Geekstalt's photostream  

This is a shot of the Fountain of Love in old Havana, Cuba. This is an HDR shot of three exposures combined in Photomatix and adjusted in PS5.

Well I got some great news earlier today: I received a letter of offer on a job! I start on Monday. Looking forward on getting back into the work force. The job sounds interesting too.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Hi everyone! Sorry for not posting in a while. Things were crazy with all the photoshoots I did for friends and family around Christmas. Combine that with photo processing, Christmas events and shopping and I wasn't able to post much before... I went to CUBA!

So I'm back from Cuba and have to say it was a pretty amazing place. I got this shot in Havana (or Habana) showing the old capital building. It was built in around 1911 I think, and currently is closed for renovations. As you can probably tell it was modeled on the capital building in the United States. Back in the early 20th century the US was seen as a major liberal, democratic nation so many of the countries in Latin America used the American model for their emerging democracies for everything from the wording of their constitutions to the style of buildings. Oddly the one thing no one copied was the actual US government system. Almost all the nations of the world are either Parliamentary (based on the UK) or Presidential (based on France). I believe the American system of separation of the branches of government with a system of checks and balances has remained uniquely American.

Hope everyone had an amazing New Years and all the best in 2012!

Been doing a LOT of photo processing. Touching up and so forth, mainly for Christmas portraits I shot. Just these last four days I've processed about 110 shots, and printed about 80 of them for clients (i.e. friends :-). So tonight I got the urge to process something NOT Christmas related. I remembered a shoot I did with my friend Jill and decided I'd see if I could find a good shot worth processing up.

Our shoot didn't go well technically. Jill was flawless, but I failed to use the flash as much as I should have so a lot of the shots were very dark. She also didn't like some of the processing I did a year back using GIMP. It was all I had at the time. So now, using CS5's RAW function I was able to take this shot and recover it. Hope she likes it!

Have a great week everyone!

Sorry to not be posting much recently. I've been doing a lot of Christmas Portraits for friends and family and that's eating up basically all my photography (and general) free time.

So here's my first time shooting with off-camera flash. Since there was no one else around to experiment on, I had to use myself. I have a portrait shoot this coming Saturday and unlike most of my earlier shoots this one will be indoors, so I finally decided it was time to figure out how to get my flash to fire when it is not docked on the camera. Turned out to be pretty easy. I then spent the entire evening playing with it, LOL! This is one of the shots I managed to get with it.

The flash unit is a Nikon SB-600. For this shot I stood with the flash about two feet away mounted to a tripod at about head level, pointing across me. It was set to 85mm zoom so the light would be very tight, with the power set to 1/40th. Worked well I think as there is a white wall about four feet behind me but you can't see it at all! The flash on the camera was also disabled so that the SB-600 was the only light source. I think after working with this in Photoshop that I should have set the power to more like 1/25 as the image in photoshop was quite dark and needed some pumping up.

I played around with a lot of different poses and settings, moving in and out of the direct beam of the flash. Some came out pretty good. I was surprised how easy it was in the end to get some pretty dramatic shots.

Did encounter so problems so it wasn't all smooth. Tried to create some fill light on the right side by bouncing the light using a white towel. No luck there. Also had some weird exposure issues when I left the lights on in the room. Not sure why but with the extra light the shot actually came out darker! Go figure. Not sure what is happening there.

Hope everyone is well and counting down the days to Christmas and/or holidays!

Been doing some work for Craig again. In this shot besides the general touching up and desaturation, I also tested a new technique I learned for replacing the background in CS5. I really like how it worked, especially if you look closely at the hair of Craig and his friend. CS5 did a great job of catching the fine hairs and creating a mask to move them. Let me know what you think. I'm wondering if I should have darkened the models to make them fit the background better (the different directions of the light between the figures and the background seems to be causing some issues for me. Hard for me to believe they are standing on the river front. But this is just a test after all)

Sorry I haven't been on much - being laidoff is hard work! Been job hunting and also doing general renos on the house. Got some good news: I have two positions now that look interested in hiring me. Now it's just a waiting game.

Hope everyone is having a great week!