After spending most of the past few weeks exploring how my new On1 software can be used for photoart fuckery, I’m now playing with it as more of a straight-up processing platform. On the left is 5280LM’s own Michael Pecaut, who should post here more often.
Street Art, RiNo, Denver
Not that there’s no fuckery afoot, of course. Continue reading
High Plains Drifter
… one of the first images I shot after buying my first digital camera.
Centennial Olympic Park, Atlanta
Centennial Olympic Park, Atlanta
At Union Station, Denver
… in the woods at my university.
… in an image taken by one of my journalism students, Taylor Kickbush, to fulfill an environmental portrait assignment in her photojournalism course.
… found on a path in the woods at my Franciscan university. Note that the dollar bill is stapled to the message. I wonder why …
I’ve been posting a few pictures from Riley’s Farm Colonial Faire. They were reenacting the times just prior to and including the Boston Tea Party. I did the Lasses and the Brits already. Now we have the Americans. Again, the lighting was terrible, yadda yadda yadda. And I wish I had a better telephoto so these would be a bit sharper. But I think these turned out OK despite all the problems. All with my Nikon D7200. Mostly with my 55.0-300.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 lens.
This first guy spent all of his time with the candle girl I posted a while back. And most of THAT time was spent trying to twist apples in half with his bare hands. Riley’s Farm IS an apple orchard, after all, so I guess that’s the thing to do. I’m not sure if the candle girl was impressed or not. I have no idea what his actual job was supposed to be.
Paramount Theatre, Denver CO
As promised, here are are the lads from the Colonial Faire at Riley’s Farm in Oak Glen from a few weeks ago. I’m not thrilled about the sharpness in some of these, but short of walking into the middle of the demonstrations, it’s the best I could do. Now I understand why people have such huge lenses when they do this sort of thing outside of a studio. But I’m still learning. As I mentioned when I posted the pictures of the Lasses, the lighting was terrible. Basically, mid-day. So I had to do quite a bit of photoshop fuckery to get the pictures even remotely viewable. You’ll see what I mean. Shadows are terrible in places and over saturation is rampant. Doesn’t help that I edited these on my laptop…which seems to show pictures a bit brighter than my desktop, so a few of these are a little dark.. But I tried.
I decided to break them up into Brits and Colonials. First, the Brits. They started off the day with an inspection of course.
Or should you? From Wikipedia: “For 11,000 years, Native Americans have used this area for their hunting grounds. Long before the Lakota were the little-studied paleo-Indians, followed by the Arikara people. Their descendants live today in North Dakota as a part of the Three Affiliated Tribes. Archaeological records combined with oral traditions indicate that these people camped in secluded valleys where fresh water and game were available year round.”
I recently joined a photography Meetup group . It is basically set up so models, makeup artists and photographers can get together to build their portfolios and exchange information. Since I don’t have a lot of experience in these things, I figured it was an easy way to at least start networking. I went to my first meeting last weekend. It was a Mermaid theme. I think there were 8 or 9 different models, but I only got to work with about 5 of them. They were all good sports about the whole thing, getting into the swampy water and climbing all over the rocks for us.
Originally, we were supposed to shoot at the beach but there was a problem with getting the proper permits. So, we ended up at a small landscaped stream in front of a water treatment facility in Chino instead. We spent about four hours shooting. Unfortunately, it was at the absolute worst time of day in terms of the lighting, 10am-2pm, so I had to do a lot of Photoshop fuckery to get the shots to look even remotely decent. Even then, a lot of it is bleached out. Since I’ll post the pictures as I edited them, you’ll see that there was a learning curve in just how to deal with the bad lighting.
All of this was shot with my Nikon D7200, and mostly with my 55-300 mm f/4.5-5.6 lens. Occasionally, I switched to my 18.0-140.0 mm f/3.5-5.6 lens, usually because there wasn’t a lot of space to work with and some of the models wanted full body shots. I started off with ISO 200 but had to move to 400 for the shots that were in the shade since I wasn’t using a tripod.
First, we will start with the only pirate that showed up.
