I will be transitioning to my new logo (above). It more stylish and having a more horizontal orientation it’s much more flexible to use with or without the text below it.

For the sake of posterity, here’s my old logo (below):

The old one had too much awkward negative space to the left of the butterfly wings, so it was hard to do anything with the text to make it fit in that space. Most people didn’t get the simile of the camera metamorphosing into art.  I still like that part of the logo, though, and will probably use it without the surrounding text.

Overlooking the Snake River in South Ada County.

Original:

Just a few miles away from my house. While the image below appears to have no clouds in the sky, it is exposed for the barn so the sky is blown out (over exposed). I took three different underexposed images as well to pick up the detail in the sky.

Original:

The finished image at the top is a representation of the post-edited photo I had printed on a 1-1/2″ gallery wrapped 20×16 canvas (sans logo).

Original:

Original (exposure compensation +1):

I did charity pics for a fundraiser at a community sock hop put on by the music program at my son’s school.

The shoot was outside from 6p to ~6:40p, I was shooting at f/2.8 from about 16 feet away and the natural light faded quick, so I had to change my ISO often (started at 250 and ended up at 3200).  I had no strobes or continuous model lighting.  A street light popped on, and that allowed me to speed up my ISO a tad.  I had a 550EX mounted on my camera pointed straight up into the sky and the bottom of a paper plate secured to the back of the flash with a rubber band for a bounce card.  It got to the point that I couldn’t even see the subjects through my viewfinder and auto-focusing wasn’t working so well in the dark.  Needless to say, I had a couple out-of-focus shots.  Oh well, you snooze you lose by waiting ’til the last minute to get your pic taken with this beautiful Chevy, owned by Mr. Crawford.

The dance was packed!!  Greasers, preppies, and poodle skirts everywhere.  Great music.  Parents and kids had a blast!

Original (exposure compensation +3):

This is right behind Sego Prairie pond, Nicholson Park, Kuna, Idaho.  From Mid-Autumn until mid-Spring the source that feeds this small river is cutoff.  During the Summer, rafters enjoy floating the creek.  My house is ~.1mi East of here. I looked out my backyard window at about 8am and noticed the fog.  By the time I made up my mind to get dressed and get down here the mist was gone.   To make matters worse, I habitually fidget with the back dial on my camera and without realizing it (until I got back home) I had opened up the aperture and forgot to check it before shooting.  I cropped out much of the blurry foreground.  Hope you’ll still enjoy. :-/

Original:

At the end of Summer 2009, my wife, son, and I took a trip to the Oregon coast to visit her brother and his family.  A rest stop to visit Multnomah Falls is right in the middle of the Interstate, so ya just gotta plan the time into a trip to stop along the route and view the most photographed waterfall in the world.  You just gotta!

Anyway, I was just digging through my photography archives to see if I had a pic of the falls to try my hand at my newly developed HDR processing skills.  The pic I found, the one featured here, was the first worthy image I happened across.  I might have a better pic in my archives, but I didn’t bother looking further once I decided to choose this image to process.  I guess if I decide to make a print I’ll look for a better image and maybe take more time to process it, but this one worked out good enough to hone my technique.

Besides producing an HDR, I was also experimenting with the golden ratio, so I cropped this image in a way that put the bridge along the lines of Phi.  I also wanted to crop out the top and bottom of the waterfall to give the imagination somewhere to start and go to.  Pssst… but if you really want to know… the top is cropped right at the point where it spills over the cliff’s edge, and the bottom is ~half cropped out, mostly to eliminate much of the boring, barren gravel and stone in the bottom left side of the cliff face, as well as to achieve ~Phi.

I also double-tone mapped the image, which I typically would do for a moody effect, but I went the opposite way with this image to pop the shadow detail in the cliff face, underbrush, tree interior, and the convexes of the falls.  The set below shows the original exposure (SOOC), the initial tone mapped image, the double tone mapped image, and the final HDR after masking out some of the harsh highlights and enhancing the interesting orange underbrush at left-center.  The beauty of this HDR is that it was created from a single RAW image, which I manually created a bracketed set from (-1,0,+1 EC), and it was also a hand-held composition (and believe me the entire time I hiked around the falls I was wishing I had my tripod with me!).

View the set in slideshow mode to watch the transition.  :-)

Enjoy!  :-)

[Show as slideshow]

Update:

2/8/12 – Aww, what th’heck…. here’s one more.  ;-)