The Pantheon Redux

Yes, this is a repeat - and I'm not even on vacation. Why the repeat? Because I've been learning some new things about photo editing. In fact, I've made a video:

Joelle

In my search for photos from my early days of digital portraiture, I came across this photo of Joelle that I took almost 9 years ago. I had a great subject but the the photo also represents the power of Aperture by Apple as an editing tool in that in a minute or two I was able to retouch and then enhance the photo. All of this was done in preparation for my Advanced Digital Photography class at Lake Area Technical Institute.One of the nice things about teaching photography is that I learn at every step along the way and today was no exception.

Lost!!!

This photo was a "shoebox" experience about 30 minutes ago. In a quest to find photos I have been ignoring, I started at the chronological beginning of a library of digital photos that has close to 50,000 pictures. About 300 pictures into my search, I found this. I don't remember taking the photo, but I do remember the class with great fondness.The light source was a single 150 watt bulb and the camera was my Canon 1D, which represented the state of the art in DSLR photography in 2002. The camera cost $5500 and do I dare say that it was worth every penny? It had a whopping 4.4 megapixel sensor!The "shoebox experience" is what many of us have encountered when we are searching for something in our closet and we come across a box of forgotten photos. I am sad to say that decades from now, no one will have a clue about all of the digital media that we put into boxes. If the 8-track tape and the floppy disk are evidence of the ephemeral nature of electronic media, imagine what will happened to hard drives and compact flash cards we are using today.If you want to enjoy your favorite digital photos years from now, you need to get them printed. And then put them in a shoebox.

A Little Prayer

For the first time in two years, I have updated my blog's look. I've been contemplating a change for a while but fear of the unknown kept me at bay. When you change themes in blogs, all of the photos have to be resized, hopefully by an automated process. And who knows what you'll get?But it looks like things are working, though if you aren't using a 21st century web browser, you may have problems. Let me know if you do.Here are a few of the changes:

• A more user friendly interface with links to older and similar posts
• An ability to purchase prints through a pro lab
• An interface that works great on iPads, iPods and iPhones (no javascript!!)
• And a nice slide show at the top of the page

Those who have been reading my blog for years will probably hate what I've done. But I'm not going back. . . . 

Tiny Dancer

I am going on my third full day in New Orleans and I still haven't found what I would called a "brilliant" photo. Nor has one found me. In analyzing this, I realized that when I'm not attending the photo conference I am at, I am more tourist than photographer. And there's a difference.The difference lies in intent, I think. I carry my camera almost everywhere but generally I am more intent on seeing things or on soaking up the culture and ambiance of New Orleans. I am not really intending on taking photos.When I go out to take photos, normally nothing else matters. Hunger, thirst and often even self disappear. And when I'm a tourist, that generally doesn't happen. And when I am in the company of people as I am at this conference, I can almost guarantee that it doesn't happen.Tomorrow is my last day here, and I will try to find the opportunity to become a photographer. Meanwhile, I am posting a photo I took near Jackson Square. Though the musicians were great, I found dancing girl especially intriguing.By the way, I have a parallel Microblog called "The Things I See" and I've posted a few of the photos I've taken in New Orleans. Go here:The Things I See

Conveyance (Variation)

In the three years that I've been posting to this blog, I try not to post the same photo twice. However, I'm reposting yesterday's photo again, but this time with a different look.Why am I doing this? In part because I want to show the kind of impact color and black and white can make on a scene. I guess I'm also show the kind of power the digital photographer has these days in manipulated photos through fairly simple processes - such as what I've done.

Conveyance

Ljubljana, Slovenia, is a picturesque town that a photographer could easily get lost in. There are things someone like me, from a small town in a rural state, never sees - such as rustic looking painted bicycles.However, I do believe that if someone came to Watertown from Slovenia to photograph our town, they would find strange and photogenic things that we would probably ignore.Giant cowboys might be an example. . . .

Split Harbor (HDR)

This is not a true, layered HDR photo. Instead, I made it using Nik Software's Color Efex Pro 4.0 and Nik Efex HDR. It creates a bit of a surreal effect, I think.Are you a photography student wanting to know more about the process that leads to photos like this? Here's a tutorial I created this morning fresh off the video "press."

11-19-11 Melissa

Melissa looks a little sad here but she was one of the more ebullient subjects I had the pleasure to photograph. She was a dancer and actively involved in theater and made posing very simple. And she had many great looks.Here, we are in an abandoned building in Gary, SD, in 2002. I had found a broken window that faced north and told her to pose by the edge. I got beautiful wrap-around Rembrandt lighting.Incidentally, one rule of thumb in portraiture is that you should avoid having the subject show the back of his/her hand to the camera and I break that rule here. Frankly, I didn't know the rule 10 years ago. I did use the "Burn" tool in Photoshop to make the hand a darker shade than the face. Why is there a rule about this? Well, partly because the back of the hand is fairly nondescript and also because any other bright object in a portrait competes with the face. And generally, portrait photographers don't want that.

Darcie

I took this portrait the first year I was serious about senior portrait photography. That was almost 10 years ago. The camera was the Canon 1D, which was a groundbreaking digital camera. It cost $5500 and had a whopping 4.4 megapixel sensor!I had a lot to learn about photographing people back in 2002 but I did get a few things right in this photo. First, how could I go wrong with Darcie? I was lucky to have the opportunity to photograph her. While I can take no credit for her good looks, I will take credit for finding the right light and the right moment for this portrait.We were at Terrace Park in Sioux Falls and I knew that the morning light was best for this particular location. That meant we had to leave Watertown pretty early to get to Sioux Falls by 9 am.As for "the moment," I will say that I had no book learning on this but that even from the beginning I had a bit of an intuitive sense of when to press the shutter button. On this particular day, I had already taken over 50 photos of Darcie and so by the time I took this one, both of us were relaxed. And anyone who does this kind of portraiture knows how important that is.(NOTE: This photo was originally posted as a color image but the more I looked at it, the less I liked it. So I have revised my post with a black and white image that does have a little "glamour" applied in Photoshop.)Canon 1D 1/125s f/4.5 ISO250 91mm

Triplicate

One of the good things about this blog is that it forces me to go back to my old photos and find things that I've forgotten about. This photo is one of them. I took this of my son Jon at the Santa Ana airport in California. I used my iPhone 4 and an app called Photosynth, which I had just discovered.Photosynth lets you do panoramic photos. Actually, its strong suit is that it lets you do 360 photos. Go to the Photosynth web site to see some amazing examples.

Rural Relic

This is another example of an HDR (High Dynamic Range) photo. In fact, there are two photos here - one exposed for the sky and one exposed for the dark side of the old hulk of a car. This photo is fairly realistic, though the rays that are visible in the sky aren't something you would normally see in a photo taken at this time of day. The HDR photo accentuates the contrast in the sky and you see the rays.