Tag Archives: Salem

Warbirds Over the West: Making all the Images I Envisioned Despite Fear

01 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by in History, Locations, Shooting

≈ Comments Off on Warbirds Over the West: Making all the Images I Envisioned Despite Fear

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

 

On June 13, 2015, the B-17 Alliance hosted the second annual Warbirds Over the West at McNary Field in Salem. This was the first time it was held at the Alliance’s new home in Salem. Knowing that my friends at the Living History Group Northwest were supposed to be at the show, I knew there was a chance for some images that were very important to me. I also knew to make them happen I’d need to ask some these great folks who I don’t know that well to do this for me with little benefit to them. (Can afford to give them some free pics, but little else.) This is a situation that often makes me quite anxious, so I was afraid I would chicken out and come home without the images.

I have been endeavoring to build a portfolio of images of people with vehicles in a Hollywood inspired style to show potential clients. The “aviatrix” shoot I recently wrote about with Sami Van Der Westhuizen and Carrie Strahle – makeup, was also part of this effort. If all went well at Warbirds Over the West, I felt certain I could reach the number of images I needed to show this portfolio as separate from my “people” portfolio on my web site.

With these images being the most important thing I had planned for the day, and the fact that the light would be deteriorating all day; I made it my first task for the day. Thanks to training with Toastmasters International and some other issues, I have been doing pretty well with these sorts of things when it has to do with my photography career. Thus, asking the various folks in these photos to pose for me went off without a single hitch and resulted in images that met what I envisioned very well. I couldn’t be more grateful for their help.

These images were shot and processed with the method I discussed on here earlier, How Do I Light Heroic Portraits? The only difference was I used a low-saturation version of the Lightroom preset I created. I usually do this with old military things.

Of course, there was a lot of other stuff going on at Warbirds Over the West. The headline was Grumpy was there from the Historic Flight Museum was giving flights to paying folks and doing flybys. Some friends from WAAAM flew the museum’s Taylorcraft L-2 and there was also a Stinson L-5 on hand. The beautiful, shiny DC-3 flew in from Aurora.

There was also live music and a beer garden, which proved to be the perfect way to chill after the big day.

In the end, it was a great day, I look forward to it next year.

Take a look at my Point A to Point B portfolio, the People, or the images from Warbirds Over the West.

Government in the Viewfinder

22 Friday Jun 2012

Posted by in Locations, Shooting

≈ Comments Off on Government in the Viewfinder

Tags

, , , , , ,

Recently, I decided to shoot a lot of local landmarks (advice from a few folks figured into this) and felt one great place to do a lot of this was the capitol area in downtown Salem. It’s close to home and has some beautiful buildings that I predict could be interesting to travel clients.

So my approach to these shoots (images are from three separate shoots) was first to put elements in the images that would be interesting from a travel perspective. Secondly, I tried to include elements letting the viewer know the season, thus the flowers etc. Finally, I tried to put it all together in a pleasing composition. Now as you can imagine, the various elements aren’t always placed around the grounds in an ideal arrangement for photography. To compensate for this, I did a lot of walking around trying to analyze perspectives without taking images. For two of the shoots, I also had a 17mm TS lens on loan from Canon Professional Services, which allowed perspectives I can’t normally achieve. (Great lens by the way, although I don’t think it would be used that often in my work, just a bit too wide. The 24mm TS however, I would love to add to my permanent kit. I loved it when I had it on loan.)

The experience of shooting the capitol was also very interesting. I shot towards the end of the day for the good light, so that meant crowds had shrunk dramatically. So most of my time there the atmosphere was just that of any location with few people around. Some of the time I spent there however, there was a soft casual atmosphere of friendly people playing in the park together. Kind of like the atmosphere I enjoyed so much in my former home of Eugene. Not something I have come to expect here in Salem.

Backlit Starburst HDR

10 Tuesday Jan 2012

Posted by in Post, Shooting

≈ Comments Off on Backlit Starburst HDR

Tags

, , , , , , ,

First of all I’d like to mention that the gallery above includes a couple images other than the ones that I am discussing here. All of these images are of the state capitol in Salem, Oregon.

My goal in these images was to create an image with a beautiful sky and starburst sun, while still retaining good detail in the building. The first step was to position the camera such that the sun would just be peaking around the building. I used the shadow of the building to aid in this process. If you position yourself at the edge of the shadow, you will be very close to where you need to be. This was the fun part of the process, chasing shadows around downtown Salem appeals to my quirky sense of fun.

Once you find the right spot, (you’ll need to move often if you plan on taking more than one image) setup a auto exposure bracketing sequence that is as dark as you think you can get away with. The hard part here is to get a good looking sky, thus you need some pretty dark frames.

After getting home I load the images into Nik Software’s HDR Efex Pro. The main parts of the process were to use low tonal compression then place a control point on the building and brighten it and increase the structure a little.

Well, I think now I’m going to go try the Lightroom 4 beta.

Night HDR

03 Tuesday Jan 2012

Posted by in Post, Shooting

≈ Comments Off on Night HDR

Tags

, , , , , , ,

When looking at HDR photography, I often found the night photos to be the most impressive. Well, I recently did it for the first time. It is way cool, but there are a few oddities compared to doing it in the daytime to watch out for.

My biggest suggestion is to use live view and manual exposure. With the 5dII at least, the camera I was using. If you dial in a lot of exposure compensation for your base exposure it sort of squeezes the range it can shoot in the Auto Exposure Bracketing sequence. Shooting manual does away with this problem. So I set a manual exposure using exposure simulation in live view. I set the f/stop to f/16 and adjusted the shutter speed to fit as much of the values into one histogram as I could. I then set the sequence to two stops each over and under.

The other oddity here is that the shutter speeds are so long, that it’s hard to keep track of where you are in the sequence, etc. I had a moment when I thought my camera was malfunctioning, when all that was wrong was I had locked the button of my release down.

In post processing I loaded the images into Nik Software’s HDR Efex Pro. Can’t tell you a whole lot more as I processed each image differently.

Give this night HDR thing a try, the results are wonderful.

Handheld Night Event Photography

02 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by in Shooting

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

Recently, two different Christmas parades were presented in the Salem area that I wanted to photograph for stock. Both highlighted lights as the main attraction, thus they happened at night. I’ve always found events like this to work best when I photograph handheld. So, I needed to come up with a technique for this.

Here’s what I came up with. Arrive before the event starts, and when the ambient light approaches the level it will be during the event, run some experiments. Set your exposure on manual mode and ISO to one of your highest settings, I used 6400 on my 5d II for these images. Then mess around until you get the glow to the lights you want in the images. You should probably check the display occasionally, adjustments might be advisable through the night.

I was quite pleased with the results I achieved with this technique.

Check back tomorrow, when I show you some stuff I did from a tripod the night of the boat parade.