Griffith Observatory - HDR

I started doing HDR images about a year ago and it definitely takes patience and skill to get the look I have in mind. I don't always like the crazy surreal look but other times I do. I bracket to get 3 images of different exposures and use a program called PhotoMatix to merge them into an HDR image. Photoshop also can do this but I find PhotoMatix works better for me. I then bring them into Photoshop for a few more minor adjustments to get it just right. 

 

 

San Juan Capistrano - Natural Framing

Back in June a friend of mine was visiting from Sweden. We took her over to San Juan Capistrano for the day. Most of that was spent at the mission where I took these photos. It was a nice place with a lot of history.

Here I used already existing archways and doorways to frame the shots. They were post-processed in PhotoMatix (HDR) and Photoshop. I don't always like the extremely surreal look of HDR images so I didn't go too overboard with these.

 

 

 

The Stitt Family Photos

I had the pleasure of photographing this family a few weeks ago. For the location I chose a local park. Parks are great locations in my opinion because of the natural setting and ease of access. This was shot at midday with high sun. To deal with this 'problem' I tried to stick with areas of the park that were shaded and used fill flash to prevent harsh shadows on their faces. I also was sure to brush up on my 3 person poses beforehand.

 

 

 

Using Selective Color

I don't use this technique often because I think it can be overdone and look rather tacky but occasionally I'll see an image where I think it will work. I probably do it the hard way in photoshop...duplicating the image, making it black and white (using a gradient map or monochrome on the channel mixer), placing it on top of the color version and just erasing through to the background (the color version).

 

 

Group Shots at the Pumpkin Factory - Corona, CA

Group shots at this event were not particularly easy because there was very little room to work with. We had to squeeze everyone onto a hay bale. An itchy hay bale. Talk about a practice in posing!

 

 

Pumpkin Factory 2009 - Corona, CA

These are some of my favorites from the job we did at The Pumpkin Factory here in Corona, CA. We were there every weekend in October. I've done events before but this was by far one of the funnest. The kids were so excited about the different things going on around them!