Indian Engagement Party

What a fabulous experience!  Photographing an Indian engagement celebration spread over two days.  Words almost fail me, but not quite.  Elegant, colorful, exotic, beautiful, and enchanting come to mind. 

I love the richness and beauty of Indian culture and rituals.  I love the acceptance and friendliness of everyone I met.  As always, I consider it a great honor to be asked to photograph such an event.  My clients are clients, but I also consider them to be friends.

 

I felt awash in a swirl of color and had a sense of oneness with my surroundings.  The opening and closing images of this post are my attempt to convey those feelings.

Click on the following link to see more images.

More event photos 

Dock Dogs

Lee and I enjoy going to our local county fair, mostly to see the Dock Dogs.  This is an event where dogs dive into water to catch or grab a toy thrown by their owners.

I love to watch them fly through the air, and they really get into it.

As do their owners.

Everyone has a great time.

This little guy, who is in the opening photo of this post, was diagnosed with terminal cancer last year and has only a few weeks left.  Nobody had a better time at the event.

You can see more photos at the following link:
www.bpfa.biz/clientgalleries/dockdogs13

Sixth Grade Student Photos

 

I recently made brief presentations on photography to two of Mary Crabtree's sixth grade classes at Buckeye Intermediate School.  Mary had asked me to help her students create images from a bug's eye view to complete a school project they had been working on for some time.  After the presentations on photo basics including composition and lighting, Mary took her students outside using iPads as cameras and sent me the results for follow-up critique sessions. 

Wow!  The results are fabulous.  Some of my favorites are posted here. 

Click on the following link to see all of the images I received.   

http://www.bpfa.biz/clientgalleries/buckeye 

Kudos to Mary and her students.

Backlighting

I recently attended a training session by David Guy Maynard on using speed lights for location portraiture.  Fascinating topic!  He brought along a couple of professional models that we photographed after his presentation.

The problem was that twenty or so of us were standing side-by-side using our camera-mounted lights.  

How boring.  So I decided to crank up my ISO, turn down my flash, and move to the side so I could use his modeling light to backlight the subject.  Much better!

 Needless to say, I prefer these shots. Backlighting certainly makes for more interesting images.

Photoshop Taketh, Photoshop Giveth Back

I was new to digital photography and Photoshop when I took this picture on a misty morning.  I loved it!  Couldn't wait to get home and play with it in Photoshop.  Knowing computers, I backed it up and then backed it up again.

Over the next several months I continued playing with it until I finally decided to make a print.  It was horrible!  Then I discovered I had accidentally "dumbed" it down to a very small file size, resulting in severe posterization.  No problem, I had backups.  Wrong.  I had overwritten my backups with the new, downsized file.

I now know what I did wrong; original in JPEG rather than RAW, not saving original file in a safe place, and not understanding Photoshop.  Over the years I have mourned the loss of this image but have kept it with the hope that someday I would figure out a way to salvage it.  

Voila!  The other day I came across the image and thought of the technique that radically alters colors.  The result lacks the mystique of the original but certainly is an interesting image.  Posterization is reduced and its effects minimized by color and texture.  Photoshop has truly given back what it took away years ago.

Library Opening Reception

My photographs are now on permanent display in the Brunswick library, 3649 Center Road, Brunswick, Ohio.  They are located on the back wall of the computer room in the adult section.  The opening reception was held on March 2nd and I want to thank everyone who attended and Friends of the Brunswick Library.

Angela Huston wrote a very nice article about it in MedinaCountyLife.com and her husband, Russ, took the photographs.  Thanks to them also.

 MedinaCountyLife

The following link shows larger images.  The first five are photographs in the collection.

Photos in Collection 

Warping

I recently met Nancy, a photographer friend, at a meeting where we began talking about different aspects of photography, including the use of fisheye lenses.  When I told her I had straightened such a photo, she asked how and I told her I would post the answer on my blog.  The (almost) finished image is above.

 I may crop it before printing so it looks something like this.

This is my original.  I took it with a ProOptic 8mm Fish-Eye CS lens mounted on a Nikon D200 modified for infrared light.  The lens costs $280 at Adorama.com and I enjoy using it.

 

To straighten the lines I simply added a guide line and then applied a series of warp adjustments (Edit/Transform/Warp) to a duplicate layer.  You can limit the area of the image impacted by the warp by making a selection first.  I then removed lens flair, did some burning and dodging, and added some structure and a little color to get my final image.

Using warp adjustments can be a little tedious, but the results are usually worth the effort.  I always enjoy it when another photographer looks at one of my images and is not sure how it was done.