pent the day out in the desert of Arizona taking some sun drenched photos. I found this lonely tree reaching for more sunlight across this pathway. I shot this with my Nikon D800 and finally settled on a Silver Effex Pro post processing.
I'm not going to lie, I was terrified of this shoot. Trey Ratcliff announced this portion of the evening by saying, "this is going to be one of the hardest things you'll ever shoot as a photographer." He was right. We were thrust into the abyss of fire dancers!
I wasn't sure ow to shoot this. I mean I thought I should dump it over to Manual mode and try getting the right shutter speed, ISO, etc. But that takes time. I wound up firing off some longer exposures in Aperture Priority Mode which gave me some amazing light trails. I should have taken one nice HDR shot of the house and hill side without the girl in the frame but there wasn't enough time. With that one HDR I could have used it as a canvas to mask in the dancer later.
It's one of those live and learn shots because knowing what I know now I would have approached it a whole different way. wish I had managed to grab some fast shutter, high ISO shots of her face but alas I did not.
Here's a shot I finally got around to processing. Honestly I didn't have to do too much considering the remarkable conditions over Lake Wakatipu in Queenstown, New Zealand. Every 30 seconds during this sunset the light was changing to something new and fantastic.
Here I shot seven bracketed photos with a 1.0 exposure variation; this is something you want to do when shooting directly into the sun. Using the tone mapped image I pulled in the sky from the +1 exposure to fix some of the gray sky. I also brought in some of the redder grasses from the 0 level exposure. These grasses were unbelievably red while I was standing there.
Since I grew up loving astronomy (subscribed to Astronomy Magazine) I couldn't wait to get out and practice some star photography. After practicing for 60-70 shots I managed this one. I managed to get about 4-5 shooting stars in this one. I will be doing a lot of this during the Summer months. I also plan to write up a nice post on how to shoot these.
Starry Night in New Zealand
I'm in the midst of a trip to my sister's house to see her new baby girl. I decided to keep the computer at home and just travel with the iPad mini. I shot a bunch of photos using my Nikon D800 but I edited them on my iPad using SnapSeed and some simple touch-ups in iPhoto for iOS. It's kind of freeing not using the computer on the road. I love that I can shoot and edit RAW photos on my iPad. I'm going to write a larger post about traveling and shooting with the iPad soon.
Baby niece asleep
Morning on The Hills Golf Course. This place was beautifully peaceful, I'm glad I didn't ruin it by playing golf. Trey took us there before sunrise and I think I shot close to a thousand photos. This taken about an hour after sunrise so that just goes to show you how many amazing spots there were out there.
I shot this with my Nikon D800 using a 28-300mm lens. I found this lens to be more useful on the golf course because it let me compose tighter shots than my 14-24mm. I'll be posting many more photos from this morning.
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
The Hills, Queenstown