Artist Talk: Cloud City

 Hey everyone,

Happy New Year! This year we will be much more active on this blog. I have been posting a lot of things on the Facebook page but the blog has been getting neglected.So a lot of the same content will be in both places and I will start sharing my tips and tricks. I hope that I don't sound TOO amateurish!

The first thing that I want to share is the latest installment from the series of photos from the Met Summer outdoor exhibits. Two years ago it was Bambu and last year it was Cloud City.  I find the rooftop displays very image worthy! Cloud City was a series of mirrored, multi-sided orbs in the form of a cloud. The sculpture itself was magnificent and I took the image below and then decided to render it as a quad. It's now hanging in my dining room. The image was run through four different filters in Color EFX Pro 3 and generated these four versions.

 This next image was taken while looking at the city next to one of the mirrors. The view from the roof of the Met is spectacular to begin with but it was amazing to see that scenery reflected in the 'cloud'. The image below extends the skyline and the dramatic sky punches up the picture. I waited for a long while for people to completely clear out of the picture and then i realized that the people actually gave it a sense of scale. So I waited for someone interesting to come by and snapped the pic. What's interesting is that the forward subject is actually NOT looking at the sculpture! It's hard to compete with that view!

This next picture is one of my favorites! I like split images and color separation. Typically what people do is take an image and duplicate it in Photoshop then reverse it. After that they line them up next to each other. As I walked out onto the roof, I immediately saw this image in my head. I crouched way down near the sculpture and got this image that looks like it's Photoshopped. In post I desaturated the bottom half and punched up the vibrance on the top half. I mounted it in a gold frame and it really popped. Love this image!

Hope this gives you a peek into what makes me take certain pictures.
Until the next frame...stay in focus!
Hayden.

Geeking out about photography tech...

Technology has taken us to new places with photography. The most obvious of them is digital photography but there are some other simple things that make our life easier as well. Recently, I shot a wedding and as used some of the toys in my bag, I realized just how much technology comes into play with photography.

At this wedding, I didn't have a second shooter so I was only going to get the shots from the two cameras strapped around me. I then remembered that I had a remote trigger for my flash that DOUBLES as a remote shutter release. I set up one camera on a tripod behind the officiant and therefor I was able to get shots of the couple with their guests behind them. It didn't work as well as I would have liked because I got a bunch of shots of the officiant's back but the technology worked well. I just have to pick a better spot next time.

I was also able to place that camera back there and know that, if I did pick it up in one of my images, the technology also existed where I could very easily erase it as if it were never there. That process used to be laborious and splotchy at best in the past. Not it's ridiculously easy.

Speaking editing software, wide angle shots are now easier to create. I happen to own a Fisheye lens which has an 180 degree range. That means that I can take a picture and capture almost everything from my left and the right peripheral sightline. The problem is that as you get to edge of the image, everything gets warped. The easy solution is to take a bunch of pictures and stitch them together in an editing program. Everyone looks normal and you have a nice wide angled shot.

There are many more examples but you get the point. Photographers used to show up to events with their cameras and shoot and then a week later hope that the images turn out the way that they wanted them to. Now there are so many ways to fix or augment your shot that shutterbugs are allowed to be creative, even at a stress filled event like a wedding.

That's my focus...see you in the next frame.