A New Project

 

 I have begun a new project. Several months ago, I received a phone call from Sonny Seals. He was looking for a photographer to shoot old churches. He and George Hart have a website featuring historic rural churches in Georgia. The accompanying photos are from my first shoot, The Old Richland Church in Twiggs County. It was built in 1848, and is still an awesome sight.  

 

To meet the criteria, a church must be over 100 years old, be in a rural area, and still be pretty much original.

The aim of the website is to research, document and preserve this special part of Georgia's history. Some of the churches are still in use, some abandoned, some see limited use. Old Richland has been restored and well maintained. Others need some TLC.

 

The photography is all HDR, done by a group of gifted photographers who are willing to give their time and talents to this worthy cause. And it is addictive, to me, anyway. I love to shoot, love to try new techniques, and love history. 

Take a look at the website. http://hrcga.org/richland-baptist-twiggs-2/

Pretty cool stuff.

Needing Some Rain

It's the end of July in Georgia, it's hot and dry. We need rain. Stopped on the way home from Warner Robins and shot a picture of this corn. It is a field on Lakeview west of Highway 41. Thought this image says it all.

An Explanation of HDR Photography

 

 The top photo is an HDR photo. HDR is High Dynamic Range.  You can see all the detail in the photo, much as your eye would see the scene. The bottom photo is how your camera see the same scene. Your eye and brain compensates for all the differences between the highlights(brighter areas) and the areas in deep shadow. The camera has to average all these values and give you something in the middle.

To do this as an HDR image, I shot an exposure that captured the shadow area, overexposing the rest of the image. I shot a second image that was the camera's chosen exposure, then did one more that captured the brighter areas. It left he truck under the barn too dark.

I then used an HDR program to combine the images giving the top photograph. The three images have to be done without moving the camera, so all parts of the image will match up when you combine them. Best to shoot on a tripod.

These were done with Photomatix software. With it, you can use up to nine exposures. The key is be sure you get the extremes in exposure in your scene covered. Most DSLR's have auto exposure bracketing which helps in doing the needed exposures. I set my D600 to do three exposures, each two stops apart. 

If you want to try this, there are several free programs, and a bunch, including Photomatix that have free trails that usually last a month. 

Just a reminder, ask permission before you photograph something on private property. 

   The last image was done with a program called MachineryHDR. It produces images that are kinda surreal. The colors are a bit exaggerated, detail is intensified. For some images I like the look, but like a fisheye lens, it ca be very overdone. Each photograph is different. So are personal taste.

Its Been A While

 

 I have recently started a new project that requires doing large amounts of HDR photography. Most of what I have been shooting lately has been HDR just to improve my skills in that area. The learning curve is pretty steep for an old man, but it has been fun.

I have tried several programs, as I have written before, and still come back to Photomatix for the result I like. I don't really care for the exaggerated look that you so often see in HDR. You get the look, but still close to reality.

I had gone out this morning to shoot with my newest camera, a Kodak Retina that is almost as old as I am.

It is a 1950 model, a cool little film camera. More on it soon.  Anyway, I carried along my D600 and decided that these two store fronts on Lowe Street in Fort Valley were too good not to do in Color. My little Retina is loaded with Ilford HP5. 

Really like the window shot. It makes for a nice image, lot of symbolism going on there!

The Whistling Baby

This is a photograph I did in 1982, ran in the Macon News July 13, and young Carrie Cohen was 8 months old. At the tender age of 7 months her Dad, Louis Cohen, taught her to whistle. This astounding fact was brought to the attention of writer Catherine Lee, who asked if I would like to shoot a photo.

The photo shows young Carrie whistling away to the obvious joy of proud parents Darline and Louis. The story and photo were picked up by the Associated Press and Carries puckered face was gracing the pages of newspapers all over the country.  A friend who was in Rome, Italy at the time even saw the photo on the front page of the Daily American.

Gotta wonder where she is now, and can she whistle "Dock of the Bay?"  What a cutie.

Not Quite As Old As Me....

This old Mack truck has been sitting alongside Highway 96 in Reynolds for  a while now.
Every time I drive by, I tell myself I need to shoot it. Yesterday I stopped and asked Tabb at .Full Power Diesel if it was ok to shoot some pictures.

 

 If you see something you want to photograph, always take the time to ask the owner's permission. 

 

This is believed to be a 1952 model Mack. Lordy, I am three years older that it is. And it looks better than me. The previous owner ran it as a wrecker until the early 1980's, then parked it. Tabb rescued it from the woods where it had been sitting. 

 

 I have always loved old Mack trucks, so much character.

 

 Hope you enjoy seeing these images.  Not too many of these old beauties still around.

 

 

This Old House

This old house sits alongside Highway 96 between Geneva and Reynolds, Georgia.  Have no idea how old it is, but I have been driving past it for well over fifty years. It looks very Antebellum, like it should have been in the middle of some huge cotton plantation. Maybe it was.  Though someone has always lived in the house, I don't remember ever seeing any folks around the grounds.

Tracy, my daughter,  has a fascination for the place like her old daddy does. Guess I kinda did this one for her. I was driving back from Columbus yesterday in the rain, and as I passed it, decided it was time I did a photo of the place.

I really wanted the trees and some of the grey sky in the image. There was no way to do that without a bunch of utility lines....and I do mean a bunch.  This image has about thirty minutes of work in it. Besides the usual toning and photoshopping, I worked for quite a while removing power lines.  Some went through the trees, and that was tedious work.

After removing the unwanted elements with the clone tool, I enhanced the sky, and added a bit of fog and gloom. This is the way I have always seen the place, a dark reflection of what it may have been.

Happy New Year.....

A Stormy Christmas Eve

 

It has been a stormy week so far. Lots of rain, very un-Christmas like weather.

This morning Gussie and I went out for his morning walk and the clouds were really whipping by. Very low,

and fairly well lighted by the ambient city light. 

I decided to try a couple of photos, so I grabbed a camera and tripod. The exposures were all manual, around 10 seconds at f10. I wanted to get the movement in the clouds as well as the trees. Did fairly well.

Wishing all of you a Merry Christmas, and hope some of you will be getting gifts of a photographic nature.

Make a resolution to do some photography with a real camera, not just your phone.

Christmas Lights

 

Tis the season for Christmas lights again, and this morning was a great time to shoot them. Fort Valley is really pretty at Christmas, this year we have some new lights. The huge oaks at the bandstand have these

new lights wit various colors. In the past, they were all clear lights.

This morning we awoke to light fog, and a misty rain. The fog added a little glow to the scene, and the rain wet the streets to give a nice reflection. The wide shots were shot at 1/6 second at f4 with my 28-70.

Autumn Is Falling... All Around Us....

 

 This Ginkgo tree is several blocks away from our home in Fort Valley. It is always so pretty, but I have not photographed it for several years. It was looking good last week, and I was afraid that by the rains were gone, I had waited too late to shoot it.

I braved the 30 degree weather to get some shots this morning, and it was worth the cold. Both shots are with the fish eye lens. For the bottom shot I got down in the grass, with the front element of the lens inches away from the closest leaf. 

When shooting trees like this, always be sure to walk around a view from all sides. The way the light hits the leaves can make a huge difference in you photo. 

A Place From My Youth

 

This past week while in Columbus, I rode out to Flatrock Park.
Our family often visited the park while I was growing up. It was one of my favorite places.
Spent lots of time climbing those hills, playing on the huge rocks. Here is one of the images I shot Wednesday. The first is an HDR, the second I converted to black and white. Love the black and white.

I shot at a really low shutter speed (1/5 sec) and used a very low ISO (50) to get the blur in the running water.

Friday Night Lights Got Brighter

 

I shot my first football game of the year last Friday night here in Fort Valley. It was Peach County and Warner Robins. It was actually the first football game I have shot in two years. Partly due to my work schedule, and partly due to what I was shooting with. I had been using my D90 and it was a bit too slow, plus the stadium is so dark I was having problems stopping the action.

 

I had two cameras die recently, so I bought another camera, a D600(Nikon, of course)

It is a wonderful little box, quite fast and has enough ISO to shoot in the darkest stadiums. 

Since it is full frame, I loose the extra magnification, so the 300f2.8 is actually 300mm, but no worries.

 

 The first ten minutes were pretty dismal as I worked on my timing and figuring out where to stand. The timing came back fairly quick, but after 40+ years of football, I still stand in the wrong spot half the time. 

Joe Holloway always said shooting football was half luck and half knowing where to stand. He was a wise man.  Anyway, not too bad for an old man.  The originals were color, and turned in to the Telegraph as color. I decided I wanted to see them as black and whites. 

All those Friday nights of Tri-X and Accufine developer have stuck with me, the way I still see football.

A Little Bokeh, If You Please....

 

The top bloom has been by our back porch for a couple of days. This morning I grabbed the D600 and my old Nikkor 300f4 along with a couple of lenses, deciding it was time for a photo.  The 300mmf4 is a great old lens, really sharp and quite hand hold able..... even for an old guy like me.  

I saw the cool leaves in a window box after shooting the first flower and had to try it.  It was shot with the 300 as well.  The minimum focus distance and the fact that it was shot at f8 gave great detail while dumping the background.

 The background colors made for good contrast with the color of the plant.

I found this house, or should I say I rediscovered it several months ago while shooting an assignment in the Fort Hill area of Macon.  I remember passing it on several different occasions over the years. Its current color scheme and the lions on the fence yanked me in like a fish on a hook.  I had to shoot it. 

I have been back to Macon a few times since I saw it lasy, but for one reason or another, just didn't work to shoot it, light was wrong, too busy to go by, whatever.  Well, I had to buy a new camera, two of my oldies died.  My new pick is a Nikon D600.  Its a full frame digital SLR.  Just what this photo needed.
Once again my 15mm is really a 15, not a 21, but that will save for another post....

Getting Close

 I photographed some crepe myrtle flowers last week. If you have never gotten up close to crepe myrtle blooms before, they are quite tiny.  Today I decided to try with my close-up lenses.

 

   

The white ones are so soft looking, almost surreal. These were done with a +2, +4 and +10 stacked

and shot with a 70mm lens.

 

This last shot is not a crepe myrtle, but a pull tab from a can. We gets lots of beer cans dumped in our yard each weekend, but not too often just the tab. If you are wondering about the odd background, that is the palm of my hand.

Using Light

 

I photographed this plate of pears this afternoon. Saw them in the kitchen and thought I should 

shoot. The light caught my eye, the way it played across them. Light was from above and behind them, but not very nice light, and in a bad spot to shoot. 

I moved them into the dining room and set up a light. The top was my second light setup.  I put a light above and slightly behind them.  The subtle light touching the left side of the pears really makes a big difference in the photo. 

 

The second photo is dark on the left side.  To ad that bit of light, I placed a white card up close so it would reflect back onto the side of the pears. Really makes a difference.

Meet brothers Moe, on the left, and Milo. Two of our outside cats. They were enjoying breakfast yesterday morning, and I grabbed the D90 and a 24mm lens for an early portrait session.  Milo is the larger of the two, but Moe is the fighter. Both can give you the look.

When shooting pets and kids, get down to eye level, makes a better image.

The photo was enhanced a bit using Topaz Adjust 5. Used the detail enhancement and beefed up the highlights a bit.

Stormclouds

There is a really cool cornfield alongside Highway 49 in Peach County. Every time I pass it, I think about shooting some pictures.  Today as I came home, I noticed really neat storm clouds gathering in the east.  I found a spot to get corn and clouds. The top image is an HDR combo of three images, one overexposed, one correct exposure, and one underexposed.  They were combined in Machinery HDR. The second image is a straight exposure, done by the meter in the D90. By combining the three you see good detail in the highlights, mid tones and shadows. The second image is an average of the three, so you loose detail.

The bottom image is an HDR, swapped the fisheye for the 15mm.  I have some other images from the shoot I will share another day.

Yet More HDR Software

I found a new(to me) HDR program last week and downloaed a free trial. This sunflower photo from last Monday's playtime was toned in Photoshop, then ran it through Machinery HDR. I like it. The program has some presets, or you can do your own tuning. This is not a true HDR image, but a single frame(film flashback!) that got the HRD effect.  I have not tried to do ma multiple exposure HDR image with it yet.

For those of you who don't know HDR, it combines bracketed exposures so you get all the shadow detail and all the highlights in your image. When you take a picture, your camera averages the exposure, so you loose detail in both shadow and highlights. So you bracket, doing some underexposed, some overexposed and the combine them for the final image.  That is very simplified, but you get the idea.

Some HDR programs give very exaggerated tones and colors, I call them clown colors. This one does not, it is more normal.  Give it a try.

http://www.machineryhdr.com/ 

Good Will Cemetery

 I rode through Good Will Cemetery in Fort Valley today. It is surrounded by Bluebird, and I had never visited it before. I shot a few pictures, just things that caught my eye.The spinning pinwheel was a bit of a challenge. I wanted the blur, and I was shooting mid-day. Had to drop the ISO really low to slow the shutter.