Archive for the ‘San Clemente’ Category

San Clemente Pier Awaiting the Sunset

Saturday, July 17th, 2010


I’m kind of a sucker for California, sunsets and beaches (if you haven’t noticed). So when I can get all three of them in one image, I’m pretty satisfied. I have an almost identical image of this pier that was shot about 10-15 minutes later in an older blog post. That image shows just how quickly sunsets change from beautiful golden warm tones, to surreal and cool tones. I took this image on a photo walk with Trey Ratcliff, back in January. If you like the images on this blog, you should check out his work as well over at Stuck in Customs.

I took this image with a Canon 5D Mark II (I’ve got a review here), and a Canon 24-70mm lens (review here). I kept the aperture fairly low here to freeze the waves as much as possible. The lower your aperture, the faster your shutter speed. Shots like these have several obstacles, including waves, birds in the air, people walking by on crowded beaches, and so on. Some people can’t figure out how you would be able to freeze birds in the air when you’re taking 3-7 frames of a scene. To concur this obstacle, you can either mask in one of the lower light frames (which always have the fastest shutter speeds of the set, or shoot a single RAW image and convert it into a pseudo HDR.



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San Clemente Photography | Tower 1 at Sunset

Monday, February 15th, 2010


LIMITED EDITION PRINTS COMING SOON

As many of you know, HDR photography is a huge passion of mine, equal to wedding photography I’d say. Up until this point, my HDR images have just been a hobby and something I do to get away from everything else. Well, in the next 1-2 weeks, I will be working on organizing a site for you to purchase these prints in very limited quantities. The prints will be sold in small sets to ensure that the owners are few and far between. They will be signed by me with a number stating which sequence the individual print is in that set.

Seeing these HDR images on a computer screen is one thing. Seeing them hanging on your wall is completely different. The detail in these images are incredible and a 15 inch computer screen just doesn’t do them justice! I will try and make the cost of these prints as low as possible. They will hopefully bring in enough income to allow me to travel to other places and keep these images coming. Fort Worth is a great place, but the world has so much more to offer and it’s a huge passion of mine to bring that to life in my images!

If you’re interested in reserving one of these prints, please email me by going to the contact page of my portfolio website. You can get there by clicking the “Website” link at the top of the blog, or by scrolling all the way down and clicking the contact me link at the very end of this web page. The Limited Edition print sets will be released one at a time and probably on a monthly or weekly basis. Haven’t decided yet. These first prints will be extremely limited, in order to test the market and see the demand for them. If they sell out quickly I may add a few more in the future. As always, thank you to all my fans for your support! The comments I get here, on facebook, on twitter and through email always make my day!

TOWER 1 AT SUNSET

It’s freezing outside in Texas. A high for today of 40 degrees with wind chills in the upper teens to lower 20′s. The snow was fun for the first day but now it’s old, my yard is like a flooded swamp, and I’m ready for some warm weather! So this morning I am sipping some steaming hot coffee and posting a picture of sunny California. I took this shot a few weeks back in San Clemente, about twenty minutes south of Laguna Beach. San Clemente is a beautiful beach town, my only complaint was the incredibly annoying train that went right through the beach (about five feet behind where I stood to take this picture). I was down there for a photo walk with Trey Ratcliff of Stuck in Customs and every ten minutes or so he would be talking and a train would pass through blaring it’s horn. Other than that, I loved this place! And the little hole-in-the-wall pizza place we ate at had some of the best pizza I’ve had in a while! Anybody know what that place is called?

San Clemente Photography | Tower 1 at Sunset



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San Clemente Pier at Sunset with @treyratcliff

Thursday, January 28th, 2010


WHERE I’VE BEEN FOR THE LAST WEEK

Hey guys! Sorry it’s been over a week since my last post! I got crazy busy for a while there, which is good. I am currently in sunny Orange County for a 4 day mission to take as many pictures as I possibly can! I’ve discovered that travel is my absolute favorite thing to do and I am so blessed to be able to do it more often now that I’m a full time photographer! One of my favorite HDR photographers Trey Ratcliff had a photo walk yesterday evening in San Clemente and that was plenty enough of an excuse for me to fly over and make a weekend out of it! A photo walk is just a laid back group event where anyone who wants to come out is welcome. Trey gave some basic tips to those just getting into HDR and then walked around to each person to give them individual time. We walked up and down the beach and all just hang out for a few hours. After that, we took over a pizza place right off the beach and hung out there for a couple hours. It was a great time and I got to meet a lot of really cool people! In about an hour I am going to meet my beautiful wife at the airport so she can spend the rest of the week with me, and we are going to hit up every beach and every sunrise and sunset we can before we leave!

SAN CLEMENTE PIER AT SUNSET

This shot was taking about 5 minutes before the sun set. Sunsets are the most amazing things to photograph because they are so fleeting. You literally get a completely different picture ever every time to compose because the sky is brilliantly changing in color and saturation every instant. I had never been to San Clemente or even heard of it for that matter, but I am glad I made the trip for sure! San Clemente is located about 40 minutes south of Newport Beach which is right by John Wayne airport. Laguna Beach is right in the middle of the two. The shot below is a three exposure HDR with the anchor (middle exposure) taken at 1/40th of a second, ISO 50 at f/3.5. I opened my aperture wider than usual to stop the waves as much as possible. If I had wanted to blur them more, which I did in some other shot, I would close my aperture down to around f/16. These HDR shots are a lot of work to edit it photoshop. After running the three exposures through Photomatix, I took the rendered HDR image along with the three RAW files in photoshop to do some masking. With moving waves, changing clouds, birds flying through the air, etc, their are a lot of things Photomatix just can’t figure out. So you then have to mask in the exposure that froze the waves. Then you have to mask in the exposure that caught the bird in the place you want it to be, or the one that is sharpest. After all that (fun) work, I came up with this image, enjoy!

San Clemente Pier at Sunset



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