Matt DeWitt Photography Blog » Kansas City

A day at the Renaissance Festival!

Matt DeWitt — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 04:20:22 +0000

A couple of weekends ago my friends Mike, Eric, and I took an afternoon trip to the Kansas City Renaissance Festival. I had never been before and always wanted to go so I finally convinced a couple of my friends to go. Eric and I drove up and met Mike and hung out for the night and then hit up the festival the following day.

That bad thing about it was that it had been pouring rain for a day and a half; we were worried it wouldn’t stop so we could go to the festival. It finally cleard up and we got to go. There was mud everywhere; it was very difficult to walk around. We managed and had a good time.

Anyway, the point of this post is to talk about some off-camera lighting. I’ve been reading Strobist for a while now and think it’s amazing. It really is a great source to learn about off-camera lighting. So, being full of fresh Strobist knowledge I decided I could try out my luck with some bare flash, off-camera lighting while at the festival. I made Mike and Eric hold the flash for me and was constantly have them move around a little to get the light better.

None of these pictures are spectacular, but you can see some decent off-camera lighting. And I’m just happy that this flash stuff is finally starting to click. Here are a few of my favorites and a link to the complete album at the bottom.

Eric with his new best friend. They had so much to talk about.

Mike and his new girlfriend. Hehe, j/k. She later managed to trick us into stripping down and wearing tights. Long story…

I really like the armor. I have some brighter exposures of this shot but I ended up picking this one because I thought it did a better job of creating a feeling of darkness, since Medieval times was a dark time. Or something like that…

Mike and the cute fairy chick. She gave me a ribbon because I told her I left my fairy costume at home.

That’s it for some of my favs. You can check out the rest of the pictures I took at the festival on my personal Flickr page.

More Kansas City HDR

Matt DeWitt — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 02:58:23 +0000

Another shot that I took with the previous two. This one was taken of the Art Museum in Kansas City. I tried not to overdo the HDR as much on this one so it looks a little more realistic (even though I really like the almost-fake looking HDR shots, like this one. In fact, this Flickr user has many that I really like.)

This one was also done on on my Canon Rebel XTI, shot in RAW, and using 5 exposures (-2, -1, 0, +1, +2) and done in Photomatix Pro.

Kansas City HDR

Matt DeWitt — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 04:30:08 +0000

After I got back into Kansas City from doing my brother’s senior portraits in Colorado and went around with my old roommate and snapped a few pics of the city with intent to transform them into HDR shots. Here are a couple that I’ve done so far.

This one is a shot through the fence right behind Mike’s apartment. I love the bridge and the water and I really like the almost cartoony feel that this image has.

This one is from one of the stone paths we came across while wandering around the art museum. I totally didn’t notice I managed to get one of the mowers in the shot. If you ignore that part it’s a pretty nice pic IMO.

These were both done by shooting in RAW with my Canon Rebel XTI and then taking 5 different exposures (-2, -1, 0, +1, +2) into Photomatix and doing all of the HDR work there.