling down a country gravel road I spotted this horse along the ridge line and really liked the simplicity of the photo. It had a feel of being lonely and desolate out in the field and I tried to convey that feeling here.
Photo was shot using the iPhone’s built-in camera and post processing was done in Adobe Camera RAW with a little bit of work in Topaz’s De-Noise filter to help clean up some of the noise.
For this week’s challenge I decided to try a different perspective on the topic of “Looking up.” This photo of my nephew, Damion at the top of the stairs, looking all innocent and patiently waiting for me to finish taking pictures of him so I could pick him up. His body stance, hands behind his back and the look on his face and his eyes just melts my heart.
Shot with my Nikon D800 with a 18mm Nikor lens at f/2.8. Shutter speed was 1/40th of a second with an ISO of 1,800.
Today after church I found this small stuffed dog waiting patiently as his owner “Charlie” helped to clean-up the sanctuary at First Christian Church in Madisonville. I like it when something just shows up for my daily picture, but of course it always pays to keep an eye out for things that make for an interesting picture. The rows of pews help also I think!
Camera was the built-in iPhone camera and the image was processed in the Snapseed App.
Today’s picture was a easy find. I went with my sister to see Marty Brown and The Willis Clan in concert at the new Owensboro Convention Center. They had these projection systems that washed the walls with blue light that made it look like it was underwater and everyone, kids and adults alike were fascinated by them. I found this family playing with their shadows which I thought made a interesting picture. It was almost more than the iPhone could handle as the light was low and so the phone shot with a high ISO and low shutter speed, but this one works for me.
I shot it on the standard iPhone Camera and post processed the image in Photoshop with Topaz Adjust so I could better work out the issues with the low light.
No, it’s not the movie!
I think this is the first time in a very long time I can recall both lakes at the city park being frozen like they were this morning. The look of the ice reflecting the trees and the sky caught my attention during my daily exercise. One of my walking buddies, Brian Walker, braved the ice a little next to where I was standing shooting this photo and when he walked on it it made no sound at all, like it was frozen solid.
I shot this with the HDRpro App and then processed it in Snapseed.
I just love the look of this photo of a bench at the city park here in Madisonville, Ky. The early morning light combined with the shadows, frozen lake and clouds just all came together in this photo. It again was really cold, but after I got my shot I couldn’t resist sitting on the bench for awhile to capture with my ears something his image couldn’t.
Sitting there I could hear the sounds of geese and ducks off to the left out of the frame making their quiet sounds as they were roosting on the the ice, but there was another sound that had caught my attention. It was the sound of the warmer water from the lake as it reacted on the ice on the surface. I’d not heard this before and it was almost like a musical instrument as it was coming from all over the lake, almost like an orchestra when added to the other sounds of nature.
There are some things you just can’t capture in a picture and you should take time after or before shooting to take your scene in.
Below is a recording I did with my iPhone but it really doesn’t do the experience justice.
Shot with the built in iPhone and processed with the Snapseed App.
Today I was out just driving around looking for a picture that said something to me. It was one of those solid overcast days with wind and a very low temperature and the weather just wasn’t giving me much inspiration. I was driving down the road when I passed this stand that sells yard decorations on the south side of town. I glanced back in my mirror and saw this sun in the otherwise drab day and had to turn around as I knew I have found today’s picture.
Shot with the built in iPhone camera and processed in Snapseed.
I just love it when I turn around from what I’m currently working on and find a picture I like just staring me in the face.
I was sitting here working on my computer and when I looked behind me I found this scene with two of my cats zonked out in my other two office chairs. The chairs weren’t repositioned or anything, it’s just the way they were left the last time they were moved and both cats had settled down for a nap.
I quietly picked up my iPhone and got of about three shots before they reacted to the sound of the iPhone taking a picture, and yes, they know what that sound is as they hear it often enough. This was the second photo as Anabelle had just opened her right eye a little bit, which I think helps the photo a lot. I kinda wish I had put the phone of silent so I could have gotten off a few more, but I’m still pleased on the results.
You should always keep an eye out for those nice moments that happen around us all the time that we all take for granted and capture them.
I shot this in Nashville for this my first month of participating in a year long photographic challenge of shooting with film! The theme for January was “Urban Landscape” and I shot three rolls of TMax 400 120 film with a camera I bought awhile back called a Belair X 6-12 Jetsetter. I have it setup to shoot 6 – 6x12cm wide negatives on a single roll of film, pretty much a panorama. It comes with two lenses, a 90mm and a 58mm and I used the 90mm for this month’s challenge.
It’s different to shoot with as it’s not a through-the-lens camera and so you have to use a viewfinder that sits on top of the camera to compose your shots. Rather different from what I’m used to these days, especially the part where I’m used to checking out my photo after I get done shooting.
With that said, it makes you think a little, no a lot more, about what you’re photographing and picking what you feel like is that decisive moment that is worth capturing on film. It’s definitely a different way of seeing, at least it is for me.
I shot the typical cityscape photos and waterfront photos while I was in Nashville, but ended up settling on this one of an overpass for the railroad and city street in a industrial area. The road above is Interstate 24, and I really wanted to wait around for a train to show up, but it was during the really cold weather and the chill factor was -12 degrees. I just like the way the pillars holding up the interstate look like giant trees that surrounded the railroad tracks.
The details: Auto Exposure, 90mm lens at f/16 with TMax 400 B&W Film. Processed in TMax developer and the resulting negative was scanned with an Epson V700 scanner. After scanning I opened the photo in Photoshop as a RAW file and adjusted the shadows, highlights and boosted the clarity while in the RAW plugin. For the final step I made some adjustments in Topaz Adjust.
With some smooth jazz playing and the sound of running water along with the smell of darkroom chemistry… I had forgot how soothing it is for me to process film, work in the darkroom and edit film over a light table. It’s been a long time. I think I processed two rolls perhaps last year, but it’ll be different this year as I’m doing a year-long film challenge.
Today I processed four rolls, one of which was blank and not really sure why, and the other three were for the above challenge for which the theme is “Urban Landscape.”
In the process of doing the film challenge I decided to combine my daily iPhone challenge with the monthly film challenge to see what I could come up with and as you can see I did a still life with the paper backing from the 120 film I shot and also a self-portrait as I looked over my shots on the light table in my office here at home.
The film backing photo was shot with the Hipstamatic camera app on the iPhone 4S and then I did a little fine tuning in Photoshop using the Topaz Adjust filter.
The self-portrait was done with the built in camera on the iPhone 4s, and no I didn’t use the front facing camera as the quality on it is really bad. I just held the camera toward me at a low angle and shot until I had a picture I was happy with. I then ran the photo through the ShakeItPhoto app to add the Polaroid look and then applied a soft focus filter in Topaz Adjust.
You can read about the Film Challenge and see it’s picture later in a separate post here on this website.
This high vantage photo was shot with my iPhone 4S using the phone’s panorama feature. I don’t use the feature a lot, but I do like it and since we have a higher vantage point here at First Christian Church due to a new multimedia platform we’ve installed.
Sometimes all you need to do to add a little more impact to your photograph is to change your vantage point by getting higher as I did here.
I didn’t do any editing on this shot on the iPhone as I wanted to maintain the best quality I could get out of the photo as I plan to use it for the header photo on our church’s Facebook and website.
I opened this jpg up in Photoshop as a RAW file and yes, you can do that. Just go to File, select Open As and change the type of file in the file type to RAW. Then browse to the folder that contains your jpg file and Photoshop will open it in Camera RAW and you’ll have a lot of the neat RAW Plugin features that you can use before opening it in Photoshop.
I did a little tweaking in the exposure, shadows and clarity sliders before applying a bit of a vignette. Then after opening the image in Photoshop I tweaked it a little more in the Topaz Adjust filter before adding my watermark to the final image you see here.
This is my niece Maria and her daughter Adrianna from this afternoon and I really like how this picture turned out. I wanted a picture of the two of them together that had a vintage film look to it and while this isn’t the way the picture started out, it is what I had envisioned in my minds eye as I was shooting it. I knew I wanted something in tight on Adrianna with good light and mom slightly out of focus and a little darker in the background.
I shot the picture with the built-in camera on the iPhone 4S. Afterwards I opened the photo in Snapseed, cropped it a little, did a little burning down on the edges and the highlights. Next I applied the grunge filter set to it until I had the look that I was going for and then used the center focus to blur the edges slightly before I applied the border that gave it a vintage photograph look.
For this weeks challenge I’ve chosen a photoof my nephew Xaiver and his sister Adrianna as he cuddled with her this afternoon on the couch.
When dealing with photographing kids this age most times you have to be patient and shoot a lot of pictures to get that just right photo. This one didn’t take that many or that long though. I just sat on the opposite end of the couch and waited. I think the whole tame frame wasn’t more than about two minutes till I had this shot.
Exposure info: 1/60th, f/2.8 ISO 4,000 with my Nikon D800 and a Sigma 24-70 lens at 34mm.
It’s been so cold this week that I haven’t gotten in my morning exercise except for Monday. Not that I couldn’t have, because I know the hardest thing about exercising, or shooting pictures in the cold, is getting out the door.
Knowing that the temperatures have been well below freezing all week long I made it a point to bundle up this morning and brave the 5 degree weather to make my way to the city park to get in my exercise as I also knew that the water on the two lakes would be frozen and there would probably be some “hoarfrost” that might make for interesting photos.
I found this leaf that had the edges covered in it and made it the centerpiece for this shot showing the “hoarfrost” and the other leafs frozen below the ice.
Shot with the built in camera app I did the processing first in Snapseed on the iPhone and I then brought the image into Photoshop CS6 and worked on the shadow and highlights before applying Topaz Adjust plug-in for the final adjustments.
My nephew Damion looked up from playing with his trains long enough to wave good-bye while wearing his favorite bear hat. It’s not a terribly sharp photo as the light was very low in the room, but sometimes that doesn’t matter. Catching him in this moment, with the hat, expression and wave makes up for the softness of the photo. Anyone who photographs young kids knows that they run at about 100 miles an hour and sometimes you just can’t get them to stand or sit still long enough to get a sharp photo.
Does this mean that you should do away with your soft photos? Not if they record a moment that brings you emotion and that you’ll be able to look back on and fondly remember.
Today I used the built in camera app to shoot the photo and then processed it through Snapseed. I then brought it into Photoshop CS6 and brought down the saturation in the photo and applied the clarity filter in Topaz Adjust.
Today when I stopped by my sisters house my niece Elaina opened up her arms wide and gave me this expression you see here. Of course I along with anyone else could tell what she wanted me to do and she sat there patiently waiting as I shot her picture using the Lomora Pro App before picking her up. She, along with all the young kids in the family, are very social and like having their picture taken which works well for me and most of the rest of the family as we’re all into the picture taking thing!
This was the first picture that I’ve taken that I’m pretty happy with from this new App that I downloaded yesterday and I must say I’m still figuring out the settings that I like. It was shot with the Provia Film with normal exposure in a square format. I kinda like the retro blue look of the photo, like I shot tungsten film in the daylight. The App only has one style border which is Ok, but I wanted to have that Polaroid look that I used yesterday and so I opened the image and processed it through the ShakeItPhoto App to achieve that look. I also did a little tweaking in the Snapseed App to bring down the blue tint just a little as it was more than I liked with the Lomora Pro camera App.
I like the ability that the iPhone gives me for processing the same picture through several different Apps to achieve a look that I like. Just can’t wait till March as I will be able to upgrade to the 5S, which has 12mp camera instead of the 8mp with the 4S.
CSX railroad recently did some rail/tie plate replacements through downtown Madisonville, Ky and left a heap of these plates that were replaced. I liked the mountain of the old rusty plates and together with the old building next to the tracks in the background and the cloudy skies I envisioned a pop art kinda picture when I first saw the scene.
After shooting the picture with the native iPhone 4s camera I opened the picture in a App called Lomora, one I haven’t used a lot. The “Lomo” style seemed to be what I thought I was looking for so I downloaded this app to try it out. There’s also a pro version of the App which I didn’t use for this photo, but think I’ll make the leap and pay the $2.99! I love my apps and their prices! I’ll try the pro version out with my pictures from the next few days, so stay tuned.
Today’s photo is a simple shot of a CLF lightbulb. This is the first one I’ve ever used in my home as the early ones always had that bluish white light that gave the look of florescent which I really never cared for. The new ones of today are a warmer tone and look more like incandescent lights which I favor. After installing it I looked at it and decided it’d make a good shot for my daily iPhone challenge.
I used the standard camera app on my iPhone 4s to shoot the photo with. I touched the screen where the light was to set the exposure for the camera (yes you can do that and it also sets the focus point) as I wanted the tube to show up and everything else to go black.
I then opened the image in the ShakeitPhoto App that gives an old style Polaroid SX-70 look to the picture, complete with the borders. That resulting picture I then opened in the Dynamic Light App to make the bulb pop even more as it didn’t quite have the look I wanted.