Renaissance Festival 2011, #6

Another photo from the Renaissance Festival in October. Please click on the image for a larger view. Honestly, when I took this photo I didn't realize what a spectacle the eyes were ... purple/blue irises and long black feather eyelashes. When you're in a hurry to get a shot and thinking more about your camera and light, sometimes it's those things that are lost ... until I looked closer at these files. 1/125 sec at f/3.5, light from a Photoflex softbox from camera left; postprocessed in Nik Color Efex Pro 4.

Renaissance Festival 2011, #5

Photo above is from the Texas Renaissance Festival a couple of weeks ago. I've been reading a lot recently about color grading and gradient mapping colors, so this is color shifted a bit for artistic effect ... kind of towards vintage tones; also vignetted with a nice new technique from Calvin Hollywood.

Kacey High Key

After Doug's comment below, I decided to give this image a square crop. Also made it black and white -- almost high key. There are literally so many different directions you can take images. It's really a matter of personal taste. I guess since I've been using Color Efex so much recently, I'm thinking more color than black and white these days.

Kacey

Portrait of Kacey taken several weeks ago at Challenger 7 Park in Clear Lake. The usual processing: shallow depth of field, backlight, Nik Color Efex 4. Cheated the sync a little here: f/5 at 1/320 sec with light from a small softbox from camera left ... got a little vignette at the bottom, but in the spirit of David Ziser I think it doesn't hurt the image, in fact maybe provides a nice dark base.

Influences

There are times as a photographer and artist work flows fast and furiously and other times painfully slow...peaks and valleys, I guess. It's inevitable. I have definitely been inspired recently and most of that is because of a couple of big influences: 1) the recent upgrade to Nik Color Efex Pro 4, which is truly one of the most amazing photo processing plug-ins out there. There are times when you wonder if an upgrade is really worth it. But hands down, version 4 is revolutionary. It puts so much power in one package, it's really amazing; 2) I've also been watching a lot of tutorials on retouching by the German photographer and artist, Calvin Hollywood. If you can make it past the German accent, he's doing some of the most innovative photo retouching out there. Sometimes you just have to sit and watch a video a few times and let it sink in ... like inverting a layer, converting it to a smart object, putting it in vivid light blend mode, then running a high pass filter on it to soften skin .... WHAT? ... but it works. Truly ground-breaking; 3) I've also been following the work of Boulder, Colorado photogapher Charles Hildreth lately. Not sure where I saw his stuff first, but I like his style a lot -- alt process, color shifted, backlit, shallow depth of field ... all things I've been tinkering with lately mainly because I've seen how it can be done well by Hildreth.
The image above was taken 10 months ago. It was basically an out-take from a photo shoot with Sarah in January. She picked up Larry Patrick's camera and I took a few photos. Now, 10 months later, I start playing -- color shifting and adding an illustrative look with Color Efex, skin smoothing and adding definition ala Calvin Hollywood, and desaturating like Hildreth. Influences.

Red Chair

Taken in the Garden District of New Orleans on a hot August afternoon. Three exposures blended together with Nik HDR Efex, then finished with Nik Color Efex 4.

Sedona

I was looking through some old files this morning and came across some images from Sedona, Arizona taken in May. We were there several days, and on the last morning (as we were leaving) some nice clouds moved into the area. I stopped at a few road-side parks and took some shots as we headed out of town. Three bracketed images merged together with Nik HDR Efex, finished off with a few adjustments with Nik Color Efex 4.

Renaissance Festival 2011, #4

Motion blur abstract -- taken 10-29-11 at the Texas Renaissance Festival. 1/30 sec at f/11.

Renaissance Festival 2011, #3

Bella Florita, Gypsy Dance Theater -- Saturday's Texas Renaissance Festival.

Renaissance Festival 2011, #2

Tsura, Gypsy Dance Theater -- Saturday's Texas Renaissance Festival.