Wedding Decoration: Rose in a Jar

This was my favorite edited version of a photograph of a decoration at a wedding that I recently attended. The rose in the jar was beautiful, a very big rose (as you can see in the photo). The angle makes for quite an interesting photograph, with the shoe dangling over the rose at the top right corner of the scene.

Sunset Under the Bridge

This is a sunset view from underneath the Mackinac Bridge, in HDR, processed in Photomatix and cropped and otherwise edited in AfterShot Pro. I was going to make a joke about trolls (under the bridge) but decided against it. Thanks for stopping by!

Lake Stones and a Rorschach Test

While visiting a lakeside park in Michigan, I took pictures of stones. In the Photomatix processing, I liked the effect that one of the "surreal" filters had in bringing out the colors in the stones. Afterward, I found that looking at the pictures of the stones is like looking at a Rorschach; I see one stone that has two creepy little faces in it.

Too Much Light on the Seagull's Neck

My original image on this seagull was too bright, with the bird mostly washed out in the image. I was shooting at 0 exposure and probably should have notched it down in the full sunlight (especially since I was shooting something white.) I liked the ripple effect in the water and wanted to do something to salvage the image, so...

This was my first attempt running through Photomatix and then taken over to Aftershot Pro for some crops and edits. The bird has mostly been brought back, but there were a few hot spots that I could not remove. (Someone with more experience/patience than I probably would have been able to do so.)

Then I had another idea:

This won't work for everybody, but I thought: What if I simply crop out the offending portions of the image? I used the longest crop setting from AfterShot on the Photomatix image, tilted the photo, and this is what I came up with. Again, probably not for everybody, but I thought that it did nicely in bringing out the feathers and the ripples/color in the water that I enjoyed. Thanks for stopping by!

Red and White Striped Umbrellas over the Yellow Chairs

I liked the vibrancy of the reds and the yellows in this scene, or the way that they combined together. For some reason, It makes me think... lemonade.

Pictures of Orion at the Lunar Eclipse

While taking pictures of the lunar eclipse yesterday morning, I learned a few lessons. I was basically guessing, running through the settings dial, hoping to find a something in which I could get a half-way decent picture of the moon. I'm not quite sure that a 24mm lens is the best choice for shooting these photos, as such a lens leaves you trying to focus in on a small dot in your frame (one that mostly appears as a ball of light...). The image above is cropped from the original, which was shot at ISO-100, F-stop f//1.8, 1 sec. (with a remote control). It's not the best that I had hoped for but was the best that I made.

When I grew frustrated trying to get a proper moon shot, I turned instead to shooting the constellation Orion. I think that the best shot I came up with was the following:

F-stop: f/1.8, ISO-800, Exposure time: 19 sec.

Compare that photo with the one that I had taken immediately prior, where (again, using my remote control,) the only difference in settings was that the exposure time came out to 8 seconds:

At first blush, this final picture might seem to be the better picture, as I like how dark space appears. However, what I liked better about the 19 second image was the fact that you could see so many more; though the overall image is brighter, I like how "full" the 19 second image appears to be.

Mackinac Island Horses

Mackinac Island is home to quite a few horses, at least during the non-winter months of the year. In today's picture, you see a few of the carriage-pulling horses that live on Mackinac Island.