GoldΩmega

This has been a while in the making, but the bulk of my photography and digital artwork can now be found at deviantART via the link below. This will likely be my last post to this journal, at least until I can no longer afford to subscribe to devart. Updates to my personal website are also in the works, but won't be completed anytime soon, I'm afraid.

goldomega.deviantart.com

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This evening, I would like to leave you with an image from Crawford Notch in northern New Hampshire. This photo was made from a tone-mapped HDR image. If you want to learn more about HDRI, please read through this Wikipedia article on the matter. My sincerest thanks for everyone's continued support. Who knows, perhaps I shall one day return...

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This evening, I would like to share with you a shot from an impromptu photo shoot. A few weeks ago, my sister approached me and asked if I would take some shots of her and her friend. This shot was a spontaneous pose that with proper use of flash and some creative editing, reminds me of something one might see in a magazine ad.

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This shot underwent exstensive editing, including softening, color and tonal correction.

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This evening, I would like to share with you an interesting coincidence. When returning home from seeing Snakes on a Plane, which is a great summer popcorn B-movie I might add, I saw this frog perched vertically on the side of my house. It was patiently waiting for insects attracted by our outdoor light. As such, the frog remained perfectly still during the thirty minutes I took to photograph it.

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Of all of the shots I took, this shot best showed the form and texture of the frog. I reduced the color temperature of the shot to produce these unusual yellows and greens and did boost the levels a bit.

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This evening, I would like to share with you an image from the North Conway Scenic Railroad. It was a damp day, which meant overcast skies and even, somber lighting.

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I enhanced the somber mood of this shot by giving the image a slight brown cast and desaturating the image overall. I also added a slight darkening gradient to the sky to give a more atmospheric quality to the image.

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This evening, I would like to share with you part of a lighting study conducted this past Tuesday night. When I left a friend's house that evening, I noticed the light had a breathtaking, mysterious quality to it. Rather than returning home for a good night's sleep, I sacrificed an hour or so to capture a few scenes I came across on my route home. This shot is one such scene.

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I adjusted the color temperature of the RAW camera data to produce the slightly cool colors in the background of this shot. I also shifted the leaves to a more yellow color for more separation with the background.

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This morning, I would like to share with you an image from an outing to the mountains this weekend. It had been raining heavily the past few days and everything had a sheen of water to it. Glancing down, I noticed this leaf with water droplets and pine needles set against the wet pavement. There were so many textures and such a subtle play of color, I couldn't resist.

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This was shot handheld using a Canon L-series telephoto with a slightly narrower aperture to keep everything in focus. The overall image is a bit too soft for my liking, but still very reasonable.

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It's been entirely too long since my last post to this journal. I've been spending most of my time building up my deviantArt gallery. Between that and other demands on my time, I've had to choose to neglect a few things in my life.

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This evening, I would like to share with you a rather abstract image from a nature shoot conducted with a friend of mine in which we drove to various locations and leisurely made some shots. Lately, the focus of my efforts has been on mastering the use of the camera: establishing proper exposure, DOF and blur as quickly and accurately as possible. Very soon, I'd like to slowly make the transition from a vicarious style of photography to a more hands-on, deliberate approach where I spend less time behind the lens and more on actively shaping the scene. I'm beginning to have confidence in my lighting and design capabilities, so I'd like to begin to introduce stronger human themes and concepts into my photography. I fully expect this to be a slow process with a wide learning curve, but at last I feel ready.

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The highlight elements of this shot were produced by using a strong telephoto lens at a very wide aperture. The highlights are reflected sunlight from water in the background that, when out of focus, bloom into larger shapes.

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I should apologize for the infrequency of my posts lately. I've been spending quite a bit of time at deviantArt building a gallery there. It's been a slow process; I have quite a lot of material to show, but I've been building the gallery gradually to build interest. It's been going very well.

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This evening, I'd like to share with you a simple, yet colorful piece of my life. Here is the doorknob to my room. I really enjoy the colors and textures in the door and thought it would make an interesting shot.

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It had recently occured to me that I've never set up a traditional still life, so today I tried one using produce and a tankard I found around the house. It was a project I did purely for the fun of it. My aim was to achieve a painterly look.

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The background and the bottom surface of the still life are textured art papers I found this weekend. I think they worked well for this project, but I'd love to find art paper like this in larger sizes. I'm also finding it difficult to store these papers in a way that keeps them from folding, curling or wrinkling. For the moment, I'm storing them between two pieces of foamcore I use for reflectors.

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This evening, I would like to share with you the result of one of my first ever photographic experiments in a studio-like setting. Last night, I broke out one of my quartz halogen studio hot lights and tried various shots of a small stormtrooper figure and this dragon statuette given to me a couple of years ago. I was intrigued by the details and almost organic translucent materials of the dragon.

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Having read several books on studio lighting and setups, I made a very simple set made up of a piece of black velveteen draped between a chair back and a folding TV tray. The velveteen was used as the backdrop. Throughout the shoot I used white paper and foamcore as reflectors and pieces of black posterboard as blockers. It became clear to me that I need to invest in some stands and clamps.

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This evening, I would like to share with you one of my first shots of 2006 and one I am rather proud of. While on our way back from shopping, my girlfriend and I came upon this scene on a farm along the way. I simply couldn't pass up the opportunity for a shot with this kind of potential, so I pulled over and took a series of shots over the course of about five minutes. The horse in this shot had its back facing me for most of the time I was there, but I was lucky in the end as it gave me this great broadside view.

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I did some significant color shifting and boosting to this shot to get the color scheme where I wanted it. I wanted the scene to be a peaceful, early morning shot, so I made the colors cooler and more intense, but not unnaturally so. My aim was to romanticize the scene without making it appear too processed or unnatural.

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Today, I would like to share with you something rather abstract, but wholly appropriate given the day. This is an experimental shot I made of our family's christmas tree. I would like to wish everyone the happiest of holidays and my own personal thanks for your interest in my photography and digital art.

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This shot was made by zooming the camera in over a six second exposure. I left the camera still for the first two seconds in order to make the lights really bright in their original positions in frame. To make the highlights bigger, I left the camera out of focus slightly.

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This evening, I would like to share with you an image from one of the most peaceful days I've enjoyed this year: a man and his son simply enjoying the breaking waves at Sohier Park in York Beach, Maine.

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This shot stayed in my archives for awhile before I saw some potential. The water in the background was overexposed, but still within the range of tones that made it manageable to retouch. I wish the depth of field in this image was deeper, but the time I had for shooting this was very short lived.

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This was a broken swing shot at Stair Falls. I really like the contrast between the wood, the metal and the softened greenery in this scene. Thanks to sxe_yeti_sxe for his editing suggestions.

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This one needed quite a bit of work. In the original, the background was so textured that it became the subject of the photo. I softenend the background with lens blur, evened the tonal values and desaturated the greens slightly. I also applied a softening effect to the image overall.

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This evening I would like to share with you an image from a Yankee Swap we hosted this past weekend. I would almost classify this image as a snapshot. It was taken very spontaneously, but there was some preplanning done on my part to get this composition the way I wanted. This scene was a humorous exchange between my sister and her boyfriend that took place before the swap started. I don't remember what was so funny at the time: I was too busy setting up the shot.

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The main purpose of this shot was to capture the festive display by our bay window. This shot was actually two separate shots that were assembled together into a single panorama. I had done assemblies like this for Stonefield Studio for wedding projects, but I wanted to attempt to set up one of my own. I was using a very wide angle lens, so there was significant distortion in the shots that I did my best to correct. This is evidenced most clearly by the ceiling at center left. I'm very pleased with the reactions of everyone in this shot and with the quality of the light in the scene.

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Today, I would like to share with you an image from the 2004 Rochester Fair, which is one of many country fairs that take place in New Hampshire every autumn. This fellow was playing his accordion at one of the several enterances to the fairgrounds. He was so enveloped in his own music, it made for a very natural shot.

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I sharpened the textures in the background somewhat and applied a subtle soft focus effect across the entire image. I also darkened the reds slightly to make them less intense.

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This evening, I would like to share with you an image from the city where I live. I live in a fairly typical New Hampshire town: typically New England weather, humid summers and very cold winters, a mix of new and old architecture... all things that make New England a beautiful and sometimes unforgiving place to live. This scene demonstrates the effects of these conditions.

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This was shot in RAW format and was adjusted for contrast, sharpness and white balance. The only other postprocessing was to desaturate the reflected pink in the snow.

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This evening, I would like to share with you an image that demonstrates the benefit of spotting the potential of a scene. I first saw this scene about a year ago on my way to one of my clients. Every time I've passed by, the lighting conditions weren't anything special. Today, while running errands, it began to snow pretty heavily. Since I had some extra time and I was out already, I decided to ride to this place to see how the snow played upon the scene. This is the result.

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I converted this shot from color to monochrome and increased the contrast a bit. I sepia toned the image using a four color gradient map.

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This evening, I would like to share with you the first of what I hope becomes a lengthy and insteresting photo series entitled Stump Art. Usually when I encounter a stump, it is a plain object: an empty husk left behind from the harvest of man. Lately, however, when I encounter stumps in a selective cutting area where other trees have been left to grow, I encounter something wholly different. Here, the stumps are as blank canvases to which nature applies its brushstroke. This is one such canvas.

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I increased the contrast and darkened the background slightly to make the features of the stump more prominent. I also sharpened parts of the image and applied a slight warming effect overall.

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This evening, I would like to share with you an image from back in February. This was taken at an ice fishing derby at Alton Bay, NH. This was when I first purchased my camera, so I was taking pictures of everything in hopes of learning the ins and outs of my camera. My thanks to crabbyolbastard for identifying the dog in this shot as a Great Pyrenees.

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This image has been an editing nightmare. Whenever I attempted to save my work, my computer would consistently crash, losing all of the work I had done up until that point. The changes I made were many. I first made the image black & white, since the color was not a strong feature of the shot. I tinted the image sepia slightly to give the image a richer look. I also darkened and blurred the background to make it less distracting and did some dodging on both figures. An older shot, but one I've come to like.

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