Cold as ice, but not willing to sacrifice

I really wanted to get up for sunrise yesterday morning, but I also knew it was going to be around zero degrees. I managed to rise early enough to watch it out the window and it was spectacular.  It had snowed a few inches and the cold had created frost on everything.

Down on myself for not rising early enough, I went out for a drive anyway to see what photographs might present themselves.  I came across this little farm scene and am very happy with it:

Contest

So I am currently unemployed, which sucks. However the silver lining is that I have time to do more photography related stuff. So when Chase Jarvis announced he was having a contest and the prize was a trip to hang at his studio for a day in Seattle, I was very excited! The contest involved taking a picture of his new photo book in some location and he would pick the most clever or interesting or whatever he decided.

So I decided to take a picture of my dog, Frisco, fetching the book. But I also wanted this to be another chance to learn new photoshop skills, so I decided to do a composite shot, merging a bunch of frames together to show the motion Frisco went through to catch the book. Chase and his crew do some amazing shots like this of skiers.

So I took Frisco out in the park to do his favorite thing, fetch frisbees, and mixed the book in for some of the tosses. I used a tripod and took all the shots from the same location to make the merge as easy as possible. Once I felt like I had enough shots, I came home and then spent 2 and a half hours merging them together using layers and masking in photoshop.

Below is the finished product, which actually WON! the week's contest!! Hopefully it will be good enough to win the trip to Seattle because that place is ridiculously cool and I'd love the chance to check out their studio and their workflow etc etc. But if not, I won a signed print and I had a great time doing it and learning new photoshop skills.



And thanks to "Anonymous" for the kick in the pants to start posting to my blog again! (I have the time!)

And thanks to Chase for selecting my photo and inspiring me to shoot!!

Did you Photoshop that?

Photographers often get asked whether they use Photoshop on their images. There are many blogs out there that have talked about this, but I am going to add my 2 cents. It is often pointed out that Ansel Adams had his own version of photoshop, the darkroom. He manipulated his images using advanced darkroom techniques and even has multiple versions of the same image out there. There is a great Ansel gallery in Santa Fe that has many original prints of same images he did over many years as he gained new darkroom skills. It is really neat to see the different prints hanging next to each other.

Back to today and digital imaging. Most serious photographers shoot in RAW format so that they can make adjustments in the computer later. When a RAW image is first opened in the software, it is often a very dull image because there is no saturation, white balance etc applied to it. SO it is necessary to make adjustments. In many cases, these adjustments are done in photoshop.

Below are 2 versions of the same image I took last fall. The first is the RAW image and the second is my finished version(processed with Aperture and Photoshop).





I look at it this way: the RAW image is the negative and the post-process software is the darkroom. Now, of course there is another question around all this and that is are you striving to present a realistic image or a manipulated piece of graphic art? In my case I am usually striving to present it as it looked when I shot the image (although I admit I sometimes try and make it "pop" a little). If I stuck a giraffe in the above image, and presented it as a picture of Crested Butte, that would be unethical... :)

Photoshop Training

I am working on getting better at photoshop... I took a class last week but have found that there are so many resources on the internet, that if you just take the time to explore and practice you can learn a lot more that way. So last night and this morning, I was working on a tutorial I found on the web. I added my own elements to it and cut a few corners for time's sake, but here is what I came up with:


and in case you didn't know, grass fed beef is really good for you, in fact it is better than farm-raised salmon.

Spring in Boulder

One of my favorite things about living in Boulder County is seeing all the baby cows running around the open spaces in spring. They are so cute when they are running full speed. I wonder if they know that they are only going to be runners for like 6 months?? Then they spend the rest of their lives just wandering around eating grass and mooing. I hope they aren't bitter at all the running humans in Boulder when they get older.

So I went out into an open space area full of the breeding cows this weekend to try and get some images of the calves and their mothers... I got a few good ones, see below:



There are a few more on my website, under "New Images".