Day89: The Important Details

Day89: The Important Details
Originally uploaded by Emanon Photography

I missed yesterday for my 365Project, after shooting almost 2000 frames at a friends wedding this past weekend, I had to give my cameras a rest.

Today's shot comes along with a Wedding photography tip. I have read many books on wedding photography, and I have never seen anything like this. In today's market, many wedding photographers put together wedding albums, and the many ways to get book albums published, many photos are designing them. So here is my tip, at the wedding, grab a couple extra copies of the wedding program, ask the bride to send you a copy of the invitation, and grab a copy of anything else that the guests are given (If there are extra copies). Then you can take these back to your studio, or another area you can control the lighting and have some time to play around and get some creative shots of these. Remember, the bride usually spent a considerable bit of time and effort to plan out every detail here. You can then use these shots as either page background images, or as smaller detail images in the album. In this case, this is the invitation to the wedding I went to this past weekend. I could tell that someone spent a lot of time carefully hand painting and decorating these. While at the wedding the bride told me she painted them all by hand. So, I knew this will be an important detail to include in the album.
I shot this with a Lensbabies2.0 special effects lens then tweaked it in Aperture3.

A Flock of Photographers (Photography Tip of the day)

A Flock of Photographers
Originally uploaded by Emanon Photography

So if you have ever been out shooting at a park or wildlife preserve you quite possibly may have seen something similar to this. A whole bunch of photographers all crowding together to try to all get what is essentially the same photograph. The other thing to think about is how often you can show up at that same location and each and every day and see a similar group of photographers all in the same spot shooting the same thing again and again and again.

Now for my tip I want to first acknowledge that there is usually a reason that photography will group up like this. There is usually something half interesting there to photograph.

A good bit of time though, the location where the photographers group up might have been decided on other factors than the location being the best location to photograph from. Consider some of the following reasons that I have seen photographers group up.
-The location is the most convenient, easy to access.
-One photographer stopped to take a quick photo and everyone else stopped too.
-One photographer stopped to take a photo of an animal or another subject, another photographer saw the first taking the picture, but did not see the subject. When the second photographer gets to the location the subject moved, but the second photographer didn't know that, and set up his camera to photograph, and others photogs followed them.
-No photographers have bothered to walk around the next corner to see there is a better shot.

OK so here is the tip: When you see a group of photographers grouping together to try to get a photo of the same thing... Walk another 100ft to either side and make your own shot. Oh and you can also photograph the group of photographers like I did here.

Calm Night on the River (The Story Behind the Photo)

Calm Night on the River
Originally uploaded by Emanon Photography

There are times when you may be out on a mission to photograph a subject or a location that you have planned out. You know exactly how you are going to take the picture, how you are going to compose it, and how you are going to process the final image. then there are times when you are out, and you stumble across a cool location or you happen to be in the right place at the right time. This was one of the later. I was just a couple weeks into my first ever 365Project, I had planned on shooting all my photos that week at night. I like night shoots, they are different because most people don't think of shooting as much when the sun goes down. I think anytime you can get to a location to make a photo look different from anyone else that shoots it you have done a good job to photograph it. One of the easiest ways to do this is to go out to shoot at night.
For this photo, as I said earlier I stumbled upon the location. the photo that I wanted to shoot at this location was going to be a long exposure of the drawbridge in New Smyrna Beach, FL. I wanted to capture the motion of the bridge as it raised and lowered, unfortunately, the hour or two that I was there might be the only time I have not seen any boats on the river. Not to let the opportunity go lost, I looked for some other shots. I had made some shots of a boat dock on the south side of the bridge in front of the Riverview Grill, and I was on my way back to my truck when I happened to notice how the light house in the distance was acting as a backlight and creating a silhouette of the land across the river. There was also this boat just sitting there in a lift out of the water. The boat itself was being lit by the orange mercury vapor streetlights on the bridge. I set up the shot by setting my tripod right under the bridge, and took several exposures. For each exposure I was trying to time it just right to get the moving light beam from the lighthouse to sweep through the picture as it was being exposed, it took me a few tries to get it right.
the final ingredient of this photo came along in post processing, and was sort of a lucky accident. As I said the boat was illuminated by orange colored light from the streetlights. A simple adjustment in Aperture2 of using the White Balance dropper tool to click on the hull of the boat and instantly the boat was colored properly, and the water and the sky in the background took on a cool deep blue hue.

Day34- I Speak Through My Camera

Day33- I Speak Through My Camera
Originally uploaded by Emanon Photography
I've been strugling for almost 2 years now to get a full-time job, since finished grad school. There are some days I just want to scream, like today, when I found out that one of the jobs I interviewed for went to an internal candidate who doesn't have the education and experience that I have. I started out just taking some dark and gloomy self portraits, but then shot a few looking into a mirror. I realy like the way this one turned out. I don't really think of myself as artistic or anything, but I do express myself through my photography. My Photography is a release, and a stress releiver, and sometimes I fell it is my best communication.

Recap of Shooting Week 4

Well, with my picture posted on Thursday, I wrapped up the 4th week of my 365Project.  I got some cool and interesting shots this week.  I think my overall favorite shot was my shot of a coke glass that was filled with ice water.  I made the glass glow by putting the flash behind the glass.  More information on the particular shot can be found in another blog post I did for the shot you can find it here  http://emanonphoto.blogspot.com/2010/01/day27-have-cold-one.html   Here are the seven shots that I made as part of my 365Project this week.

I have not really planned out this week ahead, but I have already made two cool shots, go to my flickr page to see them.  That's it for now. 

Keep on Shooting, 

-Pete