Posts Tagged ‘travel’

Fort Worth Water Gardens

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

I can’t tell you enough how much I love Fort Worth. It’s my favorite little city in Texas, and it’s such a great place for photography. The Water Gardens were built in 1974 by a couple of architects from New York, and it’s considered the an oasis in the middle of the concrete jungle. The 4.3 acre park has 3 main pools, and this is the main one. I will definitely be back here soon on a night with more clouds in the sky! I think it might be better to photograph this spot a little earlier in the evening as well, because the sun sets right behind this building. This causes what looks like a haloing around the building, but it’s actually the sun setting right behind it. We will see!

Fort Worth Water Gardens Photography



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To Hell via Deep Ellum

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

Site Back Up And Running

Whew! I made a big dumb mistake yesterday when trying to do some advanced coding on the back end of the site. I apparently cut off access to the database where all of my posts, comments, and meta are stored, therefore there was no access to any of that. In a feverish, cold sweated rush I eventually got the database linked back up, but then I ran into another problem. I only had access to the root blog page, but not any of my posts themselves, i.e. if you clicked a link there was an error page. Well, thanks to my degree in making mistakes, I have quite a few resources to dig through online to figure out fixes for this kind of thing. I got the site back up and running this morning and I will do my best to make sure that doesn’t happen again!

A Whole New Site Coming?

Yes! That was part of the cause for the site going down yesterday, I was trying to transfer some information to the new one. I’m really excited about this new site, and hope you are too. It’s basically going to be a more focused site for photographers and for showing my travel and HDR work, but there will be so much more than that! I’ll go into more details as I get closer and closer to the launch date, so keep your eye on the blog for more. Tell your friends, tell you mom, tell your co workers, tell your dog, it’s going to be great!

To Hell via Deep Ellum

Last weekend, I went on a photo walk through Deep Ellum in Dallas. It was kind of the wrong time of day to go, I feel like Deep Ellum is a place that was meant to be photographed at night, and it was about 10am by the time I got around to this location. I may go back later at night to see what I can get at that time. Deep Ellum if you don’t know is an area in Dallas that is infamous for night clubs, tatoo parlors, culture, music, graffiti, and a few shady people here and there. It’s also the home of the original Twisted Root Burger, my absolute favorite burger in the entire world. Seriously. I took a friend to the one in Roanoke and he was all mad at me because it was going to cost him like $15 for a burger and drink and fries. He kept saying, “A burger is a burger, and no burger is worth $15.” Then he took his first bite. All he could say at that point: “What just happened to my life?” True story. I know this has nothing to do with the image, but oh well, I love that place!

I have no idea what this place is. There were no clear or apparent signs to let us know. So I figured it’s one of the many ways to get to hell via Deep Ellum! Can’t you just see it? Opening the door and seeing a staircase that goes down, but you can’t see the bottom, just a faint red glow somewhere in the distance. I’m sure that is what’s behind this door. No doubt in my mind.

Deep Ellum | Dallas Texas



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A Rather Large Drifter

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

The Early Bird and his Tasty Worm

Laziness: It’s become an epidemic in our society and culture. I despise it, mainly because I’ve struggled with it my entire life. It’s something I have to fight on a daily basis. One of the ways I combat laziness and complacency is by getting up as early as I can. I’ve developed a bad attitude towards sleeping in. In fact, if I sleep in past 8am, I feel like the world has started without me. I then spend the rest of my day trying to catch up and get back on schedule. Why am I rambling about getting up early? Well, for photographers, the light that comes with the sunrise is some of the most beautiful light of any time of the day. But it requires dedication and a love for what we do. It’s not easy to wake up before the majority of the world, pack up our gear, grab a cup of coffee, all in an effort to beat the sun to a spot we want to photograph. I can tell you this though; every time I have gotten up to photograph the sunrise, the rest of my day has been great. My drive home is always great, I have a smile on my face, I’m energized and ready for the rest of the day, and there is no crash in the afternoon. Besides great light for photography, getting up early has it’s other benefits too. I’ve found that most successful people share this trait, and I certainly want in on that.

A Rather Large Drifter

I found this rather large piece of drift wood in Miami one bright and early morning. You may have noticed the backdrop of this photo as I have posted several images from this location. Miami is one the most beautiful cities I have ever been to. I always imagined it as this dangerous, run down, dirty city. I don’t know why, maybe because of the way Hollywood portrays the city. I’m sure there is some truth to this in the night life, but I’m not one to spend my nights hopping around bars and clubs. I was constantly amazed at how beautiful and clean and vibrant the city was. There was no smog, no trash, no grime, no run down industrial areas (at least that I could find). I could easily live in Miami, if not for the unreasonably high humidity levels during the day. I shot this tree from several angles, but this one was the clear keeper of the bunch. Because I was shooting straight into the sun, I took 7 exposures to ensure I had enough light to work with in post. The key there was “enough light to work with.” Just because you have the light in your multiple exposures, doesn’t mean you have to use it. I could have processed a “perfectly exposed” image where the histogram showed no clipping on the highlights, but that’s not what I wanted here. I wanted a sun drenched image, because that’s the way I remember it. Hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed shooting and processing it!

Miami Florida Travel Photography



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The Secret Lagoon in Dallas

Friday, August 20th, 2010

Does anybody know where this is located in Dallas? If you can guess where it is, or know where it is, leave a comment below the post and I’ll send you a free set of my HDR Desktop Wallpapers. You can also use them for your iPad, iPhone, or whatever else you can think of.

Its surprising to see something like this in the midst of the hustle and bustle of Dallas. Kind of like Central Park in New York City. It’s nice, it just doesn’t seem to fit in. Or maybe it’s the city that doesn’t fit in? One of the convenient things about photography (and sometimes inconvenient) is that you can use the limitations of the frame to conceal the true location of where the scene is. In the end, art is about creating an image. It doesn’t matter how you get the finished product, just the message you are trying to send with it. An image taken straight from a camera and printed on canvas can have the same impact as an HDR that took countless hours to finish and perfect. It’s all about the visual impact. In the case of this image, I didn’t want to convey that this place was in the middle of a city. You can also take this idea to places like the zoo. Go on a trip to your local zoo and make a point to photograph the animals in a way that doesn’t give away the fact they are in a zoo. If you get a shot of a leopard, try and frame it as if she were on the hunt in the middle of an African field. If your subject is a bird, look for a plain and natural looking background for a backdrop. One that doesn’t give away the feeling of a confined space. Nobody wants to see pictures of an Elephant next to a fence that says “Fort Worth Zoo” on it. Unless your audience is an animal rights group or something.



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Posted in Canon 1Ds Mark III, Dallas, HDR, Texas | 2 Comments »

Lifeguard Tower in Cancun | Mexico Travel Photography

Friday, June 25th, 2010

Here’s an image from the beach in Cancun, Mexico. I was there earlier this month shooting a wedding so I didn’t have to time to do a whole lot of exploring. I did manage to get some shots around the resort we were staying at however, the Gran Caribe Real. I had to do what I would consider some pretty extensive post processing to this image. I actually edited this one on a plane ride from Houston to Miami and I didn’t finish until right before we started our decent. So it probably took a good two hours of clean up. The original image was quite messy actually, and to the left you can see one of the RAW images straight from my camera. Sometimes you just have to work with what you’ve got. I waited a little while for the people to move but I quickly realized they weren’t going anywhere. There was also a lifeguard giving us the stink eye when we started to move the floaties and junk from the left side of the tower. We did however move them from the right side to the left at least. Before doing my normal processing of the image, I used the new “Content Aware Fill” option in Photoshop CS5. While I can’t see myself using this feature a great deal, and I think there is definitely a lot of perhaps over-hype about it, it does come in handy sometimes. It runs an algorithm that looks at the surround pixels of an area and fills in the space that you want to delete with pixels that match horizontally and vertically from the surround image. So I simply drew a line around the people with the lasso tool, hit Shift+Delete with Content Aware selected and clicked OK. CS5 deletes the people and fill in the blank space with the shoreline and water. This would noramlly take quite a bit longer because you would have to use a combination of clone stamps with different levels of softness and opacity, followed by various healing brushes, spot healing brushes, and a lot of time. So what used to take ten minutes, now takes ten seconds. And that is a big deal for work-flow! If the people kissing would have been closer to the guard tower or my lens, I may have left them in there, but because they were far out and took up so little real estate I saw them as a distraction that needed to be removed. You’ll see I also removed the floaties on the left side of the guard tower and the person poking up from the right side.

Canon 1Ds Mark III, Canon 24-70 f/2.8 , 24mm, f/13, 1/125th, ISO 125, 7 Exposure HDR



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Key West From Atop La Concha Hotel | Key West Travel Photography

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

Have you ever been to Key West? This was my first trip and I must say that it was not what I expected. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just not what I thought it was. When I pictured the Florida keys in my head, I thought of seclusion. I thought everything was super tropical with jungles, private beaches, palm trees with people sipping Coronas underneath, and so on. Key West is actually a really busy place. The main street in Key West, Duval Street (pictures below) is packed full of cars, tourists and bikes. I found a place on Google called the La Concha Hotel, and it said that every night they have a viewing party to watch the sunset from the highest point (their rooftop) in Key West. I figured this would be a good place to get a semi-birds eye view of the island. When I got up there the entire rooftop was standing room only! There was a bar up there and everyone was drinking, having a good time, talking and watching the sun go down. It was a lot of fun and I met quite a few really nice people up there. It seems like everywhere I go, the majority of the people I meet seem to be from Texas though? It was the same thing in Cancun last week.

La Concha Hotel | Key West Florida



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Posted in Canon 1Ds Mark III, Florida, Florida Keys, HDR | 1 Comment »