The moon, beauuutiful.....Yello

I never shoot celestial bodies. I leave moon shooting to the experts.  This shot is hand held with a canon 70-200 f4 L lens.  I had a lot of trouble, even though I was exposing manually.  I kept over exposing the moon.   I thought this was a total disaster so I throttled it way back in LR4.  It is not a steady image.  There is blur everywhere, in spite of image stabilized lens and iso 3200.

But the thing I like about this super moon, are the stars.  By not having a clue what I was doing, I got the stars exposed too.  I think that's magic.

Sometimes if you shoot for the moon, you get the stars.

The cool side of the warm river

In the spring I made an image of the river and ice that has been very popular with readers. It was a warm red building reflected on the water in an unusually warm and clear morning.

That same day I made a second image that captured the cold blue side of the river.  Although not as compelling an image (people seem to love red and warm), I still find it interesting, particularly as a companion piece to the warm image. I just processed this one recently.

Don't bail out too soon, wo/man says

Here are a few more images from the neo baroque series.  I'm not really sure where this is going but I feel I have to pursue it to some kind of conclusion.

At this point it just looks like grainy photos.  Time will tell.  Apparently, one should not bail on these projects,  as the courage to see them through may lead to innovation.

Portraits can surprise us...part 2

I mentioned yesterday that  I rarely shoot in front lighting with high key (light) processing.  The other thing I usually do is work in black and white.  But I must confess that lately, colour has attracted me more and more for some work.

The portrait of my friend Sam is an example.  She brought so much energy and colour to this shoot herself, that I felt this shot just had to be in colour.

As I said, it's never a formula.  It's what feels right for the shot and what works.

Portraits can surprise us

This is a portrait I made of my friend Sam.  I see her as creative, energetic, confident. As many of you know, my usual style is what I call New Baroque: strong side light, high contrast of dark and light. I don't do it as a gimmick.  It just feels right and natural for me.

But that style of lighting just wasn't capturing my friend's image.  So I switched to the so-called photo beauty light position: light right beside the camera elevated to the ceiling.

And then I did a second thing I don't usually do.  I made the development high key in LightRoom (the images is lightened significantly).  I did all that because I thought that was what the portrait needed to convey the likeness as I saw it.  I think it works.