Roadside Noir

I combined two images of lightning.

I was going someplace, and didn’t have much time to capture this image. I quickly propped the camera on a rock and snapped a few pictures. These pictures then remained on my computer for a long time until…

This afternoon I was sorting pictures, making mental notes of things I could do to edit them up when I came across these two pictures of lightning. I thought they would look really good combined together, and it was a quick enough edit, so I stopped what I was doing to create this magnificent image.

Steps to combining two pictures of lightning

Capture lightning by continuously taking pictures at a slow shutter speed. (Here I used a shutter speed of 5 seconds)
Open the two images in separate layers
Set the layer mode of the top image to lighten only
Mask out the foreground of the top image

Added noise and contrast with the c2g filter

Waterfall Mania

Here’s a little hidden beauty in the mountains of Utah. I feel like I’ve failed to capture the beauty of this place. Someday I’ll have to go back at sunset to take more pictures of these waterfalls.

The Lady

a lady all bundled up to see some Christmas lights

The Lady

Here is an interesting way of using color noise to ones advantage. Now that I have a better camera, I kind of miss finding clever ways of utilizing flaws in my camera.

Original after minor enhancements (brightening)

Bubbly Icy Water

I was hiking up to a waterfall and noticed that there were a lot of interesting ice formations floating in the water. I edited this picture using the technique described here.

Granite Flats

I like how well the post processing on this picture turned out. The colors really come out well without looking too unnatural. The contrast is more unnatural, but that is so common now a days that it shouldn’t turn most people off.

Eclipse

Solar Eclipse

This is a picture taken of the solar eclipse. I took this picture to check my exposure as I was awaiting the solar eclipse. I didn’t realize it was actually happening when I took this picture. My entire family was waiting for the solar eclipse, but didn’t see it. We thought it happend after he sun went over he horizon and we missed it. It wasn’t until after I looked through the pictures I’d taken in preparation for the solar eclipse that I realized we’d watched the entire thing without realizing that we had.

California Sunset

California sunset

For some reason I used HDR on this picture, even though there is no reason why this needed to be an HDR picture. Here are the original three images.

Hot Air Balloon

The other day I was in an art gallery, and I realized that something artists will do to help compose an image is to control the amount of detail they add to different parts of an image. This picture is a great example of reducing detail in an image. I whited out the mountain on the left because I thought the effect of a white sunburst produced a better composition. I used a bilateral filter on the foreground to destroy detail while keeping preserving the contours of the branches.

Perfection

Some might say I overdid things with this picture, but if I did, I sure had a lot of fun doing it. To me photography is not just about capturing a scene, it’s about creating art.

original picture of a mountain scene — Original

Clouds and a Tree

I love the way the picture draws your eyes to the magnificent clouds on the top. This is from the vibrant colors and brighter on the top vs the duller colors and values on the bottom. The blue and orange colors create a nice color theme. When you take a picture think of how it will look when your done editing. Originally the clouds in this picture were a muddled blue-gray, and the mountains and houses were dark and difficult to make out.