In a Tropical Heatwave Waiting for the Fall

Can you say hot?! I’m sitting here at home in Longmont, CO where it is currently 102 degrees at 6:30PM. At least I am lucky enough to be in the air conditioned comfort of my home. We are currently at 20 days at or above 90 degrees. Whoo hoo! We beat the record of 18 days which occured back in the late 1800’s. I feel bad for all those folks that may have been traveling by covered wagon that Summer. It hit 104 degrees at the airport. Supposedly this was only third time it has hit 104.

With that said, I’m grabbing the wife and kid and were heading to the mountains tomorrow. This past week, all I’ve been thinking about is Fall and how it can not come quick enough.  We’ll probably do some hiking tomorrow in Rocky Mountain National Park. I’m also hoping to get some good landscape shots. This will be one of probably many trips to the park as Fall will indeed be here quickly. One of my favorite things to do in RMNP is to photograph the aspens. So, on that train of thought, here is a picture of an aspen grove near one of my favorite places to watch elk. My goal with this shot was to capture these fine trees with the sun backlighting them. In the era of digital cameras, it is much easier to pick the correct exposure although this is a relative concept. In this picture, I wanted to have bright sky backlighting the aspen leaves but not have the forground too dark. I believe in this instance I metered off of the backlight leaves trying not to meter too much of the bright sun. This gave me an exposure that was fairly close to the one I was going for. After the first shot, I zeroed in on my desired exposure by reviewing the histogram of my test shot and adjusting my shutter speed so that I had more of an exposure  bias towards the shadows. It I biased the exposure for the sky the trees would be too dark in the foreground. Too far the other way and the sky would have been too bright. That is why exposure is so relative. It all depends on what you are shooting for and what your desired results are. As long as you use the tools available to you and understand how to control the basics, you can improve your photography drastically. Have fun this weekend and, just wait. Fall will be here soon!

Fall in Rocky Mountain National Park

Santa Caught in the Act!

Am I now to be known as a holiday paparrazi? Well, I kind of feel like one. I was up late last night wrapping presents for my family. My son had just gone down for the night and upon completion of my task, I took a minute to rest in our easy glider. Something awoke me and, it was not the cats Ali or Moqui. Who should I see leaving gifts under the Christmas tree but, Santa! Now, I was in luck. I had the camera set up on the tripod for family pictures in the morning. This was my son’s first Christmas and I wanted to get some good shots. I had decided to leave the camera set-up for morning. I had removed my flash so, I had to catch Santa quickly or as quickly as a 2 second exposure can be. Now, he does move fast but during those 2 seconds, he didn’t . He never let on that he knew I was watching. He was too busy with his job at hand. And, as quickly as I saw him, he was gone. I thought I was dreaming until I saw the pictures on my camera Christmas night. I can’t explain it but, it happened. In addition to my son’s birth, it was one of the greatest gift I received. I hope some of you saw him too!

LOMO Effect in GIMP 2.4

Well, Christmas time is almost here. In fact, it’s tomorrow! If you are like me though, you still have lots to do to get ready. Despite how busy I have been, I did find some time a couple of days ago to play with version 2.4 of the GIMP on my computer. I recently saw some pictures taken with an old Lomo camera which I liked. These old Russian cameras definitely are not known for their optical quality and that partly is the draw to pictures taken with them. Now, I do not own a Lomo camera and, since I actually shoot everything in digital now, I wanted to figure out a way to replicate the ‘look’ of this style of photo. After a little research on the web, I found a website that had a download link for a LOMO plug-in to use with the GIMP.

After downloading the plug-in and some practice, I decided to create a B&W Lomo ’style’ picture. I first took a picture of a juniper I shot in Arches National Park and converted it to B&W. In order to use the plug-in, I then converted the picture to RGB again. After running the plug-in, I added a soft focus layer and a little film grain to simulate a vintage pic. Here is the result below.

Mountain States Toyota Portraits

We recently completed a series of two portrait sittings for the employees and families of Mountain States Toyota. We had a good turnout for this event and we had fun shooting. The day of shooting provided a bit frustration as a much needed bulb for a Photoflex Starlite head blew out and no one in Denver had one in stock. I quickly had to set up a improptu strobe system to capture the photos for the day. Since we were shooting with a combination of green screen and muslin backdrops, we had little time to dial in the lighting to ensure the least headaches for post-processing. All in all, we had a great time and captured some wonderful memories for an amazing group.

To view pictures of this event, go to our event hosting site: http://www.collages.net/ and enter mstportraits for the event and 17232 for the password. A second site was created for the second portrait night. The username is mstportraits2 with the password being the same.