GOTTA LOVE MONDAYS

Today is the Monday after Christmas. It still feels like the holidays with New Years around the corner, but it also feels like it’s time to really get to work. Kinda weird! Today I will lock myself in the office to plan for next year. I can’t wait for what next year is going to hold, and planning my marketing campaigns is probably one of my favorite things to do ever! Make sure to check my blog and website on a daily basis! From here on out I will do my absolute best to update it daily. Some days it will be sample HDR photo’s that I have been working on, others it will be highlights from photo shoots I have done recently, but coming soon I will be having contests and promotions where you can win prizes and photo sessions for spreading the word about James Brandon Photography. Stay tuned!

THE CHRISTMAS TREE OF YOUR DREAMS

I took this picture yesterday. My wife’s family is making their way in town for her sister Stephanie’s wedding in January. So I will be spending quite a bit of time over there for the next few weeks. Yesterday we were getting ready to leave for dinner and I started staring at the Christmas tree. Ideas immediately started stirring in my mind for a photo. I wanted the image to be timeless, this involved removing objects from the scene like the automatic lighter, the starter logs, the lighter gel, magazines, a dog kennel, etc. I set up my tripod and remote shutter and fired away. The main image was taken at f/7.1 for 1 second at ISO 100. The treatment on the photo is obviously HDR (High Dynamic Range) which is a process where three images taken from -2 to +2 and then run through extensive post processing to gather all the available light in every image. I wanted the image to look like a dream. Christmas Tree’s bring back so many childhood memories for me, and when you see a Christmas Tree you immediately judge it. Why do we do this? Because when we see an amazing Christmas Tree we aren’t just seeing that one. We are seeing every Christmas tree we have ever seen in our lives. And when you see one that looks like this, everything comes together. When our eyes scan a subject like this, our brains immediately start taking everything in. It molds and intertwines the image with memories from the past. The same thing happens when you smell something that instantly shoots your mind back to some event from the past. And to me HDR is really how we remember events and images. We remember the details, and we remember them in romantic and inspirational ways, so a standard photograph just wouldn’t do here. My goal for these images are to start conversations around them. So please feel free to comment. Comment on the image itself, or on the content of this paragraph. What smells, tastes, feelings, sounds or images bring up memories from your childhood? I know when I smell the smoke from a neighbor grilling, it instantly sends me back to memories of my Dad cooking on the grill. He was and is a master of the grill and I remember so many details about helping him start the fires on his charcoal grill and even better, the smoker we had in the backyard from his father. Thank for reading and hope to hear some great memories from everyone! And for more information on HDR and the HDR process, check out Stuck In Customs, a blog by Trey Ratcliff. He is an amazing HDR photographer and even has a fee HDR Tutorial for anyone wanting to learn the process.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 28th, 2009 at 11:37 am and is filed under Texas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.