The Bridge

For this week's post I am featuring one of three photographs I did of a bridge located in the area where I grew up. This bridge was part of a railroad line now turned rail trail and is over 100 years old. Whenever I was near it growing up it always have spooked me a bit because of its towering size and the heaviness it seemed to be just barely holding up. Now that I am older I appreciate the beauty and marvel in how man can make such a structure that lasts without repair for over a century.

More Noir

Blast from the past. These two pics I actually took in college and reworked for your viewing pleasure. Let me know which ones you like the best.

Crimmal Intent

For this weeks photo blog I did some pictures with the intent of entering them in a Gallery Contest "Murder, Mayhem, & Missing Masterpieces". http://lcaaonline.org/opportunities.html
The catergory I am thinking of entering is crime and punishment. To be honest though since the web site is not 100% clear on what type of art you can enter I need to call and double check that I can enter photography. But I thought the theme was fun so if not no biggy. Now even though I am only allowed to enter one piece per category I decided to make a couple of different photos with the intent of picking the best one of the bunch when I was done. So far I have two done. The first was planned the second was not ;)

For this one I had Sin City and the old Dick Tracy comic in mind for the style and color theme. One of my sisters modeled for me and we shot this on location at her house.

Now this next photo happened during the test shots for the Main image. It makes me giggle but the look on this cat's face means business. I like to think he is a cat detective that just arrived on the scene of the crime. Cue in some CSI music.

As I get more images for this contest I will upload them and maybe have a little voting poll going on to see which one you all like the best :)

Dreams and ships

For this week's photo image I was partially inspired by http://sevenblueseas.blogspot.com/ and her very lovely group of pirates. But the direction I wanted to go with this image was something definitely more dark and creepy to fit in more with the Halloween season which I love.

This image is a part of my Dreamscape series. All the photos in this series are made using multiple images, all which are mine, manipulate and combined together to create a new surreal like scene that becomes my best interpretation of what a paused dream might look like.
A lot of the photos I use for the Dreamscape series are taken when I travel. Many times when I am out and about on vacation I take of photo of something that speaks to the creative side of me and reminds me of a part of my childhood. After I get home and go through what all I had captured I will tag photos that have the right elements for future projects. For this image I got a lot of my elements from a beach trip last summer in North Carolina. A dolphin tour provided the ships and a stormy day the wonderful cloud cover. The water for the ocean was a combination of the waters of the Florida Keys, North Carolina and Niagara Falls.
I hope you enjoy this week's image "Shipwrecked"
To few other images of my Dreamscape series please go to http://picasaweb.google.com/rla.onlinephotos


  

Light Painting 101

Yea new post! I decided to aim for posting every Friday or Saturday...hopefully. Coming up with new things each week is going to be a challenge so wish me luck :)

Light Painting definition via Wikipedia: Light painting, also known as light drawing or light graffiti is a photographic technique in which exposures are made usually at night or in a darkened room by moving a hand-held light source or by moving the camera. In many cases the light source itself does not have to appear in the image. The term light painting also encompasses images lit from outside the frame with hand-held light sources.

 

Light painting is fairly easy once you get the hang of how things work, but also fairly tricky once your ideas get bigger. An example of an "easier" one is shown above. Random but I love doing reflections in commercial photography and I thought it would look nice in this light painting shot as well.

My light source was of all things a Star Trek pen light. What I liked about this light source was the green color and the size of the beam. Size is important depending on what you are photographing. For something like an ipod nano I wanted a smaller beam. Something like a normal flash light would be too big and most likely just blow out (overexpose) the ipod. Think about the size of what you are photographing while hunting for a light source.

As far as what you can and can't use for light painting my motto is if it makes light use it. It is all about experimentation. I have use light sabers, flash lights and christmas lights to just name a few.
One very important thing to have, besides some sort of light source, is a tripod. You must! must! have one or have the inhuman capability of turning into a nonmoving rock while holding your camera. To do light painting properly you will be doing long exposures. For example the ipod photo was a 30 second exposure. Too long to hold the camera without ending up with blurry images.
To set up your shot the easiest way I found was to start with the lights on. Now this is easy to do in a studio setting or anywhere indoors that has a light switch. Not so much outside at night. If you are doing an outside shot I suggest you go to your location during the day to check things out. That way you are not stumbling around things you didn't know were there now that it is night time and dark out.
Now how to get those fun squiggly lines :) Basically all you need to do is to point your light at the camera. The hard part is getting the right exposure for your light. Too long of an exposure and your light gets blown out. Too short and your camera might not pick up any light at all. Also important is the speed that you move your light. The most trouble I have is in moving my light too fast so the camera doesn't have the chance to pick it up.
And the number most important thing is to have patience! Getting the right effect takes time and much experimentaion. My first couple of times took me around five hours before I was happy with the result. The second most important thing is to have fun! It is a really cool technique and you can do a lot with it!
Some of my results below :)

Thanks for reading!