On The Hunt

Nope, I didn’t see a single one.  Elk, that is.  I didn’t have a tag, but went along for the fun with three of my brothers and several friends.  It was a blast!  I could have done without the sore feet and lack of shower and bathroom, but It was a great opportunity to practice photography.  Even though I didn’t see any elk, I did see several deer, a fox, birds, bugs, trees, stars, sunrises, and sunsets.  I had time to practice painting with light, HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, panoramas, and astrophotography.  I have a ton of pictures to post, but I’ll have to break it up into several posts.  Here are some pictures of the main reasons I went.  My brothers, friends, hunting, and wildlife.

I took this one on a tripod with my fancy dancy wireless remote hidden in my pocket.  (Doug, me, Tommy, Ryan)

We spent a lot of our time glassing the hills (looking through binoculars) for any signs of elk.  I like this panorama that I stitched together of Doug and Tom doing just that.  You can click on this one to see it in a larger format with more detail.

Here are some of my other favorite pictures of us “glassing the hills.” (Eric, Miguel, and Tom)

Hunting pictures wouldn’t be complete without the weapons…

and some wildlife…

I’ve still got plenty more to go.  Next post.

Baptism Dress

Briesa is getting baptized this Saturday.  Congratulations Briesa!  What a big step for her.  To add to the occasion, her Mom made her a new dress.  Wendy has made dresses for each of her daughters’ baptisms.  What a great tradition.  I think Wendy did a great job with the dress too.  Wendy asked me if I’d take some pictures to help remember the occasion.  Thanks Wendy!  Here is some of what I came up with.

f/2.8   1/1250   ISO 100
Canon EOS 7D with ‘EF 50mm f/1.8 II’

f/2.8   1/400   ISO 100
Canon EOS 7D with ‘EF 50mm f/1.8 II’

f/4.5   1/500   ISO 125
Canon EOS 7D with ‘EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS’ @ 37mm

f/4.5   1/500   ISO 200
Canon EOS 7D with ‘EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS’ @ 34mm (Cropped)

f/2.8   1/400   ISO 100
Canon EOS 7D with ‘EF 50mm f/1.8 II’

Thanks again Briesa.  Good luck with your baptism.

Spring Chickens in the Fall

We have some new arrivals at our house?  Christi and I were talking yesterday about how cute baby chicks are.  We both agreed that they are still cute when the grow up too.  Somehow they don’t lose as much of their “smile factor” as they grow up compared to other animals.  We still get a big kick out of it every time we see one of our chickens running across the yard.  Something about the way that chickens and ducks walk and run is just plain amusing, and seeing them out in our yard wandering around is grounding.  Hopefully we can hold on to these ones a bit longer than the last clutch.

f/1.8   1/60   ISO 160
Canon EOS 7D with ‘EF 50mm f/1.8 II’

f/1.8   1/60   ISO 125
Canon EOS 7D with ‘EF 50mm f/1.8 II’

f/1.8   1/60   ISO 100
Canon EOS 7D with ‘EF 50mm f/1.8 II’

Just a quick note on my gear.  As I’ve been editing portraits, I’ve been more up close with the colors and noise in my pictures.  I’m using a Canon 7D and I’ve noticed that noise started to creep in noticeably even at ISO 400.  Get over ISO 800 and it becomes almost unbearable for me when I’m working up close on skin and eyes.  I originally bought the 7D liking the 1.6x multiply (bigger zoom) of the APS-C frame because I’m using it for wildlife photography too.  But since I’m doing more portraiture, I think my next investment will be the full frame sensored Canon 5D Mark III (When it comes out) instead of faster glass.  From what I’ve heard, you get much better color saturation and less noise at higher ISOs than with the smaller sensors.  Lucky for me, I have time since it will take me a while to save up for the new camera anyways.  For now I’ll continue learning to use what I have.

The Niu Family

Saturday I got together with the Niu family to do their family portraits.  What a great family.  We met them first at BYU and have stayed great friends ever since.  What a great family to photograph too.  Debbie does photography and I could tell that her kids were used to posing for pictures.  It was great!  It was kind of a drive by shooting because we ran out of day light and had to zip over to the Potato Barn to get these pictures instead of downtown Gilbert as we originally planned.  Debbie had some great ideas and made it very easy for me.  Here are some of my favorites:

They put Michael in between Chris and Debbie as a joke since he is taller than his Mom now.  Boy our kids are going up fast!

I couldn’t write this without a highlight on their best little poser, Cambria.  What a cutie!  She had everyone laughing and smiling with her lively faces.

Key lesson learned… allow enough time… again.

Thanks Niu Family!

Wrapping up the Cook Family Photos

Whew!  Thanks again to the Cook family for giving me their time and letting me practice on their familiy.  It’s been a week, and I finally just blew through it and finished the edits on the Cook family photos.  We ended up with some good ones.  I’ve already got a Niu family to start working on… :)  Yep, it is the Niu family’s portraits.  Here are some of my favorites of the Cook Family. 

I learned a lot about my own work flow with this shoot.  First of all, I tried to edit and treat way too many pictures.  I really should have paired it all down to a manageable amount first rather than trying to rip through them all.  I ended up with 100+ edits and 5 different colors treatments.  

I wanted to save each picture in several different color treatment, but savings each picture in each color was taking forever.  I finally figured out that in Lightroom I could select 100 pictures and create a virtual copy.  Then it would already have the new 100 copies selected and I could use Auto-Synch to apply a preset to all the 100 new copies just created.  Soooo much easier than trying to do one at a time.   Bada boom, bada bing.  Watch out though when leaving Auto-Synch on and having 100 photos selected.  I learned the hard way not to remove the selection and ended up changing many pictures in ways I didn’t want too.  Thank good ness for Ctrl-Z (undo).  I really need to sit down for Photoshop session with Leah and see her techniques and work flow again now that I’m getting some practice under my belt.

I’ve also been using my collections a bit more to try and organize edits versus originals, color treatments, etc.  I’m not sure if I’ll stick with this flow or go with using flags, stars, and colors to distinguish them.  Time will tell. 

In Photoshop I learned more about cloning.  I learned to save a tone of time in masking off areas using the quick selection tool.  This made it much easier to clone grass right up to them rather than sitting and blending all the edges by hand.  Another big learning on cloning was in using the pattern stamp and alternating the rotation, scale, etc. of what I’m cloning to make it more real and help eliminate repeat patterns. 

One last thought.  I need to learn to get the right amount of smile.  It’s easy to invoke a big grin, but sometimes I loose the eyes when the smile is too big.  I’ve been practicing closing eyes and then having them pop them open before I take the picture.  I still haven’t totally figured it all out, but I’m sure I’ll get there.