Saturday I set out around noon to shoot a picture for the West Kentucky Photography Club’s weekly challenge, which had a theme of “Decay.”

Earlier in the week I had passed this house close to Lake Malone in Dawson Springs, Ky that was literately falling in from the roof down. There wasn’t a place on the road to pull off and at the time I was looking for a feature photo for the newspaper I work for and decided to log it into my brain for a return visit as I thought it would work out well as an HDR for the challenge.

Saturday I decided to head back down to the house and ask the people that lived next door to it if it’d be alright to take a picture of it. Now, I normally don’t feel the need to ask, but in this case I had to park in their driveway as there wasn’t anywhere to pull over on the road. With that being said, as you can tell this picture isn’t the house, but sometimes things work out the way they’re supposed to.

I caught the guy that lives next do getting out of his truck in the driveway. After introducing myself and talking about the weather briefly I asked him about taking a picture of the house and what it was for and he said it belonged to his brother and he couldn’t give me permission to shoot a picture of it and he’d rather I didn’t. So, that was the end of that picture and the beginning of the one you see on the page here.

I was disappointed and decided to head on down the road to Princeton, Ky looking for something else to fill the challenge and when it was all said and done I ended up in Paducah, Ky. I’m not sure just how the idea of this picture of a graveyard popped into my head, but again things just work that way sometimes. Now, I agree that you can’t see the decay that is going on, or has gone on, in this picture, but there’s not a single person that can’t imagine it, so it worked and I ended up liking this picture much better than I think the other would have turned out. Plus, I got 8-10 other really nice images I liked out of the trip, many of which are now available for purchase in my online sales store.

The picture is a High Dynamic Range (HDR) photo taken with my Nikon D700 with a series of three separate exposures, one normal, one over by a stop and one under by a stop. The lens of choice was my Nikkor 18mm f/2.8 and I hand held the camera for the three exposures.

The three images were combined using Photomatix Pro and then brought into Photoshop CS5 for final processing using Topaz Adjust for this end result.

If you’d like to learn more about HDR Photography I’d suggest you visit Stuck In Customs.

So, when you set out to shoot a picture for your project always keep your eye and mind open to other possibilities, because you never know you might get a better picture.

Till next time – keep clickin!

I shot this picture last year during the annual Scott Kelby PhotoWalk when I was in Los Angles and as all good photographers, just getting around to processing it the way I envisioned the photo.

I am one of the all time great procrastinators, just as my sister or anyone else in my family and they’ll confirm it with out a doubt. Working for a newspaper for last fifteen or so years I’ve become accustomed to working on a deadline, unless it’s for myself, then I’m more like the TV repairman that never fixes his own set.

I did two year long picture projects where I shot a picture everyday for both years, and I had planned to do the same this year with portraits, but it didn’t work out as I’d hoped and it turned into a portrait a week project. For the most part I’ve shot one a week, but getting them edited and posted here to the blog has been a bit more of a challenge for some reason.

I’m going to do better and while there will be perhaps some rambling on sometimes, I’ll try to relate what I was thinking or what I like about the photos that I post here for your viewing pleasure. Hopefully you’ll go away from my post learning a little bit or at least with perhaps some inspiration for your own shooting.

Now, back to the picture…

I stumbled on this church off of Olvera Street that had a shrine attached to and everyone was having a great time taking pictures of family members that I assume were destined for their first communion. I watched the scene for awhile till this photographer showed up with a family and he had all this gear on him and shooting what appeared to be Polaroid Cameras. I just couldn’t pass up the photo and thought about turning it in for my PhotoWalk image, but opted for a picture I shot in China Town instead, which won the walk I participated in. Now as an afterthought, I think I like this picture better than the one I turned in, which I’ve included below.

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