I know it’s a few days late, but I’ve been traveling and settling back in after the Holidays. I snapped this on one of my last days in Colorado – I’ve been wanting to do some more HDR as I really like the way the images look, even if they are way overdone (to a certain extent), hell, HDR is one of the reasons I picked up photography initially, so I decided to give one a shot.

The sunsets over the mountains in Colorado are beautiful – maybe someday I’ll be able to live there again.  I wanted this shot to have it all: trees, grass, snow, mountains, sky, solar flare – I could do without the road in the mid-ground, but oh well. I put my camera on Aperture mode and bracketed it at 3 shots: -2, 0, +2 at f/22 and fired away on a tripod.  As a side note, shooting at f/22 lets you see all of the dust spots on your lens/sensor

I did the tonemapping in Photomatix and did some clean-up and enhancing in Photoshop. It’s not great, but at least it gets me thinking in the HDR mindset, so perhaps I’ll have more of them to share with you in the future.

Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas (or the holiday of your choice) and I hope you’re ready for 2010! I’ve got a few things in the works that I’ll keep you posted on as they develop. I’ll leave you with a couple for fortunes I tweeted this morning that I’ve been saving as motivation for things to come:

Ahh, Colorado, how I miss you some times.  Josi and I are here in Fort Collins visiting my family for Christmas – it’s a much needed vacation for me and it could possibly be Josi’s last American Christmas, so I had here come home with me so she could spend it with my family and I.  We got here on Friday and have just been taking it easy the last few days. We went to visit my grandpa in the hospital (he’s home now though, yay!), wrapped some presents, and watch lots of movies already. Josi has been wanting to take some snow pictures for a while now and since there is a little snow still left on the ground we decided to head out this afternoon to see what kind of pictures we could take.

I really wanted to get a little higher up so we could get some mountains in the background so we headed over to an elevated railroad track near my house to start out our adventure.  And it sure felt like an adventure with the climbing we did to get up there – traversing snow, ice, and lots of mud. We made it up and started to set up for our first shot:

This picture pretty much has it all: a beautiful girl, snow, mountains, some solar flare.  A little bit of post in Lightroom really made this shot pop. Since the sun was still high and bright we were shooting at fairly small apertures – f/16 here (based on the rule of full sun exposure = f/16 @ 1/ISO) – so we had to use a lot of flash power to get a good exposure on Josi.  I set up my SB-800 on a stand and then super-clamped an SB-600 to the stand and had them both firing into a silver umbrella just barely out of frame camera right to get a decent exposure on Josi.  After I shot a few shots of here she snapped a few of me and then we moved on to a new pose:

This shot was mostly for me to play with some high-speed sync.  Since I already had two flashes set up I figured I could push a little power and bumped my shutter speed up to 1/2000 of a second which gave me a working aperture of around f/2.8 using high-speed sync. Josi was cross-lit between the flashes and the sun, but it doesn’t look unnatural because of the angles of the light.  She doesn’t look so happy in the picture, but I was pretty happy because I got to try out high-speed sync and was pretty happy with the results.

After we were done up here we packed up and headed closer to the foothills for sunset.  We found this nice little trail and hiking area not too far from my parent’s house so we stopped there to finish up our first Colorado photography expedition.  We walked a little down the trail and stopped where we found a good shooting spot on either side of the trail.  The first shot we did there was this:

We still had a good amount of sun coming from camera left and I didn’t want to ruin that with flash so I just used a single, bare SB-800 off to camera right zoomed into 105mm just to give a little kick that matched the ambient sun exposure.  It created some harsh shadows, but since I wasn’t doing a close up I figured it would be ok.  You can see the base of the foothills in the background and the late afternoon sun adds a nice glow to the snow and the tall grass in the background.

We finished up with the shot at the beginning of the post – my favorite from the day.  This shot was done similar to the first shot of the day – overpowering the sun with two full power flashes off to camera right.  I just played around with the composition until I got the sun in a spot that I liked and snapped a few shots and we called it a day.

I didn’t use any Photoshop on these – it was all done in Lightroom.  Lately I feel like I’ve been spending too much time in Photoshop, so for these I decided to take a step back and focus more on the images themselves rather than the post-production.

We’re supposed to get some snow in the next few days so hopefully we can get out and play in the snow and take some pictures.  In the mean time, check out a few shots that Josi got of me during out outing today:

Make sure you check out the rest of her Flickr Photostream too – she’s got some nice shots there (probably because I’m such a wonderful teacher :-p).

Have a safe and Happy Holidays, everyone!

I went out shooting with Jason and Eliesha at a new (to me) downtown spot – down by the railroad tracks and the footbridge.  It’s the shadier part of Springfield, but there are some cool portrait locations, so it was worth checking out.

Here is a shot of Kristen sitting on the stairs leading up to some type of loft:

Next we have a shot of Samantha leaning against the railing of the footbridge with a beautiful sunset in the background:

And another shot of Kristen, this time on the footbridge with the last glimpses of the sunset behind her:

Nice one-flash solutions with a shoot-through umbrella.  It might be about time for me to order a new shoot-through – mine is beat all to hell.  It’s bent, stained, dirty, etc.  It’s seen better days, but it’s helped me through a lot of shoots, so I’ll definitely be replacing it soon.  Maybe I’ll go with a 60″ one this time…