SLC Temple and Rock Canyon & Stream

Last month while in UT for the Wasatch Back relay race from Logan to Park City, I had a chance to take a variety of photos. The Salt Lake City temple, no doubt has been photographed hundreds of thousands of times, probably millions, but with a clear day and a decent camera I was determined to at least take some for myself that where print and display worthy, hopefully some of these will be on our walls in a short time. We also hiked Rock Canyon, something we never though of doing while living in UT, but coming back as a visitor, random things are entertaining and enjoyable, things that would have been boring as a student as some may think.

Sister's Family Photos

A few weeks ago my sister wanted me to take some family shots with their new baby, these are some of my favorites. I messed around with some photoshop processing on some, not too fancy it was very quick.

San Clemente Pier @ Night

Playing around with some night shots. I didn't have a tripod so I had to rest my camera on a picnic table and set the self timer to eliminate camera shake.





Dana Point Harbor

HDR

HDR - High Dynamic Range, is quite the option to get some great shadows and highlights merged into a nice looking photo. Do a google/flickr search and you shall find HDR images aplenty, some of which are completely bizarre and way overdone. Others are very amazing in the detail they can bring out. Ryan McGinnis runs an awesome photoblog that I have followed for a year or so, and he produces some fine work. Go to his blog and search HDR and you will find many great examples of his HDR art. He also published a tutorial on how to create them in Photoshop CS2, the link is here.
Example 1
Example 2
Great NYC HDR shots

Playing with more processing + Misc Designs

So here are three more shots of photos I've sent through photoshop, the two resulting images are far too overprocessed, but the original shot wasn't much to work with, taken out a car windo going 50 mph, and the first weekend with my camera= not knowing what I was doing. Anyway, just some options to play around with in the future with photoshop.





These Illustrations are two that I have created recently. The soldier is for a t-shirt for my sisters family reunion with her inlaws, the second car image will be uploaded to istock when I'm done with it.

Post Processing

I need to get a streamlined post processing work flow for my images. Currently I tweak them one by one, and that takes anywhere from 2 - 10 minutes per photo. The first image is the photo straight out of the camera, the second one is after it has made its way through my photoshop routine.


Wow those two shots look a lot alike. Blogger must alter the coloring when they are uploaded? The two files from Photoshop look drastically different. I'll see if these next two show any difference? First one is straight out of camera, second is after photoshoping some things.