Story Telling

I think one of the things I really need to start working on is story telling in my images.
Sometimes, I am just unable to do this in one image.

Below is an example of telling a story with three images.
These pictures were taken at the John Hancock Building in Chicago.

Few things I am trying to do with these images, the first one is using leading lines to bring you up the building.
The second image I am trying to show Katie's reaction to the size of the building, and the third showing how tall it actually is.

Let me know how I did, and what you would change about the images.

More Chicago

Below are some of the images that were taken in Chicago, while visiting the Sears Tower. Our friends (people who grew up in Chicago) hate calling it the Willis Tower... So basically I will stick with the Sears Tower. 

I didn't even realize it when I was editing the pictures, but I guess I think of the Sears (Willis - Blah) Tower as a very black and white building. Maybe it was because of the overcast day...

Let me know what you think of the images. Even if it's negative feed back, only one way to become better!

Enough talking, I present to you my view of the Sears Tower:

Chicago

I started to edit the photos from Chicago, here are three i took from our hotel room.
I liked the way the fog covered the build when looking back at the pictures.... It was terrible when trying to go to the top of the Sears Tower.

We Stayed in the West Loop. The last night time image, Lightroom 5 did an amazing job straightening out the building. I will make a blog post about that soon.

Tabby in a Box

I am always trying to learn how to take better pictures, my wife tells me I need to take the pictures and not think so much. I think this is good advice. Most of the time I find my favorite pictures are using a flash bounced off of something (wall, ceiling, human).

Below is just one of my parents cat Tabby. The thing loves to be in boxes.

Flash bounced off the ceiling.

Mark and Ali's Wedding!

Just a few images from Mark and Ali's wedding.
Awesome wedding!

This wedding was challenging (hard as hell) for me to shoot. Like a dummy, I forgot my flash....

However, like a true master I didn't let that stop me! So I pulled out my hotel room key, and used the pop-up flash on the camera. I started to bounce the flash off the ceiling. I think it worked out pretty well, for one ghetto method.
Below are some of my favorite from the wedding.

The rest can be viewed: HERE!

Note to self, don't forget your flash.... Makes for some very crappy pictures until you figure things out.

  

 

 

Domnic's First Birthday

This past weekend, Katie and I went to Domnic's first birthday party. Below are a few of the pictures when everyone sang him Happy Birthday, and he got to enjoy the cake! 

Side note Joe and Ang's basement looked awesome, that is where the party mainly took place. 

It is insane how fast the first year went by. Here is to many more Dom! 

How to take a Screen Shot on the iPhone and Nexus 7

My wife just bought me the Nexus 7 for Christmas, and I currently own the iPhone 5.

I just wanted to learn how to take a screen shot on the iPhone and Nexus 7. This is just a quick tip on how to do it.

For the iPhone 5 -  You Push the Power Button & the Home Button at exactly the same time.

Once you hit them at the same time, you should see a white flash. This white flash is confirming that screen shot was successful. You will be able to find the screen shot in your Photos (Camera Roll).

For the Nexus 7 -  You Push the Power Button and the Volume down button at the same exact time.

The Android OS will display the screen shot in a smaller window and then file the picture.
You will be able to find the Nexus 7 screen shot in the Gallery.

Let me see some of your screen shots, and iPhone/android setups.

HDR using the iPhone.

The camera on the iPhone was one of the major reasons I switched from Android. With that being said, I never really thought the iPhone's HDR setting did a great job. The only time I've seen the effect perform well was when I would shoot indoors during bight days.
Example: If you were to take a picture of someone in front of the window, the window would be blown out in the picture. The camera is exposing for the person and not the window. This can be changed by exposing for the window, but the person will be extremely dark. However if you use the iPhone's HDR feature, I believe it does two things, uses post processing and stops down the extremely bright parts of the photo. and possibly takes another photo  and merges them. I don't see the 2nd situation very likely because of camera shake.

Below I took two photos of the sky during sunset. I picked the sky as my main exposure and focus point. The top picture is without HDR, and the bottom with HDR turned on.

No HDR

HDR

You can see that the light on the wall in the first picture is blown out, and in the second picture the iPhone was able to correct the brightness. The sky looks identical in both pictures making me think that the HDR is a post processing software method.

The only difference is the level of detail you can see around the light and the pipes leading up to the roof.
Either way, I find the incamera HDR very underwhelming. It is a fun tool if you want to play around with it inside you living room on a bright day. However if you are trying to capture a HDR sunset, I'd recommend other camera gear.

Let me see your HDR pictures if you get the chance.  

1 Second Video a day.

Last may I saw a TED talk featuring Cesar Kuriyama, talking about recording 1 second of video everyday for the rest of his life. 

I thought this was an amazing idea, and start to do the project myself. I have been recording the videos since may. Since Cesar has created his app, I have actually seen my videos come to life. I will have to use adobe premire to cut the full year together, and see what my life has been like for the past year. 

I am extremely excited to see the final product. However I am a bit worried about how many days I have missed. At this point, that is in the past and something I will have to work on to improve. I hope to never miss a day moving forward, but I do make mistakes and days will be forgotten. 

I plan on piecing together my year from when I first started recording videos. However after that I am going to record every year of my life, with a starting and ending date on my birthday (12/23). 

I do encourage people to pick up their own hobbies, and photography/videos my blog has become one of my stronger passions.

I hope to develop my blog, to become better and easier to navigate. I am considering buying a domain space, starting my own daily blog. This is something towards the future, and perhaps become my one second a day when it finally happens. 

Changing the format of my blog - Diversifying

I am going to start changing the format of my blog, and stop posting strictly my own pictures. I am going to start posting areas of photography I find interesting in the field of photography. This was per Katie's (my wife) suggestion.

I have been thinking about buying the 35mm f/1.8 DX lens. I currently own the 50mm f/1.8 FX lens. Since I have a cropped sensor, the 50mm is now a 75mm (with the 1.5x cropped sensor multiplier).

Two main reasons I want to buy this lens:
1. I love the bokeh of the f/1.8 which let a lot of light in.
2. I needed a more wide angle lens, especially since the 50mm indoors is so zoomed in.

Reasons why I don't want to buy the lens:
1. I don't want to buy a DX lens, I want to upgrade to a FX lens.

I don't think to struggle with one lens, in hopes that one day of buying a full framed camera.
This is not a good enough reason not to, buy it. When the day comes to finally purchase a full frame (FX) camera body. I will just sell this lens.

So in 2 weeks or so I will be purchasing this as my next lens. The next question is buy it used off of ebay, or to buy it brand new.  I think I will be buying this lens brand new, since the savings will be around $40-50. For the piece of mind at a price tag of $50, I feel it is worth it to buy brand new.

Flight

This image is of a goose taking flight on the water. The image is cropped, I was not able to get close enough with my 50mm lens on the camera. I feel that it kept most of the detail, which is usually my concern about cropping an image. Anyway, this was taken at cooper river while walking around.

Flight on water

Jay - NYE

Hours before midnight on New Years Eve, aka last year!

This was just a quick picture I took of Jay while he was filling the pitcher from the keg.
I asked him to give me his best pose, none of the others I thought I did good job capturing the moment except this image.

So Jay Happy New Years to you! The first man I ever kissed, oh so many years ago!

I tried to make the image seem older, as if it was almost taken with film...

Chirstmas Dog

On Christmas eve, Katie and I's friend Kaitlin has a Christmas Breakfast. This was the 2nd year I was invited, and the only guy! I felt honored! When we pulled up they had a very nice decorated house, and this little guy below was front and center!  I liked him, and took his photo. I tried to blow out the background, but allow enough so you can see the other decorations. 

Below is Christmas Dog! 

Fake Proposal

On New Years ever we were joking about Jay and Alisha getting engaged.

Well thank god Alisha finally popped the question, and below is the moment captured.

Congrats to the Armstrongs!

New Flash Diffuser

For Christmas I received a new flash diffuser. I wanted to try it out on my dad, below is the result from playing around with it. I enjoyed how it lit my Dad perfectly, but kept the background dark. Just a different effect that makes portraits better.