The Mansion

Recently I had the privilege of getting access to the Pittock Mansion in Portland OR for a photographer only shoot. Normally you can't even take pictures in there. I went as part of a class from NewSpace. Going in I decided that I would shoot primarily HDR images and process them for an antiqued look or B&W. I have included two of the "antique" processed images here, but I was able to take several in the limited time we had. They will be showing up on my website shortly in their own gallery. Personally I am having a hard time deciding which post processing I like best: antiqued, sepia or B&W.

The details: The HDR images shown here required 7-9 1stop exposures at f22 (some for several seconds). The RAW files were loaded into Lightroom 2.0 and then processed in Photomatrix Pro. After that some Photoshop CS3 warp correction (for the wide angle lens and perspective angle) and slight cropping. Finally, the antiquing and final adjustments were done in Lightroom.

So far I have shared short blog entries on my various shoots the past weeks. I stated that the purpose of my blog was to hopefully help others pursing photography in a more serious fashion. By "serious", I mean making an income. This is a tough time to be doing this, but pursue it I will. In line with this, I have spent the last 8 weeks taking a course through BetterPhoto.com with Jim Zuckerman focused on "How to Make Money with your Photography". One key thing is becoming apparent, we are talking about a multi-stream income approach to making a living. I know from interactions with other photographers like Tony Sweet, that generating multiple avenues of income is a way of life. This can include stock agency work, art fair sales, teaching, self publication sales, gallery sales, product sponsorship, etc. It appears finding the ones that work best for you as an individual photographer are the way to go.


In the near term I expect to focus on the calendar market (Jan to May is the season for submittals) and then the stock agency market (not the DJI or NASDAQ;-). I'll let you all know how that goes in the coming months.

Covered Bridges

I am delinquent in adding another entry - busy week. But before the week started my wife and I took a Saturday to visit some of the 50 covered bridges left of Oregon's previous 450. It was suppose to be a nice sunny day, but in general it was a very bleak gray day. Given it was winter with little color to start with I assumed that I would go B&W for the photos. It also seemed appropriate given the old bridges. My big goal was to get a nice HDR image of the inside of a bare wood interior. Well this last point was hard to get - most bridges were white on the inside. But as you will see I did achieve my goal at the last of the bridges. And as luck would have it the sun just broke through and added a nice golden glow. In the end I didn't go with straight B&W but with desaturated or selectively desaturated images. They were all done with HDR in order to get good detail and get some definition in the sky.

Exploring

I have been doing a lot of exploring around the local area the last few days. We have had a somewhat unusual spell of frosty foggy mornings. As I was scouting yesterday I came down into a little valley that was still mostly in the shade. The ground was still very frosty and I spotted a beautiful tree with nice color foilage behind it. With all the detail in the scene and given it was a bit late in the morning (the sky was getting too bright) I decided to shoot for HDR. I took five exposures (1 stop apart) ensuring that there was good detail in the shadows and good color in the sky. The first photo is the result. I went for a bit of surrealism again on this one. Just in case you think I only shoot trees, the second image is of a tractor I found during my explorations as well.