Clayton Morris

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Photo of the Day

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We stayed on a beautiful lake near Fussen, Germany in early Fall of 2012. After we arrived at the hotel I ran down to the lake and shot a few bracketed photos (3 photos with different exposures). It was mid-day so I didn't really think these would turn out. But I ended up being fairly happy with it.

This was my first real attempt at shooting with HDR in mind. There's more ghosting than I'd like, but live and learn.

The next morning I regrouped and snapped a series of photos in the early morning hours as the sun was coming up. I'll share those a bit later. 

Füssen, Germany

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A Photoshop Layers Breakthrough

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I had a breakthrough tonight that I just had to share.

few weeks ago I took the plunge and downloaded Photoshop. I'd never used it before. It is overwhelming. But I felt like it's was an essential part of any serious photographer's workflow so I needed to learn it. To fix ghosting in some of my amateur HDR photography I had to passably master Layers. 

Layers, for those of you that don't know, and that included me a few weeks ago, is a great tool in Photoshop that allows you to pull in multiple photos and use component parts of different exposures. For instance you might want to lighten the sky using the sky from a brighter exposure. 

had the hardest time trying to figure out which 'layer' I was working with and which 'layer' I was attempting to pull in. I was ready to throw my computer through the wall when I had a breakthrough. I finally realized that the main layer was, of course, sitting on top but the layer I was pulling in is simply one below the top layer. It's that simple and no amount of searching on Google helped me figure that out. 

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Photo of the Day

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In my quest to capture some Fall colors I wandered up to a local resort called Woodloch. I don't think anyone saw me trespassing on their grounds. It just started to rain so I set up quickly on a tripod and fired off three exposures of the most interesting angle of the lake.

oodloch Resort

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Photo of the Day

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t's my favorite time of the year, Fall! We always venture up to the Poconos Mountains to catch some of the leaves changing. This season is no exception.

As I am just beginning to learn a Nikon D800 I thought it would be a good learning experience to head out and shoot some local rivers and streams as the sun was setting. I have a lot to learn. One of my big mistakes was using the flimsy tripod I bought for a lighter camera. The problem was that even when taking bracketed photos with a 2 second timer it still managed to shake the tripod. The result was some ghosting between my five images. The Nikon D800 is a beast! 

Anyway I climbed down to this rocky outcropping to grab this shot. I spent sometime in Photosho trying to fix some ghosting using layers. This is the first photo I've ever exported from Photoshop and I'm proud that I got over my intellectual fear of using it.

imble River, PA