Havin' some fun

Man, this Lightroom is addictive! These are some images I made outside of my work the other morning. As they say, the best camera is the one you have with you, and my trusty G9 keeps rockin'.

Is it Spring?

Obviously I'm not the only one (or thing) confused about the weather around here. During my little photowalk around the neighborhood today I noticed that some of the flowers were a bit uncertain about the season. It felt like Spring, it looked like Spring, heck, it even smelled like Spring. Anyway, here's some of the sights of Southern California Spring...I mean Winter.




If things seem a bit different, they are. I'm trying a workflow on my new laptop with (wait for it) Lightroom. Yes, all of these images were processed, edited, exported and uploaded on and from my laptop. This thing is sssssmokin'!

2 different takes

It was an absolutely spectacular day here yesterday. Temps in the mid 70's and clear blue skies. I've been wanting to photograph this tree across the street from my house for the last week or so, and today seemed like the perfect day. This tree has brilliant white blooms and they looked awesome against the sky. The first image is that tree with a simple black and white conversion to make the details pop. The second image is a Mulberry tree I believe, and the limbs on that are insane. I thought a somewhat graphic presentation of those silhouetted with the sun peeking through worked well.

Walkin' on sunshine

My super awesomely awesome wife surprised me with an early Valentine's, Father's, Arbor, Saint Patrick's and President's Day present yesterday. Yessir, she got me a MacBook. I have an iBook that has served me well the past 4 or 5 years, but it was really starting to chug along. The new one is smokin' fast and it gives me about four times the hard drive space as my old one. Anyway, all in all a pretty fantastic day.

I thought it would be fun to take some pictures of the unboxing for your viewing pleasure. Please to enjoy.

Luminosity

I've taken many pictures of these and I finally got one that worked for me. On a related note, staring up at the ceiling can make you really dizzy.

Looking East

I went to one of my favorite places today to check out the sunset. It's been raining a fair bit here lately and the clouds have been awesome. The sunset turned out to be relatively unexciting, but there were a few moments of sublime color. And as they say, even a bad evening spent watching a sunset is better than a good day in the office. Or something like that. (To see a larger version, click here)

Golden glow

Tutorial time!

My friend Darcy asked if I could do a guest post on her blog about Photoshop. I had fun with my last tutorial so I said sure. This is the same Darcy that did my blog makeover last year and she's wicked talented. Click here to check out her blog and my Photoshop tutorial.

I Heart Faces #2

Contest result

Thanks to everyone for the encouraging comments about my I Heart Faces entry. The winner was announced today and.... it wasn't me. Just like in high school, where I was salutatorian, I came in second. If you want to check out the top five finishers, click here. Congrats to Skeller who came in fourth with a very cool shot of her son. This was a fun contest and since they have a new one every week, I'm sure I'll be entering another one. I would encourage any of you who enjoy taking photos to enter a contest. Get your work out there and also see what others are doing.

I Heart Faces

This is my submission for the I Heart Faces weekly photo contest. Check out their blog.

Room for thinking

Palm tree sky

Check out my workflow

Over at Jason D. Moore's photo blog he has posted a tutorial that I wrote about processing one of my images. Go check it out and then leave me a comment telling me what you thought. Click here to go to the post.

Reflections of Christmas

Me and my little man having fun around the purple tree.

Forbidden fruit

My wife got her (ahem) Twilight perfume in the mail today and I thought the bottle looked pretty cool. I'm always looking to improve my "studio lighting" and small flash skills so I thought that I'd have a go at making an image. After much trial and error, and some fun in post production, this is what I had in mind.

Festive kitty

I decided to commit to taking a picture each day for the next year. I won't be posting every day (although I hope to make that more frequent) but I do want to pick up my camera every day and make an image. Having decided that, I picked up my camera tonight and searched around the house for something to shoot. Fortunately one of my big fluffy kitties (Lupin) was perched on the couch with the purple Christmas tree in the background. And so begins the grand experiment.