Tag: Idaho

Old Train Bridge

Living in small town doesn’t afford that many opportunities for landscape photography, but it can provide an old bridge or two to shoot. Actually, in this instance, there are two bridges directly beside each other, but the one you don’t see in the picture isn’t very interesting. This old train bridge was built in 1912. It is cut into the steel at the top on both ends, so it seems pretty obviously accurate to me. I wonder if anyone had a celebration for it. I didn’t see any festivities.

Well happy birthday old train bridge.

Old Train Bridge

Old Country Store

What is it about seeing an old country store that makes people want to stop and take pictures? Well, anything old for that matter. Every time I see something like this as I’m out and about I’m am just completely drawn toward it like a moth to a light. Perhaps it’s just me that likes this sort of thing so much. I suspect part of it is my love of history and digging around in the past. The future is unknown and as yet unexplored, but the past is known and can be very much explored through the remnant of what once was.

This store in the central Idaho’s Camas County has probably been photographed thousands of times. It is right beside a well traveled highway, en route to a very popular birding wetland. But whatever, the Grand Canyon has probably been photographed BILLIONS of times, but I don’t see that stopping any new shooters giving it a go. Here’s my take on the old country store.

Old Country Store

Idaho State Capitol

A few weeks ago I decided to do a photo walk in downtown Boise. I was all by myself, but I had a good time anyway. I did get a few decent shots, but nothing to write home about. However, because I am practicing HDR photography. I decided to share a couple of my images here just for the fun of it. Isn’t fun what it’s all about anyway? I did get a neat shot of the moon and a concrete plant on the way home, but that is beside the point. Enjoy the Idaho State Capitol photographs and be sure to let me know what you think it the comments.

Tree of Life

Since I am just beginning to explore the realm of HDR photography, I continually find myself trying to push the limits of what it can and cannot do. What that tends to mean is that I shoot into the sun a lot. Since we’ve been having a record dry summer here in Idaho, that means there aren’t any clouds to photograph. What then? Well, I just make the most of it. On this occasion I saw this cool tree gracing the hillside and knew that I had to at least try and make a photograph. Facing away from the sun meant a rather flat and boring scene, but facing into the sun brought those nice long shadows and also gave me something to use for framing and reducing the glowing sun. And so we have something that looks like an oxymoron, a dried up and dying tree of life.

tree of life

Skyway

I’m beginning to play with HDR. My goal is not to create images that LOOK like they are HDR, but that have a nice range of tone that is visible to the human eye. Because current camera technology is limited, the only way to do this is to combine several images into one. This can produce some very crazy results. This image looks closer to normal than it started out. Surprisingly, it takes a lot more work to get a natural looking image using HDR processes, rather than a crazy psychedelic scene. This little view is just outside my driveway here in Idaho. It is one of my first attempts at capturing and processing HDR and I hope it is a pleasing skyway view.

skyway in Idaho

Concrete Moon

Yesterday I went into town to do a little architecture shooting. I did a few things and came away with a shot or two that I like, but nothing stellar. However, on my way out of the city the moon was setting in this gorgeous soft hued sky and I was dying to find a place to shoot it. Being in the residential part of the city there really wasn’t anything striking to shoot with this fantastic sky. As I was just on the outskirts of town I decided that it would be best if I just hurried along up into the mountains and grabbed a landscape from there, though I didn’t have a clue where that would be. Suddenly I came upon this giant concrete plant and I instantly knew that this was the shot for me. I had to double back a take a couple mile circuit to return to where I saw the scene, but I was able to get there in time. The biggest challenge of capturing this scene was that I had to shoot across a very busy highway, so timing was difficult. I was shooting with HDR as my end goal using 3 exposures. This meant that I had to time each shot precisely so that no cars were passing in front of me. Add to that the extended wait time between shots for long exposure noise reduction and I had quite a task to accomplish. But, I did finally manage to get it done. And here is the end result of shooting a concrete moon.

concrete moon

Fish Cloud Swimming in the Deep Blue Sky

This part of Idaho is dry in the summer. VERY dry. Like, we haven’t had rain for 65 days kind of dry. So I was a little surprised to see this odd fish cloud lounging above town a few weeks ago. That was the only one. Not a single other cloud could be seen. It struck me as strange, unique and interesting all at once. I wanted to capture the ‘above town’ part of it, but that part of town just wasn’t deserving of being in a photograph. It wasn’t until I started to work on the image that the shape of a fish stuck it’s head out at me. What do you think: fishy or not?

fish cloud

Two Stones Flow

I’ve taken a new approach to photography recently: I always take my camera with me. For a while I was quite burned out on using camera’s for much of anything but I’m starting to get the joy back. And with better and better image processing options I have the ability to make shots I’m proud of without spending all day in Photoshop. This image didn’t even see Photoshop once. I only used Lightroom 2 and Topaz Adjust 5.

This is my very first image processed using a fantastic little plugin called Topaz Adjust. I’m just on the 30 free trial right now, but I’m LOVING it so far.

This is along the Payette River between Banks and Crouch, Idaho. It’s a tough place to shoot because the road is on the north side of the river and the hill opposite is VERY steep and facing north, so it almost never gets good light on it. Plus, it has a strongly lit sky behind. But that all makes for a good photography challenge. These two stones seemed to go nicely with each other even though I’m clearly breaking some rules of composition. I don’t care. Sometimes you just have to shoot be it good or bad.

Two Stones Flow

Inspiration at the Headgate

inspiration

As a professional photographer I think it is very important to keep moving forward, growing your skill, your craft and your passion. But, when those things are connected to a paycheck, somehow the fire seems to dim. Well today I got a little fuel added to my fire by Trey Ratcliff (see StuckInCustoms.com for his work). He has a series of tutorial videos for anybody interested in getting into photography, and the first one is free to watch so I watched it while I was eating lunch. As I was listening to him teach the very basics (and smugly thinking “I know that already”) it occurred to me that I wasn’t actually doing the entire process of photography, but am generally just pushing the button on the camera and if it isn’t Polaroid success then I just move on. Well, that seems to be the wrong approach, eh? You might say it is severely lacking inspiration.

So I decided to go outside in my own yard and poke around. I did my very own, solo photo walk. There are a bunch of side-by-side comparisons of the raw file before I did any processing, and then there is the way I have decided to finalize the images, at least for now. It is not unusual for me to revisit images a few months later for a fresh perspective.

The images following are the result of inspiration to do a particular thing, and that is take advantage of the depth of the raw file as much as possible, just using Lightroom. Because of that I ended up exploring the same subject from multiple points of view, and with a lens change as well. I was shooting with my Tamron 10-24 f3.5-4.5 at first, and later on switched to my Canon 28-135 f3.5-5.6.

In this instance I was using Trey as inspiration, but also trying to learn a little bit about how he thinks so that I can apply some of his techniques in my own process. I have to admit here that I have been too down on myself because of my aged equipment, which is no excuse. (For those interested, I’m shooting a Canon 30d and post with Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS3.) So take the images for what you will, and please ask any questions in the comments.

Orange Moon

As I was groggily stumbling my way to the bathroom to kitchen to get a drink of water I took a peek out the window as I always do. I love looking outside. What I saw amazed me, to say the least. At first I thought it was blood red, which would have been even more interesting if you are into Bible prophecy, but it wasn’t. It was a vivid Orange Moon glowing eerily back at me.

It was a bit strange, yes. But it was even more strange to try and photograph. I’m curious to know why I was having such a hard time getting a good shot of this. Part of me wants to believe it was due to smoke passing between my lens and the moon, refracting the light and ‘moving’ the moon around during my long exposures. Another part of me thinks it was user error of some kind. Though I did have a solid tripod set up, using a cable release, had the mirror locked up, using image stabilization, auto and manual focus and I got lots and lots of images the looked like my tripod was sinking or I had camera shake. I even tried multiple different ISO’s and shutter speeds all with the same result.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, I didn’t do ANY post processing of any kind whatsoever. All I did was to crop. So this truly was an orange moon!

Whatever the case, I was able to get a couple of shots that were mostly sharp, so here is one for you to enjoy. Now if only I had a longer lens to get really close to see that awesome orange moon.