Seeing, Enjoying, Photographing and Sharing

So recently I was at Cantigny Park and Gardens taking photos. There were several student groups there on field trips. I would guess they were from various middle schools.

Anyhow, one of the young girls said something to the effect that "I would rather be here to see the flowers instead of looking at a picture." Well, that got me to thinking. See, there isn't anything wrong with what the young girl said or her opinion.

Here's the way I see it for me ... I was there to see the flowers too and I saw a lot of the beauty in the various garden areas. I saw flowers like this ...

 

I was also able to enjoy it and the flowers surrounding it. In addition, I was able to capture the image, which sets a certain type of permanence to the image because it will never look that way again. Then I can also edit the image and create ... 

This image. Granted it's not the same as the original, but I can create a new type of image that I can enjoy. From my point of view I got to see the flowers, enjoy the flowers, photograph the flowers and share the flowers. Not only am I sharing my images on this blog post, but I also share my images through other social media outlets. 

Here are a few more images I was able to take and enjoy ... 

 

So through my ventures I feel I accomplish what I have set out to do. But I must say, there are times that I do venture out without a camera and many times when I do that I regret it.

Enjoy Life, Take Pictures!

BTW ... On Twitter I am @TMSphotos ... I am always willing to connect with photographers.

You are also welcome to follow my Blog here. I try to share knowledge, information and experience of my photography.

"LIKE" my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/TMSphotographyChicago

The Photographers Position

I love Summertime, especially when I get to spend time at the beach. Earlier this month I was at North Avenue Beach in Chicago with my son and daughter. They were doing their thing and I had my Nikon Coolpix P520.

The Nikon Coolpix P520 is considered a compact digital or point and shoot camera. It is not a DSLR but it has some pretty cool features that I have been learning to use. I truly enjoy the zoom capability of this camera. It's pretty awesome! But I digress.

Back to the beach. I brought along a folding chair so I could sit and enjoy the sun and the weather. I took a number of photos of my son and daughter but I started looking around. There were a number of families there enjoying the weather too. Then I spotted this dad who was running around trying to capture moments of his son playing in the sand. Here is what that looked like.

I'm not quite sure what he was doing with his camera but I was keeping an eye on the young guy with my camera at the ready. Then it happened ... and I captured this.

 

The minute I saw this shot in my camera I was pleased. For me it was a moment in time that just signifies the beauty of Summer and a young child enjoying the simple things that life has to offer. 

So let's talk for a moment about the photographers position. For this shot I was sitting in a folding chair a distance away from the subject. With the zoom function on my camera I had now problem zooming in close on the subject. The beauty was my fortunate position and angle. 

Photographing children many times requires to get down on the childs level in order to capture  images like this. Children make great subjects since they are so curious about things we adults tend to take for granted. 

So next time you are out taking pictures take some time to relax and enjoy your surroundings. But, be ready to capture that one moment in time that seems to say more than imagined.

Enjoy Life, Take Pictures!

BTW ... On Twitter I am @TMSphotos ... I am always willing to connect with photographers.

You are also welcome to follow my Blog here. I try to share knowledge, information and experience of my photography.

"LIKE" my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/TMSphotographyChicago

Snow Photography - Editing Fun

We have had some snow around here recently and I can’t remember when I have had so much fun going out to photograph the scenery. The scenery created by a fresh fallen snow is art in and of itself. To capture it’s beauty is enjoyable, but there is more that can be accomplished. Let’s take a look at the photo taken.

I like the photo but I wonder what I can do by editing it. The first thing I did was to convert it to B&W and crop the image to 13x19 in order to remove the picnic table on the right side of the image.

Using Color Efex Pro 4 I created the following image.

This edit was created using the Standard High Key filter. To me, it’s an interesting effect.

Using Alien Skin Exposure 4 I created the next image.

This High Key - Glowing Skin effect is an image I like. Now I know that not everyone will like this type of edit and that’s quite alright. But I do like it and art is a matter of personal interpretation.

This next edit creates an effect of an image that was taken years ago.

This edit was made using Alien Skin Exposure 4 Vintage Daguerrotype Sepia Black Frame filter. After I created this image I then wondered what a what the High Key - Glowing Skin effect would look like with this filter, so I created it and made the following.

What I enjoyed about this whole process is getting out to see nature at a pristine moment in time and capture the beauty. What I enjoyed about editing the image was creating a whole new image to enjoy.

Enjoy Life, Take Pictures!

BTW ... On Twitter I am @TMSphotos ... I am always willing to connect with photographers.


You are also welcome to follow my Blog here. I try to share knowledge, information and experience of my photography.

"LIKE" my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/TMSphotographyChicago

Travel Photography and Presentation Ideas

I'm not proud of this particular photo but that's alright. This is about taking your travel pictures and presenting  them to others. Go ahead, read on, certainly there is something you can learn or share.

This is the original photo I took of Cafe Du Monde in New Orleans. This is a scanned image from a negative taken in October of 2000. To be truthful, I don’t like this photo and while looking at it, I wonder why I took it at all.

For discussion purposes let’s assume I did not have much time to take a good photo and I wanted to have a photo of Cafe Du Monde. Let’s face it, it is probably on the list of places to visit for a traveler of New Orleans.

Looking at this photo though, there is a lot that I don’t like about it but let me edit it and see what I come up with.

Well, I’m not really pleased with this horizontal edit that much either. The guy on the left who is waiving or hailing for someone is distracting. Towards the middle is the person walking away and it’s a bit, well, it’s not really prize photo worthy.

This portrait framed image is a bit better though. I like that there is more attention to the building and the street lamp in this image. Is the image prize worthy? No. But in this edit, the image is not a total loss either. Let’s face it, compared to the original image, this edited image is much better.

Let’s think about travel photography a bit further though and how we share images. Before the internet and this digital age we are now living in, if we wanted to share our photos many of us had prints made and stored them in photo albums.

Today when we want to share images we post them to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. But we can do something more today than we did in years past.

We can search images on the internet and we can include them in our own story. For example, this artistic rendering is an image I like. With a quick and simple save as command I have the image on my pc and I can include it in a presentation.

Here is another image obtained from a search. This is a pretty good shot that was taken. Even though I did not take the shot it is still a shot that could be used in a personal presentation. In fact, if you are ever in New Orleans and want to photograph Cafe Du Monde you may want to consider walking around and getting that perfect picture for your presentation.

Here is another image obtained from my Google Search. I really like this image on many levels. For me though, it really brings out the feeling of New Orleans not just because of the history and popularity of Cafe Du Monde, but because it incorporates the music of New Orleans.

That same Google search also provided me with this image. Now even though this image is dated it shows a side and history of the building and how it’s changed from then to now. Take some time after reviewing these images to compare for yourself what has changed over time.

Now this image from a scanned postcard can really shed some light on the history and how things change. This was obtained from that same Google search and for me it’s an image I really like a lot. I learned years ago, when you travel, buy postcards and tour books of the areas you visit. And nowadays, purchase travel CD’s and/or DVD’s. If you want to create good travel presentations you’ll be able to do so with your images/video and the local tour info.

One more quick tip ... Get a pic of the coffee and Beignets. Also, most people that visit are will to take a photo of you or you and your family. Make your photo memories special!

This concludes my presentation for today. I hope that it has provided you with ideas for taking photos and creating your own travel presentation.

Enjoy Life, Take Pictures!

BTW ... On Twitter I am @TMSphotos ... I am always willing to connect with photographers.

You are also welcome to follow my Blog here. I try to share knowledge, information and experience of my photography.

"LIKE" my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/TMSphotographyChicago

There are Larger Images of this blog post on my Facebook Page, here is a direct link ...

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.454122134642595.107856.162269090494569&type=1

Artistic Photo Edit of Sunset Coast Shoreline Oregon USA

Recently I was looking around at Public Domain Photos and found one that captured my eyes. (Reference http://pixabay.com/en/sunset-coast-shoreline-oregon-usa-51574/ werner22brigitte)

At first glance I thought this would be a great image to run through my abstract photo art process so I gave it a shot.

I really didn't care for the results so I set it aside and slept on it. 

When I woke up I still did not know what I wanted to do with this edit so I started playing around with my editing software. The following artistic images are the results of playing around with my software.

As a photographer I’m sure many would prefer focusing on the detail of the original image. I know I was looking at ways I may have made this a better photo had I taken it. But taking time to create a totally different and artistic image can be fun also.

If you have Sunrise or Sunset photos that you would like to see with an artistic edit send me a message and let’s discuss it further. I have worked with other photographers creating artistic edits before and it’s something I really enjoy doing. 

Enjoy Life, Take Pictures!

BTW ... On Twitter I am @TMSphotos ... I am always willing to connect with photographers.

You are also welcome to follow my Blog here. I try to share knowledge, information and experience of my photography.

"LIKE" my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/TMSphotographyChicago

Autumn Leaves After the Rain

Yesterday was one of those days that I had an intent to go to the pumpkin farm to take photos. That quickly changed when my daughter needed to use my car. That's ok though, the morning brought me something to think about.

When I went out on the back deck yesterday morning there were a couple of leaves with water beaded on them from the overnight rain. I thought it would be a kewl photo so I took some pictures shooting straight down on them, the pictures were not as good as I thought they would be.

So as the sun was coming up I saw the leaves in a new light. I took several more images and the edited images came out better than I expected.

Sometimes as photographers we need to look at objects from different views to capture the images we really like. At other times, if time permits, we need natures light to help us out a bit more.

Lessons learned yesterday, I like to learn things and share my knowledge. One of the things I noticed recently is image sharpness. I had taken some photos recently and noticed that with certain lenses I was loosing some details. Keep in mind that there are times I shoot with my old manual lenses. I found that in my camera settings there is a setting that allows me to increase the sharpness. With the lenses I used today I know it helped.

When it comes to editing images I found a favorite of mine is Smart Photo editor. When cropping images I have found that it helps to de-noise the images, I use Topaz for that because of the control I have with it.

I know that there are some photographers that are not in favor of cropping an image and I can appreciate that. On the other hand, I have my reasons for doing specific crops and edits and it makes me happy.

In the long run, don't we all want to be happy with the images we share with others?

Enjoy Life, Take Pictures!

BTW ... On Twitter I am @TMSphotos ... I am always willing to connect with photographers.

You are also welcome to follow my Blog here. I try to share knowledge, information and experience of my photography.

"LIKE" my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/TMSphotographyChicago

FACEBOOK PAGES - I'M ANGRY

I'm not sure what is going on at Facebook these days and sometimes I wonder if they even care. See, right now, Facebook seems more concerned with their stock market status than its actual users.

I have a facebook page and I have had it for a while now. As a photography page user I tend to "Like" other photographers work. There are also other photographers that like my page. I'm pretty happy with that. What I am angry about is the fact that I can't see all of my photo friends postings anymore. When I am in my facebook page I used to be able to hit the home button and I could sort between "Most Recent" and "Top Stories." The "Most Recent" selection would show all posts from all of the pages I liked. It doesn't do that anymore and I don't know why.

Aggravating, it sure is! I can't express that enough.

Granted, all technology is in constant change, I can understand that. But when you can't see what others post whether it is a technical issue or an intentional issue then it must be corrected.

Imagine for a minute if Twitter decided what posts you could see from your friends. Would you be a little angry? I know I would.

Anyhow, facebook needs to take some sort of corrective action. If you anger us enough, we will look for options. They do exist. If we go elsewhere, facebook will loose revenue.