If you are looking for another great photographer, I would suggest checking out Carlos Flores' work at Forgetful World. His work is really good and very inspirational.

I like to visit other photographers' blogs for several reasons. I know I can always learn something about photography and it helps me to see what is trending and gives me inspiration. After my last set of images (see WIP On Our Own) I wanted to check out Matt Kloskowski's blog. I cannot tell which blog site he is using (the only listing he has is at the bottome where it says "powered by Kelby Media Group"), but I like the setup.  It is very clean with a slight texture behind it.
To the right you can see he has several social networking sites listed (facebook, google+, and twitter). He also has quick link to subscribe to his blog, which I did.
Only a few pictures are clickable, which can be frustrating (for me atleast). I see a picture on a website and I want to click it to make it bigger. He only does this for the images that he is willing to show big.
He also has a nice feature for some images. If you look at his Seattle shot, he gives a small slideshow that moves between to  versions of the image. He uses this technique to teach a point.
Since he is part of the Kelby Training Group, he has a lot of good information on how he gets his shot.



I really like the flow of the blog and I will be going back there to keep up with his work. And his pictures are great, too.

WIP: On Our Own Part 2

So, I got out to shoot some of the background plates for my set of composite photos. Overall, I feel they are coming along nicely. I do have give a big thanks to Matt Kloskowski and his book on Photoshop Compositing Secrets. It was very helpful and smoothed out the process in a straightforward manner.

The only sidestep I took was that I used Topaz ReMask for my masking. This made it a bit easier. I merged the two images together and edited them using Lightroom 4 and Color Efex 4. I may still work on the overall look and feel of the final set, but this is a good start.

I will hopefully make it out later today to get some more shots done and then I will post those by tomorrow.

Edge 55 Apartments

Today I got the chance to shoot the Edge 55 apartment complex near TCU. These are some pretty nice apartments. I was, for the most part, given free range to shoot anything of interest. It was also a good chance to try out a new technique at photographing an interior panorama.

If you don't know, an interior panorama has one major issue compared to the larger landscape panorama. Objects are closer to the camera and therefore will shift location in the camera when using a standard tripod. It's called a parallax error. It happens because the camera is rotating around the sensor not the lens. If you have $200, you can purchase a panoramic head for your tripod, but I don't. So,  I took the head off my tripod and used the screw mount as a pivot point for my lens.









I shot with a 10-22mm lens attached to my 7d (with the crop sensor this is
effectively 16mm), so the non-parallax point on this lens is relatively close to its front. The result went well. Although, I was also shooting HDR and was only able to fire off 3 consecutive exposures per frame using the 7d's high speed continuous mode.

More Experimentation

I am a vintage camera collector. I love the old look and feel of those film cameras. One of these cameras I had purchased for very cheap. A Kodak Pocket 1A folding camera. It was, for the most part, a damaged camera. The body was falling to pieces. The lens and bellows, on the other hand, were in great condition.




I decided to put those to good use. I cut the camera from the body and attached a Canon EOS adapter ring to the back end. Now I was able to place the 1A front on my Canon 7d. The images are remarkably clean and relatively sharp (albeit low in contrast). It's focal length is 130mm, therefore, on my 7d's crop sensor it is a 208mm. The neat part is that its not just telephoto, but also macro. The bottom images are examples of this in action. They were processed using Lightroom 4 and Color Efex 4.

WIP: "On Our Own" Photo Shoot

So, apparently I forgot to hit the publish button on my last post. Sorry about that. I am still trying to figure out how to work this site.

Anyways. The photo shoot went well. It was rather hectic though. I had seven children in the studio at the same time with toy guns. You can imagine the noise. Two of the parents were there to help and they were great.

The shoot was one of the most involved shoots I have ever done. Normally I just shoot away, worrying only about changing the lighting and re-positioning myself. This time I had to jot down all the information about where my camera was and what it’s settings were including the angles (I was shooting with the Canon 7D which has an artificial horizon which was very useful).

Below is one example of the progress of this series. This is far from done, but I figured I would at least show where it’s going

I will be doing a photo shoot for my class on contemporary photography. My style will be based around tableau photography (a narrative created through images). The idea is somewhat simple. An alternate universe where all the adults have succumbed to a fatal disease, leaving only the children to fend for themselves.

The models will be my friends’ kids. So, none of them have any experience in modeling or acting. They will be shot in studio against a grey background. I then have to go out and find interesting locations to mask them into. It is going to be a daunting task, now that I think about it. I have to keep the camera angles, f-stop, height, distance, and focal length the same.

I can’t even begin to imagine how much time I will be spending in Photoshop. Oh, well, here goes nothing.

HDR Cityscapes of Fort Worth

This series is a study of light and how different times of day can change our perception of an image. Each shot was taken from a specific vantage point. I returned to the location during different times of the day. The images are three exposure high dynamic range.