One More Arch

OK, one more of the Arch from last summer's trip to St. Louis. Actually, this probably won't be the last you see of the Arch on here.

I like this picture because I get a sense of how big the Arch is. An architectural wonder!

Average Tree

Here is an average tree. There is nothing particularly special about this tree, but this was the tree I was looking for. And it gave me a little story, which is half of the fun.

As I mentioned in Quick Turnaround, I decided last Saturday to head out to Shawnee Mission Park, which is a large park on the Kansas side of the border. After driving around inside the park for a little seeing what the place had to offer, I found a nice spot that was relatively less crowded than the rest of the park. I grabbed my camera and tripod and hiked off into a grassy area off the beaten path. I took a few pictures here and there and then sat down in the shadow of this tree to get my tripod and camera all set up. After taking the photographs for this picture I looked down to see a tick crawling up my jeans!

In case you don't know; I hate ticks with a passion. Although it's been found that a protein in deer tick saliva interferes with the ability of the AIDS virus to attach to immune cells, and the same protein may help treat immune disorders like asthma and multiple sclerosis, I still hate ticks; they just bug me (Haa! Sorry..).

Anyway, I quickly jumped up and brushed the little guy off, only to see one or two others making their way up my pants in similar fashion. Quickly brushing them off, I began searching my legs for any more of the little buggers. Finding a few more, and what appeared to be a baby tick, or some sort of underdeveloped tick, I brushed them off, grabbed my camera and retreated to the concrete path to regroup. I did my best to search the rest of my clothes for ticks, and luckily my jeans were light colored, and I had a white t-shirt on, so it wasn't too hard. Finding no more I headed back to my car with my next destination in mind.

I'm not afraid of ticks by any means, and I've had many bites, so I can remove and dispatch them with ease. This was an ambush though and I was caught off guard. I would like to go back though; there were some nice hiking trails into the woods that I'd like to explore sometime. I also saw a number of deer while I was out there, just wandering around.

Lesson learned: Use my industrial strength tick spray (the stuff I use for work when I do fieldwork) on my clothes before I go to the park again.

Even though this is just an average tree you could see just about anywhere, I like this photo, and it gives me something to show for my battle with the ticks that day.



In other news, I took 3rd place in my category in the art show at work. Should have placed higher, but I lost to another HDR photo that was physically bigger than mine, and simply overpowered mine. There were numerous technical problems with his, but they didn't matter because it was big (this has been a developing trend with this art show). The thing that was in second place is pretty indescribable. Seems to be something created in Photoshop, but I'm not really sure what it was other than that.

Old Courthouse

Here is another photo from last summer's trip to St. Louis. The whole group of us were walking to the stadium from the Arch and I stopped to take a few photos of this building. I had never really though about what exactly this building was until now. Turns out it is the Old St. Louis County Courthouse. The dome was built during the Civil War, although the actual courthouse building was built before this. The Old Courthouse was actually the tallest building in St. Louis until 1896; hard to believe with all of the buildings towering over it today. It was relieved of its duties as a courthouse in 1930 when the Civil Courts Building was built and was abandoned for a few years until it was slowly renovated and turned into a monument.

Anyway, there was your history lesson for the day, and here is my photograph!

Quick Turnaround

I had been planning all week on getting out and taking some pictures this weekend and here is the first of a few that I like. I first went out to Shawnee Mission Park (more on this later), which is a pretty big place, and apparently the most visited park in Kansas. I found a spot I liked and got some pictures and then headed down south a bit further to a corporate park called Corporate Woods. I used to ride my bike through this area when I lived in Overland Park and knew it was a pretty area so I thought I'd see what I could come up with.

This was pretty much the fastest turnaround I've pulled off as far as taking photos, editing them, and considering them 'finished.' I guess that's the good thing about capturing what I was going for.. That and taking fundamentally good photos ;p



A quick note about this website: I changed the setting so that anyone can comment. Before you had to have a Google Account to comment, but I wanted to make it easier for everyone to comment (because I love to get comments!).

St. Louis Arch

One of my favorite things in a photo is a dramatic sky. I took this photo last summer in St. Louis when a bunch of the family met to go to a couple Cardinals baseball games. It was a nice day so we all walked down to the Arch before the game one afternoon to enjoy the weather and check out the flooded Mississippi River.

Millions of photos have been taken of the Arch so I thought I'd experiment with some angles that are probably less common. I really liked the outcome, and with a little post-processing work I pulled out the sky and colors to be a bit more dramatic.

Summer!

Well it's finally warming up around here, after what seemed like an eternity of winter. Although I enjoy the winter, I mostly enjoy it in Colorado while skiing. I much prefer the summer, so I'm pretty happy it's warming up. I'm fairly certain that I need to just move to somewhere in Florida. Somewhere in Florida that is Sarasota or one of the keys right there. Now all I have to do is win the lottery. If I was going to live there I doubt I'd want to do any actual real work.

There isn't much to explain about this photo or about anything I did in post-processing this photo because it is basically straight from the camera. I did a very little bit of color and exposure adjustment in Photoshop and I cropped it a bit, but other than that it's just how I took it. To me this photo exemplifies summer. A bright blue sky, bright green grass, and of course, the clothes line.

Substation

Well, it's been a while since my last update, but I've been busy lately, and I've been working on finishing up a few photos. I took this photo a couple of months ago somewhere north of Kansas City. I decided to just get in my car and drive up north until I found a good place to take some pictures. I had headed up there with a certain shot in mind, but stumbled upon this substation in a fairly deserted area, and decided to get some pictures of it instead.

I planned on trying out a post-processing method which would produce a High Dynamic Range (HDR) photo. To do this I took a total of 5 exposures from the exact same location. One exposure -2 stops, -1, +1, +2, and one exposed normally at 0. These 5 exposures are combined in a computer program and tweaked using tone mapping, which basically adjusts how the exposures are combined. When done right, I think this produces extraordinary pictures; in the wrong hands though, it can create disturbingly distorted images. I set out to do it right, and tried not to over do the processing. After combining the 5 exposures, I opened the result in Photoshop and tweaked the image a bit more until I liked the results.

I've tried to create HDR photos in the past, but could never get one to look like I thought it should -- until now. Something clicked this time, and I was able to create this image. I like it quite a bit, and decided to enter it into the art show I mentioned in Bean Ball! Regardless of how it does in the show, I'm happy with it. I don't think that I overdid the post-processing, and everyone who I have shown it to has agreed.



For the show, I had this printed at an online shop. After reading reviews I decided to spend a few extra dollars and have it printed on a metallic paper which supposedly looked very good. I was definitely not disappointed. The colors seem to 'pop' more, and with a photo like this, I think that only enhances the picture. Looking at it now, I'm wondering if viewing it on a computer monitor does it justice.

Bean Ball!

Well it's about time for the annual Art/Work art show at work. This event takes place at a number of Kansas City businesses and the top three entries (as voted on by fellow employees) represent their company in a city wide art show which is hosted at Union Station. This show started the first year I was working at my current place of employment and had a decent turnout. That year I entered my Busch Stadium panorama and by all accounts should have won the contest. I was beaten out by an amateurish photograph of some firefighters putting out a fire at night; how cliche. I'm pretty sure the American Flag was even flying in the picture.

Anyway, last year I was under a lot of pressure by the woman who organized it within our company (she loved my panorama) to submit another photo. Unfortunately, I had a lot on my plate at that time, and didn't get around to finishing up the photograph I had wanted to enter. I ended up submitting this photo, which I like, but I don't think it is contest winning material. I just wanted to put something in there to support the show.

I took this shot in St. Louis, on another one of those extended-family vacations to see the Cardinals play baseball. It was the summer I got my new camera, so as I was snapping away like crazy, I happened to get this bean ball milliseconds before it hit the batter. It was pretty cool!



Stay tuned for this year's submission! I'm very happy with what I've got this time around!

Air Show

I got home from work one Friday evening last summer to hear the roar of what sounded like jets flying overhead. I live near a small airport in downtown Kansas City, so it was conceivable that these jets were flying in and out of there for some reason, but quickly assumed that we were being attacked by a foreign nation and consequently sat back and waited for the bombs to start dropping.

Then I remembered seeing a sign for the Downtown Airport Air Show. "Of course," I thought, "that is much more logical than someone deciding to bomb Kansas City." I pulled up The Google and got a copy of the schedule only to realize they were merely practicing that evening. The next day however, had flying planned for the entire day.

The next morning I got my camera ready and started walking towards the airport. The crowd was awesome. Anywhere you could sit with a view of the airspace above the airport, people would eventually sit. After wandering around and getting some shots of the crowd and the bridge that normally would be inaccessible (unless I wanted to get run over or arrested) I headed to a nice overpass just outside the airport property for a perfect view of the action.

This was my favorite shot of the day.

Busch Stadium Panorama

I figured for my first post I would show you one of my favorites. This panorama is not only the biggest project I have undertaken, it was also my first real attempt to create a large photograph I wanted to print.

Originally, the inspiration behind this photograph was my Grandparents. They were both lifelong Cardinals fans and loved St. Louis and Busch Stadium. This was one of the last seasons the 'old' Busch Stadium was going to be used, as they were going to be building a 'new' Busch Stadium right next door, so I thought I would create a large photograph for them to have to remember Busch Stadium and all the years they went to watch the Cardinals play.

One day in the fall of 2005 after class, I was sitting at my computer looking through some photos I had taken the previous summer when the whole family got together in St. Louis for some baseball. I had quite a few shots of the entire stadium from our outfield seats and wondered if I could combine them to make a large panorama of the entire stadium. At this point, I was relatively new to Photoshop, so I started playing around with it, getting moderately good results. I continued to play with, tweak, move, and stretch six to twelve different photographs until I had a pretty decent view of the entire stadium from left to right.

When I took the original photos I don't think I had planned to put them together to form one grand panorama, so there were some missing areas, most notably, the extreme corner of right field (bottom left of this photo) and large portions of the deep outfield. I was also still relatively new to my Canon 20D DSLR, so not all of the exposures I was working with were the same. This made things a bit more difficult as colors didn't quite match from photo to photo. Additionally, the portions of the picture that I had to create manually were dependent on the existing photos. If I didn't get the places where each photo merged right, the whole thing would look off. I also wanted to have a 2:1 ratio of width to height. I figured this would look better. In addition to the outfield areas, I also had to extend the sky upwards some to achieve this ratio.

After innumerable hours working on this project (I was in college afterall, what else would I do, study??) I finally created something I was happy with. Unfortunately neither of my Grandparents were able to see my completed work while they were alive, but I'm sure they've seen it.



As I sit here looking at this I am overcome with the urge to go back and edit it a little more. I would like to bring out some of the sky a bit more; add a little more 'pop' to the picture.

I am also overcome with a feeling that the 'new' Busch Stadium can't hold a candle to the real Busch Stadium. This stadium was unique; it had character. Sure it needed some upgrades, but overall it was a classic stadium. I've been to the 'new' Busch Stadium, and to me it is just another MLB stadium built in the 2000's. Not much is unique about it; sure it's nice, but it doesn't have the character that Busch Stadium had. It's just another new stadium in a sea of new stadiums. Thank goodness Kansas City decided to renovate Kauffman Stadium instead of building a new one.

Inagural post

Well there isn't much point in having this website set up if I'm not going to use it. People are always asking to see more of my work, and while I would love to share with everyone, in the past I have had visions of creating a grand website to display my photographs. I even went so far as to create a flash based website to host my work, however other obligations forced me to leave this project in the development stages.

I hope that this web log method of websitery will help me continually update and display my work. I also hope that knowing other people are checking out my photographs and expecting updates will make me get out and take more pictures. I would also love to hear comments, constructive criticisms, compliments, etc, so feel free to comment on my posts and pictures!