Posts Tagged ‘California’

Huntington Surf

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

Artist Spotlight Series A Success!

Thanks again to Shaun Stakem for being our first ever guest blogger on the Artist Spotlight series! His post has received a lot of attention already and the numbers grow each day. I can’t wait to see what is in store for this series and hopefully neither can you! If you’re wanting to know what this series is all about, click the Artist Spotlight link in the sidebar on the right and read all about it. If your a photographer, or any other kind of artist, feel free to follow the instructions on that page to submit your work for consideration.

Topaz DeNoise 5 and Photomatix BETA 4 Released!

Did you see my recent sneak peek post announcing the soon to be released DeNoise 5 software from Topaz Labs? Well, they finally released it and it is now available to the public, yay! DeNoise 5 is an incredible piece of software and one of the best on the market for removing noise from your images while maintaining detail. Visit my Topaz Labs Review for a coupon code and link to get 15% off the program or even the entire Photoshop Bundle.

Also, HDRSoft has made available to the public their latest BETA version of Photomatix 4. BETA means that it’s still in testing phase and if you download it, that is what you are doing: Helping test the product. You won’t receive support from their customer service on it until the product is finalized, and it may have bugs that you have to work around. I however have not run into any problems yet with the latest BETA version. The previous one, before public release, crashed all the time, but they seem to have fixed that. If you decide to purchase Photomatix, be sure to visit my Photomatix Review page to get a discount on your purchase!

Link to download Photomatix 4 BETA: http://www.hdrsoft.com/download/beta/v40.html

Huntington Surf

An image from Huntington Beach I took a while back during a local surf competition.All the surfers were standing on the beach waiting to go out and compete. I couldn’t help but notice this one as he watched a fellow competitor catch a wave in the distance.



Follow James on Twitter

Tags: , , ,
Posted in California, Canon 5d Mark II | 1 Comment »

A Rocky Start

Monday, August 9th, 2010

New Page For New Photographers

Here is yet another page I have been working on in my never ending quest for good content :-) . Photography is an amazing hobby, and a very rewarding profession. For those starting out, I have added a page titled 11 Tips For Those Starting Out With Photography. There are certainly more tips that I could include, but this is a good starting point I think. I get emails quite a bit from new photographers asking about things like software to use, cameras to buy, lenses I could recommend, and things like that. So this page and the brand new Camera Recommendations page should get new photogs started on the right path. Stay tuned for more pages!

A Rocky Start

Most people hate Mondays. Mondays bring an end to the weekend. They bring meetings, phone calls, emails, and bad moods. Why is that? Shouldn’t we look forward to a fresh start after a relaxing weekend? I dunno, maybe that’s pushing it a bit too far. Today’s image is from Cambria, on the central coast of California. The beaches there are not your typical California beaches. They are rocky, with rough waters, and the tides can be a bit dangerous at times. Cambria has a bunch of really cool tide pools and that is where I took this picture.

P.S. If you’d like a full res version of this image for your computer wallpaper, I will send one out for free to the first 10 people that ask. Just shoot an email to contact(at)jamesbrandon.cc.

P.S.S. I also have a beautiful set of 10 high res backgrounds for your computer, iPhone, iPad, or whatever else you can think of. I will add some more sets in the weeks to come. The current set is priced at only $10 and the funds go to support this blog.



Follow James on Twitter

Tags: ,
Posted in California, Canon 40D | No Comments »

Laguna Beach at High Tide

Monday, July 19th, 2010

I’ve always edited my photos out of order. It just always made sense. Sometimes I won’t even look at the images from a shoot for days or weeks or even months. I do this so the anticipation of the images builds, and when I finally look at them I have a fresh perspective on them. I also do this so I don’t have to deal with the pressure of editing thousands of images from a trip all at once. It’s just too much of a hassle. I just edited the image below and it was done in January of this year. No biggie! Another advantage is that as I learn new techniques and refine my editing skills, I can edit images that I would have done poorly on earlier. In fact, I tried to edit this very image about a month after January. I failed. I simply could not make the water look right. The exposure that had the good looking waves wasn’t coming through right in Photomatix, and when I tried to mask in the correct one, I just couldn’t make it look good. I tried it again this evening and bam, no problem at all. I have gotten so much better at masking, adjusting exposure levels, re-masking, painting, spotting things to fix, that it was a piece of cake. I can also say with certainty that if I had edited this image in January, the sky would have looked bad. Back then (it seems so long ago) I was still pretty new to HDR, so I simply took the Photomatix result of the sky and went with it. This would cause haloing around trees, and unrealistic colors in the sky.

About the image | Laguna Beach at High Tide

I took this image at a somewhat secluded cove in Laguna Beach, below the famous (and incredibly expensive) Montage Beach Resort. In fact it was so secluded that some photographer felt comfortable enough to photograph his half naked girlfriend and was right in the way of my shots for a while. After they finally left, I was free to create images of the sunset! Kristin and I waited at this cove for an hour or so waiting for the sun to go down, and for naked people to leave. During the sunset, I took tons of images from different angles. And when it just started dipping below the horizon we started to leave to find a vantage point on top of the cliffs. Right when I got the end of the cove we were in, I found this spot and fired off 6 exposures from my 5D Mark II.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II, Canon 15mm Fisheye f/2.8, 15mm, f/14, ISO 200, 1/13th



Follow James on Twitter

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in California, Canon 5d Mark II, HDR, Laguna Beach | 2 Comments »

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.



Follow James on Twitter

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in California, Canon 5d Mark II, HDR, San Clemente | No Comments »

F14 Tomcat Aboard the USS Midway | California Travel Photography

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Update on Gallery Night

As many of you have read, my work is being featured in an art gallery this Saturday night at Main and Vine Art Gallery in Keller Texas. I just wanted to say that I got all my prints in and all the selected images for the gallery night are now on display and ready to go! So, if you can’t make it by Saturday night for whatever reason, you can stop by any time now to view my work. I’m pretty excited about the gallery night and hope to see you all there, hopefully I will be able to meet some of you I haven’t met before face to face. Any prints purchases that night or any time through my website will come with a “Certificate of Authenticity” as well as a brief “Story Behind the Image.” You can keep these with the picture or with your other important documents.

Cancun Next Week!

Wow this trip is coming up fast! I got some emails and phone calls from a few people with tips on what to do while in Cancun. I figured out I will only have one full day to travel around. Every other day is either the wedding, or a half day where I am flying. If I have time to make it down, I will go to the Myan ruins at Chichen Itza. I have been to the ruins at Uxmal on a cruise I got to do a few years back, but Chichen Itza is supposedly where it’s at for ruins. I keep reading that you need to stay there for about 3 days to see everything there, but I will just have to cram what I can into one day. Other than that I won’t have a lot of time to focus on travel images. Which is perfectly fine because Daniel and Laurens wedding is going to be amazing and I can’t wait to shoot it!

F14 Tomcat Aboard the USS Midway

My family has a great history of serving in the armed forces. My Grandpa and his brother on my Mom’s side served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War. He served on submarines and did all kinds of cool. My Papa on my Dad’s side was an MP in the second World War, but I never got a chance to meet him because of his passing when I was about three years old. My sisters husband even served with the US Rangers, although I don’t know much about what he did. Maybe I can find out one day :-) . Most recently my cousin Brandon (also on my Dad’s side) served in Iraq with the 101st Airborne as a medic. He was with them when they marched in and I truly admire his bravery and courage, as I do with both my grandparents. To everyone who served or serves in the US Military, thank you from the bottom of my heart. You are all heroes and your courage leaves me in awe. We are forever in debt to your sacrifice.

The aircraft below is none other than the famous F14 Tomcat. You know, Top Gun? The F14 flew from December of 1970 all the way through September of 2006 when it was officially retired. What’s really interesting about this jet is that Iran owns about 44 of them today! During Nixon’s presidency, back when the US had good diplomatic relations with Iran, the US decided to offer Iran access to our military technology. They needed aircraft to defend themselves against Russia and they decided the Tomcat would fit the bill. After relations started going south, the US embargoed much of their shipments to Iran and even began destroying remaining F14′s to make sure they didn’t fall into the hands of the Iranian air force. To this day, Iran still has 22 working F14 Tomcats. The US Air Force will not sell scrap parts of the F14 either because of the same fear, like they do with other aircraft.

F14 Tomcat Aboard the USS Midway

F14 Tomcat Aboard the USS Midway



Follow James on Twitter

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in California, Canon 5d Mark II, HDR | No Comments »