Canon 7D, Canon 24-105 ƒ/4L IS lens, HDR image, ƒ/16 at ISO 100

This is an image I took a few weeks ago when out photographing with my friend dav.d. We went out with the intention of doing light painting, but got there with enough time to get some HDR of the awesome storm clouds rolling in. This image is a reminder that pretty, crisp, clean, sunny days don’t always make the best images … extreme weather and crazy clouds can sometimes make the landscape photo even better.

The build-out on my studio space has officially started. This is a quick timelapse of the framing for my office/storage space (the area on the other side of the framing to the left) and some other offices in the room being built. My actual studio is behind the door by the white wall towards the back of the room … it will be under construction starting next week and I should be in it mid-May.

BTW, if you didn’t notice already my time-lapse got hijacked by a couple of crazy people. I think they made it entertaining, since there wasn’t a whole lot going on in the background. :)

I plan on doing more timelapses of the studio and will also be posting photos of the space as things progress, so stay tuned!

Here’s another image from the SLC Library iStock photo shoot. It’s 100% natural light, and I took a quick photo w/ my iphone to show the scene a little bit better. There are windows directly to the left that were flooding the area with light … this type of lighting is what I try to achieve when creating stock images with strobes. Fortunately for me I’ll soon have a studio with wall-to-wall windows so I’ll have this same light at my disposal whenever I want. :)

Canon 7D, Canon 24-105 ƒ/4L IS lens, HDR (1/200, 1/50, 1/13 sec) at f/11, ISO 100

I posted this same image on my blog last week after doing a quick edit on it in Lightroom and Silver Efex Pro (here’s a link to that image). My laptop won’t really calibrate too well so the original edit it didn’t look like I wanted it to, and I also shot it to make it into an HDR. So last night I sat down and re-edited the image. I did “over process” it a little bit, but I wanted it to be bold and dramatic. I even like the effect of the haloing over the top of the Three Gossips … normally that’s a huge “no-no” for me, but something about it that just works for this scene.

The processing I used was basic white-balance adjustments in Lightroom, then I brought the three images into Photomatix Pro to for HDR. After that I used Silver Efex Pro to add a nice B&W effect.

Canon 7D, Canon 50mm ƒ/1.8, 1/160 sec at ƒ/1.8, ISO 100

Last week some friends and fellow iStock contributors Renee Lee and Todd Keith set up an iStock photo-shoot at the Salt Lake City Library. I’ve always wanted to do a stock shoot in a library and so this was a perfect opportunity to give it a try … I really like what I came home with and think I got some good stuff. This photo is one of my favorites … the library has a full wall of windows on one side of the building and it was a great opportunity to use the natural light coming in. This image, along with a lot of the images I got that day, is 100% natural light (no strobes, or even any reflectors in this shot).

I’m going to be moving into a new studio in about a week (hopefully this weekend … fingers crossed!) and one of the things I love about it is that the entire front wall of the studio space is made up of windows so I’ll have natural light at my disposal inside my studio whenever I want … or, at least as long as the sun is up. It’s also North-facing which is going to give me some absolutely gorgeous light for portraits and also the food images I create.

Keep checking back here for more info and photos on my new studio (which I do plan to rent out to local photographers once it’s completed). They’re doing construction work on it this week and I’ll be installing flooring this weekend, assuming everything goes according to schedule. :)

Canon 7D, Lensbaby Composer, Double-Glass Optic, 1/60 sec at ƒ/8, ISO 100

While I was in Arches National Park earlier this week I took a lot of photos—that was the entire purpose of my trip, after all. For the two full days I was there I was in the park by 4 am to photograph stars & the sunrise, and then out again by 6:30 pm to catch the sunset. It was the first time I’ve ever really done anything like this solo, and it definitely won’t be the last.

I brought a pretty good assortment of camera gear along with me … basically my full camera bag. The only time it was a little cumbersome was on the hike up to Delicate Arch, but even that wasn’t too bad. One of the lenses I brought was my Lensbaby Composer  (a no-brainer, really, if you know me well enough). The shot above was a quick grab-shot of the other photographers and tourists at Delicate Arch (the arch is to the right of the frame). I realized that I had seen a lot of photos of the arch itself before I made the journey on my own, and I didn’t know what to expect once I got there and this is a pretty good view of what it looks like when you are sitting up high to take photos. (I also have a panorama I’m working on … I’ll post it here when it’s ready.)

This is a good example of looking all around you and not ignoring some of the less obvious sights when you are out taking photos. It can be easy to be bewitched by all the beautiful landmarks and keep your camera pointed only in one direction when in a place like Arches National Park , but don’t forget to pause and look everywhere else, too. I was only there a few days and got a bunch of the “cliché” photos, but tried to keep my eyes peeled for other opportunities.

Canon 7D, Canon 24-105 ƒ/4L IS lens, 1-50 sec at ƒ/11, ISO 100

This is a quick-edit of what I think might be my favorite photo from my trip to Arches National Park. I’ve been working off of my laptop while I’ve been traveling (a three-year-old 13″ MacBook), and it doesn’t calibrate very well so once I get home I’ll be able to take a good look at all of my images and do some “proper” editing.

I used Lightroom 2 and Silver Efex Pro to editi this image. I photographed three exposures so I’ll also give it a try as a “realistic” HDR to try to bring back some of the details in the highlights and shadows. I’m also not sure if I want it color or B&W … although I am kinda liking the B&W version. Maybe I’ll post them both here on my blog once they’re edited. :)

The one thing I’m certain of is that I absolutely love it as a square crop. I actually framed it to be cropped this way while I was photographing it (I wonder what “anti-crop” people would say to that? Buy a Hasselblad? Lol). Here’s a quick thought … wouldn’t it be cool if we could switch our cameras to photograph in a 1:1 aspect ratio? Yeah, you can always crop your images (like I did here) but it’s all about seeing the image while you’re photographing it. When shooting video you get a semi-transparent matte that gives you a 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratio, and it records the movies that way. I think that camera companies should do the same thing for still images! :)

Another side note is that I’m really digging live view and the electronic level on my 7D for photographing landscapes. I used live-view for about 90% of my shots—the other 10% was when I was photographing stars and couldn’t see anything on the LCD monitor. After shooting all of these landscape images I’m realizing that the next lens I’m gonna buy will be a super-wide lens, maybe even a prime … but until then my 24-105 will have to suffice. :)