Exploring the city

Exploring the city on a photo walk is a great way to train the eye as well as practice various photography techniques. Right now the Digital Photography School has a weekly contest to practice the Rule of Thirds. A rule that I start with when composing but have made it to the point where I know when to break it as well.

Today I had some free time and wanted to head downtown for another mini walk with the contest in mind. I remembered cruising by Larimer Square a couple of nights ago and it was draped in Colorado state flags. I headed there first and grabbed a few choice shots:




I like the picture clear of cars driving by best.

The Denver City and County building is decorated every year through the Stock Show season with Christmas lights. There was a street lamp directly behind me and I wasn't able to pan around much so composition was dictated a little on this shot. Thankfully I was able to fill up the frame but the colors are a bit harsh. I may have to go back in with Lightroom and tone down color a bit. I've never actually decreased the saturation/vibrance on a picture before.



Even though my main purpose was to capture the building decorated with Christmas lights I've received the best reactions with the black and white version of the above picture.


On the same night as the City and County building pics I wanted to get some shots of the Denver skyline with my new tripod. I drive past the City Park Golf Course quite a bit and have noticed there are some good views of the city from that area. It's nice to know that no one is out golfing at night.


This first shot is with the 18-55mm kit lens. With the 30 second exposure I was actually able to capture some star movement which I didn't realize was possible at that length of exposure.


The second shot was zoomed in a bit with the 75-200mm lens. Able to crop out a good bit of the dead space on either side and fill the frame with just the city.

Look forward to more city scenes (Denver and abroad) mixed in with model and other cosplay photography!

What I learned from my first photo shoots

NDK 2011 was a long time ago. An extremely long time ago. But I recently started becoming better with Adobe's Lightroom 3 and my wife encouraged me to go back through and re-edit some of the photos I took. Originally I was editing all of my pictures with Picasa. I still think it's great for a free product but it definitely isn't made for sharing pics with cosplayers and having business cards created from the resulting files. The saturation is pretty unforgiving resulting in a strong green hue on the majority I got back.

First up to look at are Lilacwire, Dahlia, and Makoto with some phenomenal Gankutsuou costumes. After just mentioning how much better things are looking editing with Lightroom unfortunately to post those pics here I'd have to clog up my Flickr with duplicates so what you will see are Picasa edited pictures.


Left to right: Dahlia, Makoto, Lilacwire

One major thing I just noticed and was able to glean while re-editing the above picture is the importance of keeping an eye on your depth of field. I was shooting at f2.8 pretty much all day because I wanted as wide an aperture as possible to cram a bunch of light through my lens. But this caused Dahlia and Lilacwire to be out of focus while Makoto is in focus. Lesson learned!!!


Makoto


Dahlia

While shooting with the Gankutsuou girls I also took some shots of another friend of ours.
Here I'll illustrate a Picasa vs. Lightroom edit. First the Picasa:

Ringo

And the same pic edited with Lightroom3:

Ringo

Notice in the second picture I was able to make her dress more white and less blue. I was able to increase the exposure pumping up the rocks and flowers in the background a bit without blowing out the subject.

While important to get the full costume during a cosplay shoot there is a lot of detail to zoom in on as well.

This cosplayer wanted to show off hand decoration she had crafted and I wanted to catch her phenomenal purple contacts. In one shot we met two goals. Achievement unlocked!

Ali

And there we have it. My first attempts at shooting cosplayers on the fly complete with triumphs and lessons learned. Look forward to more in the future! Fanime is only a few months away.

Cheers!