We recently did a shoot of our friend’s home theater. It’s Amazing!
Home Theater
March 22nd, 2010Images From the Amazon
March 10th, 2010Here is a slideshow of some of our Amazon images. Go to www.creativepeaksphotography.com to see our full portfolio.
Picture of the ?
December 18th, 2009This week we had an assignment photographing food, in particular, baked goods. After working for about six hours arranging, lighting, and photographing a whole bunch of food I have a lot more respect fo the people who style and photograph food for magazines. It’s very difficult.
Here’s what we learned:
Lighting is crucial. Shadows can either work for you or against you. We had two lights with us and at times I felt like that wasn’t enough. The challenge was to get the food looking natural without hot spots and to keep the image looking like we didn’t use a flash. Which we didn’t, but incorrect positioning of the lights would cause harsh shadows making the image appear as if it were artificially illuminated.
Next came the background. I can’t tell you how many shots captured something unwanted. Or an unwanted glare on a surface.
I’ll add more to this as time goes on. One good thing though… I got to eat some of the props!
The image here is one of our better ones. To see the whole collection go to:
http://jmirro.zenfolio.com/p363705967
Featured Location – Wyoming
December 13th, 2009Once or twice a summer since 2005 we have been making trips to southern Wyoming and staying in campgrounds in our motorhome in either Rawlins or Rock Springs. From there we travel north in our car into the Red Desert to look for and photograph the wild horses that roam freely on BLM land. We have seen a dramatic reduction in the numbers of horses we find so we hope our photographs will help preserve this American legacy. To see our complete portfolio go to: http://jmirro.zenfolio.com/p263561199
Just for Fun
December 5th, 2009I couldn’t resist doing this in Adobe Illustrator.
- Santa and the Moon
Picture of the ?
December 5th, 2009A few nights ago we waited outside on our back porch for the moon to rise. We knew about where it would clear the pine covered crest of the mountain behind our house. I liked the idea of having the pines silhouetted against the bright moon. Linda got this one. It’s a good image, but we knew we could do better. I was looking for something a lot crisper. The image was captured at f5.6, 1/125 sec, and ISO 100 using a 400mm VR lens mounted on a tripod. I can’t tell from the meta data whether the VR was off. Since the lens was on a tripod, it should have been. In order to improve the shot we decide to do it over again the following night from a more stable surface. We think our back porch, which is elevated one storey, could have been adding a little vibration. Unfortunately, when the moon rose the following evening, and we were set up on a more stable surface, it was behind some very high thin clouds, so we didn’t take any shots. We’ll have to wait until the next full moon.
Changes for improvement: More stable surface for tripod, ISO set to 200, f stop set manually towards the middle of the range of the lens, make sure VR is off, and get out of the wind.
Full moon rising over pines.
Sony Play Station 3
November 28th, 2009We just bought a Sony Play Station 3 and I wanted to pass on that this is a great device for photographers who have a Hi Def TV in their homes. When coupled with a media server, like TVersity, which can be downloaded for free, all your images can be displayed in Hi Def on the TV right from your computer files. It affords a great amount of flexibility. Mine will display JPG, RAW, and TIFF. There’s no need to convert all your images to JPG and no need to copy them to disc or a memory stick. And BTW, you can also play games and Blu-Ray movies. In fact, the movies look better on the Play Station than on my original Sony Blu-Ray player.
Picture of the ?
November 26th, 2009Every January, the town of Breckenridge, Colorado, hosts an international snow sculpture contest. Each team starts with a 12′ x 12′ block of snow that is packed together by volunteers who stomp the snow down in wooden forms. The teams then have several days to complete their sculpture. Here’s an example of a completed sculpture:
Printed a Large Format Image and Learned Something.
November 24th, 2009Yesterday I had one of my large format images printed for the first time. I wanted to see the detail. I was very pleased. However, the file I gave to the printer was a JPG of 13MB. The printer suggested that the next time I bring a TIFF file with a bit depth of 8 because it will give me more dynamic range, especially with the grays. I just re-saved my original PDS file as a TIFF and the result was an 83 MB file. I’m guessing there’s a lot more information there. So… next time to the printer I’ll try the TIFF. The image I’m experimenting with is located here:
Checkerboard Panorama Question Answered
November 22nd, 2009The answer to the checkerboard panorama question, (several images stitched together, on top of several more images stitched together), was quite simple. Just put all of them into Photomerge in Photoshop CS4. I can’t speak for older versions, but this version works like a champ! I shot four images in RAW, two on top and two on the bottom. Opened them all in Camera RAW, then opened them all in Photoshop. Selected Photomerge under File – Automate, selected all open documents and let CS4 do the rest. After cropping to a 4×6 aspect ratio the resulting four image picture was about 66MB in size. The resulting JPG was 13MB in size.
The next step is to get multiple images that don’t look distorted and are lined up better.