Josh Bradley Photography

So I have been chomping at the bit to get out an shoot, and I finally got the chance on Saturday afternoon to do just that. Didn’t find too much but it was enjoyable just to be out shooting and walking through the forest.

Found one of the last running creeks in the area. It has been a dry year so there are not too many left this late into the summer. Could not find a regular way of shooting it, so I went for a funky angle, because after all photography is about fun and that is what I was having.

No distortion here this is all Mother Nature. This pine was growing in this very cool arc. Just made an interesting subject.

On the way back into town I came across an old cemetary tuck back off the road (the kind you don’t want to be in a night, if you get me drift). My best guess is that this cemetary had to be one established in the early history of California because some of the stones date back to the early 1800’s.

It was a good shoot and it broke the cobbwebbs loose from my brain. Now it is time to start packing up for the wedding shoot this weekend and some all around fun.

Images captured with 1D Mark IIN 17-40f4 on Lexar digital film

Black and White, Nik, Weddings Canon

So it seems like it has been forever since I have blogged, and the photo below sums up a lot.  It has been crazy as of late, and the work load from the day job has been horrendous to say the least.

I can say though, that next week will be a full week of vacation/”fun work” so there will be a lot of material to blog about then.  What I mean by fun work is that I am shooting a wedding for 2 of my closest friends Jeff and Misty.  I shot their engagement a few months back and it was a blast and now it is wedding time!!!  It will be some interesting shooting in some amazing scenery, so I am really looking forward to it.  So check back next week for some photos, blogs, and tips.

P.S.   I would like to thank Jeff and Misty for allowing me to share their images with all the readers out there.

Image Captured with 1D Mark IIN 16-35f2.8 II on Lexar digital film

Black and White, Engagements, Lightroom 2.0, Nik, Weddings Black and White, Canon, Engagements, Wedding

So as always it has been crazy busy in my world and blogging is difficult to say the least.  However, while I was out and about today I ran across this old beat up truck and decided to take a quick shot…

With summer in full swing here it is crazy, but hopefully there will be more postings in the month of June.  I have a wedding shoot and a bunch of other stuff going on that I will be sharing.

Image captured with 1D Mark IIN 17-40f4 on Lexar digital film

Black and White, Nik Black and White, Canon, Nik, Trucks

So I ran across this image from last year’s PSW in Las Vegas.  It is funny, and I don’t know if you have experienced it, but I have.  You start going through old images, and ones that you didn’t like before, you now like.  I heard of this happening to photographers from time to time, and it is interesting.  Back in the day when I first started shooting digital I may have deleted this image to save harddrive space.  But now 8+ months later I really liked the way it looked, and I especially liked it using Silver Efex Pro.   It is just the way your photography and your eye evolves the longer you do this, and it is great!!  So there is no real lesson here except this.  Hard drives and memory are cheap these days don’t delete everything you don’t like.  Keep it around, because you never know what you might find later down the road.

Captured with 1D Mark IIN 17-40f4 on Lexar digital film

Black and White, Nik, PSW Ghost Towns, Las Vegas, PSW, Silver Efex

Man I can’t believe I missed the announcement, but on May 6th Nik Software released Sharpener 3.0 for Lightroom 2.0.  Go snag it and give it a try.

Photography

So the boys over at Dtown TV have started something new and it is called “Ask Brad.” None other than my great friend Brad Moore who is now the Technical editor for the Dtown show has his own spot on the Dtown webiste where you can ask him all things realted to Nikon.  So if you got a question that you need answered he is your man.

Photography

So my friend Jeff Lynch over at Serious Amateur Photography has been taking some really amazing shots of wildflowers as of late, and that got me inspired to photograph some of my own. Unfortunately for me there have been winds, thunderstorms, and rain all day today making photographing out in the open a bit difficult when trying to get a small wildflower tack sharp in 20+ MPH wind.

So I did the next best thing that I could think of and went to the flower shop. Right now with Easter this weekend there are a lot of varieties of flowers to choose from. So I snagged an Orchid, Cala Lily, and a Rose from the shop and headed to the house. I lucked out and had to display boards ( the type kids use at science fairs ) and left one in its wrapping because it made a great reflective surface, and the other I unwrapped and used as a backdrop. I decided to use and old trick that Moose and Joe taught me. Which was to put the camera in Manual mode set it to 1/250th of a second and then adjust the f/stop to what I wanted. If you do this right and take a pic, you will see a black screen on your camera display because setting the camera up like this creates an almost pitch black effect.

I got the camera dialed in then broke out the flash units to give me the light I wanted. I set both my 430ex and 580ex to slave mode and put them in group C, which basically gives you a great looking fill light. From there I started clicking away and had a good couple of hours of shooting. Here is what I caught.

This Cala Lily was lit from the top left with the 580ex and I used the 430ex to bounce of the whiteboard to give some depth. I finished this in Silver Efex Pro in Lightroom 2.0. Quick and easy..

Snapped this Orchid in almost the same manor except I turn the 430ex flash and pointed it directly at the back of the Orchid to back light it.

This Rose was shot in the same manor as the Cala Lily except I threw a diffuser in front of the 580 ex flash from the top left to soften it a bit more.

All in all I had a great time shooting for a few hours, and it only cost me $10 in flowers.

UPDATE:

Here is a rough sketch of the setup for photographing the Orchid, it’s painfully obvious why I take photographs and not sketch.

Black and White, Lightroom 2.0, Nik, Photography Black and White, Canon, Joe McNally, Lightroom 2.0, Moose Peterson, Nik Software, Silver Efex

So I am sure that you have been seeing the buzz around the internet that Nik Software has been developing their very cool plug-ins for Lightroom 2.0.  So far Viveza, Color Efex Pro, and now Silver Efex Pro has been set up to run in Lightroom 2.0 hopefully with Dfine and Sharpener close behind.  Since I do not use Lightroom I didn’t think much about it at first when Nik started releasing these new updates, but then I got a bug that wouldn’t go away, so I picked up a copy of Lightroom 2.0 and took the new Silver Efex plug-in for a ride.

And now that I have tried it I have to say that there is something special about this new combination.  Don’t ask my why (and now I don’t have official specs for it), but it seems like Silver Efex runs smoother and processes faster in Lightroom 2.0 than it did in Photoshop [this is my opinion].  All the controls and layout of Silver Efex is the same so there is no learning of anything new.  It is just install and go…

I played with a few images from my files and tried them out just to see the handling and to see if the results were the same in Lightroom 2.0 and Photoshop, and they are and it is great…

So what can I say about all this?  First off you are looking a Lightroom convertee right now, and I can’t wait for the other plug-ins to be offered for Lightroom.  This one is a winner!!!

You can snag the updates that allow you to use the plug-ins in Lightroom here, just use the prouct keys from your existing plg-ins and you are golden

Black and White, Lightroom 2.0, Nik

So I was going through some more images from the wedding I shot over the weekend and found one that I thought had a lot of potential, but it had some issues.  So after some creative masking and a stack of Nik filters from Color Efex Pro 3.1 and Silver Efex Pro this is the result.  It is a bit outside my normal because I wouldn’t spend the 5 minutes on the image that I did, but I was wanting to have some fun.  So here is the result…  Let me know what you think.

Captured with 1D Mark IIN 16-35f2.8 II on Lexar digital film

Nik, Weddings Canon, Nik Software, Silver Efex, Wedding

So my good friends Erica and Roger asked me if I would photography their wedding.  A risky proposition since I hardly shoot weddings, but they trusted me to capture one of the happiest days of their lives together, so who am I to say no…  It was a long day of fun starting at around 930am for me and not ending until 900pm that night, but hey it’s Vegas… so here is a bit of what I shot…

I don’t know why but black and white just felt right on these images.

Just wanted to say thanks again to Erica and Roger for letting me capture these memories for them.

Images captured with 1D MarkII N 70-200f2.8 on Lexar digital film..  finsihed with Nik Silver Efex Pro

Black and White, Nik, Photography, Weddings Canon, Las Vegas, Nik, Silver Efex, Wedding