Category: Artifacts

So here are a few pictures from a procrastination session from “Building Design and Construction Systems”. The photo of Peppercorn on the run is heavily worked, I kind of took Scott Bourne’s thoughts on Subject Attention Simplify (a very good article) and applied it to this one. The two bird photos were pretty straightforward with only tweaking to saturation and contrast, etc. I guess you can call them “digital shopped” because they are the best out of MANY, MANY shots from those session — way more pictures than anyone would have taken in the old days.

As you can see in the delta between shot and posting, I really need to sit down and sort through my photos more regularly! I suspect I need to start taking fewer (but more thoughtful) pictures because going through these massive galleries are really quite daunting!

About an hour from our apartment is Brazos Bend State Park. It was a really nice day on Sunday and the weather was gorgeous (aside from the fact we forgot sunscreen so we had to pay $8 for a dinky little bottle of that stuff). Lots of places to take pictures of local wildlife…including alligators!  In any case, it was such a nice experience, we ended up getting the annual state park pass and we’re gonna go check out some fall colors five hours out.  We’ll see, it should be interesting.

so here is some fruits of procrastinating from studying…enjoy =)

I spent some time just working a picture of Peppercorn and I thought it would be interesting to upload all three. The first one is the original shot out of the camera. Since I shoot raw, I never mess with white balance — especially since I spend most of my time just figuring out my exposure since so few of my lenses meter on the camera.

The first attempt was to try a drastically horizontal and centered composition. I spent quite some time trying to get it balanced right, however, I think in the end, it still had a Pepper head floating against the carpet.

After taking a break, I took another stab at it and I think I am much happier with this. I realized that the colorful stuff in the background helps anchor the image in space and I think keeping it at a relatively normal aspect ratio kept it in the “photograph” realm as opposed to entering the “graphic design” realm (at which point I would need to do a lot more processing). I must add that shooting in RAW, while a bit heavy on hard disk space, gives you so much extra control over the post processing output that I unequivocally recommend it to anyone who plays with their shots after they upload it to their machine.

In general I do a lot of processing on the photos — sometimes the come straight out clean, but usually I do tweak a lot of little things here and there. For this photo, clearly more of a blurry composition, I did push the blues and I did push the highlights on Badger’s back as well as from the bottom corner. I’ve never really subscribed to the sanctity of the initial image — though I do try to avoid pushing things so far that they look like digital paintings (even if the photograph has been pushed and pulled a tremendous amount).

From the Golden Palace Supermarket in Bellaire.

I spent a little time putting together a website examining the magnification ratios that are possible with these extension tubes I just recieved from Hong Kong.  These tubes don’t keep the aperture open before you shoot, but they’re ten bucks!

Check it out at photos.grizzlypear.com/macrotubes