So as I mentioned a few posts back I have been sorting and re-sorting and filing and categorizing all of my old files.  Something that was long overdue and greatly needed…  One thing that I found while comes through the files was thin image above.  Granted it looked nothing like this when I started because back then I was all about experimenting and tweaking Settings and White Balances and when I looked at this shot when I got back to the computer IT SUCKED!!  It was a drab mess of a white balance that was set so cold that the whole image was a lovely shade of purple  So back when I first saw this image I said forget it, and it has sat for the better part of 4 years on a hard drive taking up space.  Now 2012 roles around and I am sitting at my desk and I see a file that says Lessons Learned..  A file that I started a long time ago with images that were pretty much the bottom of the barrel, I screwed something up somewhere, or I was temporarily insane at the time of shooting.  But, I kept this file around so I could look back and see where I have been and what mistakes I had made so that I wouldn’t repeat them again.

Long story short I come across this images and think to myself:  This was shot in RAW I can change whatever White Balance I want!!  Ok, before the jabs come out with the “DUH josh you could have done that back in ’08″ I was younger and not so level headed (or at least that is going to be my excuse at this point)

So long story even shorter.  I dropped this into Lightroom 3, adjusted the White Balance to something I liked.  Even then the color image just didn’t work for me so I went with my favorite tool of choice Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2.0 and went to town on this image.  A few sliders here and there a touch of structure and BAM!  an image that I though was at the bottom of the barrel is no one of my favorites and is already sitting on my wall in a nice 24×36 frame.

So lesson with all of this rambling?  Keep your images, hard drives are cheap and you never now what you will find when you go browsing…

With all the things I have been involved with lately and all the time I have had on my hands being stuck at the house.  I did the unthinkable and went and completely reorganized and sorted all (YES ALL!!!) of my images to date.  It took the better part of 3 days, lots of coffee and tea, as well as the better part of my sanity.  However, I was able to complete this task and in the process I found images that I had completely forgotten about.  Some of these images were from a study of light that I did on flowers a few years back.  Others just good old fashion macro photography of flowers out in the wild.  One thing that I noticed was that while the colors are rich and wonderfully please in to the eye.  I wondered what would happen if I decided to shift the spectrum of color a bit, say to the Infra red side of things.  So I gathered up a set of images and Jumped into Color Efex Pro 4.0 and had a little fun with it.  The results are below.  Turned out pretty neat I think…

But enough of that.  As of today there is only 24 days left until I am kicking my heels up and hanging out with my great buddy Jeff Lynch on the next installment of the Texas landscape Safari.

I started thinking about the last trip out there and WHAT A BLAST it was to go to all these amazing locations.  I dug up some images from the old files and decided to give folks a preview of what is out there in Texas.  At the same time I thought I would play around with SEP 2 a bit more and have some fun…

If you are coming out to Texas for the event.  I will be the guy in the cowboy boots and hat (can’t miss me )

So onto business, see that image below? Yep, it may look slightly familiar if you followed last years Life@50 blog. It was a shot I didn’t decide to publish at the time because I just couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to make it visually appealing. I mean I took it knowing I wanted to do something with it, and my mind’s eye was working overtime spinning all the creative goodness into it. However, when I got back and sat down at the computer it just did nothing for me. So it has sat for a while steeping in the back of my brain as to why I took a shot I know I wanted, but then somehow forgot how I wanted to finish it.

And along comes a new toy, yes this is a B&W image so you know what I am talking about, Silver Efex Pro 2 (ah if only digital downloads could shine, this would be the shiniest dam thing on the block!!) I don’t know what it is about playing around with new goodies that makes it so much fun, but the instant I started playing I couldn’t stop. I tried a little of this and that, and then started finding all the new goodness that there was to enjoy, and I have to say I am hooked on this amazing new release of this software. If you own the previous version of this program, and love it I like did, then I truly believe that you will be obsessed with this one. I used a modified Pinhole preset on the image above and then added one of the new natural borders into the mix to make it interesting. Personally, I dig it.

I don’t know how to describe it other than it just works great!! The new features are to numerous to mention and just the amazing fine tuning the guys at Nik Software did on this program make it simply the greatest B&W conversion tool out there in my opinion.

So why am I standing on the soap box and cheering the praises of this awesome program? Simple, I like it, I like everything about it and what it does to help me tell the stories of my images. Remember the old proverb, Photographers are storytellers, think of this as my story editor to truly make you see what I saw while I was out there clicking away…

OK, I know yet another HDR image, but you know what it is fun to play with the new HDR Efex Pro from Nik Software.  Funny part is I really just like doing those single shot HDR images and seeing what I can some up with next.  In this case it was this shot from last weekend.  In color it just lacked something in HDR.  The blue in the sky was so overdirven (my own doing) that I just could find a happy medium to play with, so what did I do?  Black and White baby!!!  Now this time around I didn’t do my usual flow of working in HDR, exporting, then diving into Silver Efex pro.  Instead I did everything form inside HDR Efex Pro and I like the results…

Any how with all the holidays coming up I imagine things are going to quite down on the blog (like there already are not)  but I will have some neat stuff coming up soon.  The Life@50 project is coming to a close soon, and new endeavors are on the horizon along with the continuation of the Pen and Pad project, that had a few set backs this year, but will see a triumphant come back this upcoming year…

The Red Queen was a fun shot, finished the image using a process I haven’t used in a while inside of Color Efex Pro.  It was a combination of Tonal Contrast, Glamour Glow, and Dynamic Skin Softener combined in CS4  working in the image as a smart object so I could stack the filter on top of one another and make minor adjustments as needed to get the final effect…

Since this was Alice, this is my White Queen.  The effect on this one was similar to the one above the only difference was in the Dynamic Skin Softener, the values were adjusted for skin tones and I used the eye dropper to select what I felt as a good mid-range tone so that the skin would be effected as uniformly as possible..

Captured with Nikon D700 0-200f2.8 II on Lexar digital film

The shot above was from a dance recital my daughter was a part of, above is one of her great instructors. The light was hard coming of the stage light and made deep shadows, but it just worked at that moment. 

Captured Nikon D700 70-200 f2.8 II on Lexar digital film.

Has a great time shooting these, we found the great old door in the back alley parking lot of a local pub and stayed there for the better part of an hour shooting.

The conversion for this was done in Silver Efex Pro

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

So a funny thing happened yesterday, I found myself in Santa Barbara at the local Samy’s standing at the counter asking to see an Olympus.  That is right folks not only have I committed the sacrilege of switching camera systems from Canon to Nikon, but I now have an Olympus E-P2 in my bag as well…  (I am sure the hellfire and brimstone will rain down shortly).  So why did I get this camera?  The long and short of it is that I saw what this thing was capable of thanks to my buddy Ray Ketcham and a another amazing photographer out of Texas, Kirk Tuck.  The images with this little dynamo sparked a creative project that I am hopefully going to kick off very shortly assuming I can get my hands on a few more pieces of equipment needed.  At this point my buddy Jeff Lynch is probably rolling his eyes, saying that the gearlustitis is in full swing again, and he would be right.  One thing I have mentioned before on the blog and one that I know other photogs know is that one camera may not be able to do the job to get you that creative vision you had in your head…  So to that end the newest tool in the arsenal of creative vision is primed an ready to go, now if I could just manage to read the instruction book

Captured with Olympus E-P2 14-42 3.5-5.6 on SanDisk Digital Film

P.S.  There is going to be some format changes coming down the pipe, soon so if you see the blog in  disarray late at night that is me trying to relearn html coding using a sledge hammer…

Last Couple from the road trip home.  The Ranch House Cafe was on a stop somewhere past Roswell, NM.  A few buildings and the sign was all that was left of this road stop.  The cafe looked like it was out of commission for the better part of 10-15 years.

The old cabin was along the route home, had to shoot from the car because the wind storm that was coming in was pushing 40mph + winds that made getting out of the car not a hot idea.  Unless I wanted to have my teeth whitened by sand blasting.

Captured with Nikon D700 70-200f2.8 on Lexar digital film.