Christmas Beer

My wife and I decided to brew up some Holiday Ales this year with a lot of help from her parents. They have all the gear so we looked up some recipes and got the ingredients. We made two batches. They are both darker spiced ales. My favorite of the two has a strong cinnamon flavor. I took some print ad style photos for for the portfolio. I might actually add text etc... and make up a fake ad just for the fun of it. But, here's the final picture.

Update on Thursday, December 29, 2011 at 8:32PM by Anthony Sheler

I created a fake "magazine style" print ad for the Soused Santa beer just for fun since I already had the photo...

Happy Holidays!

My wife decided to decorate the nose of our 4wd sleigh. This is a HDR (High Dynamic Range) composited photo. Put simply, it's a series of images taken at different exposures (brightness) and then merged together. It's a great tool for when lighting conditions are not ideal because the camera can't take in as much light as the human eye can since eyes adapt constantly when you look around. To get the Jeep exposed correctly, the camera would have "blown out" the sky and other highlights. When you want to present a picture the way you saw it, HDR can help accomplish that. I use software to automatically combine the images. But, most of the time some additional photoshop work is needed to pull back elements from one or more of the original shots. Of course, for the purposes of posting on the internet, I have photoshopped the license plate, but this is the final result. I'll post a couple of other shots on Flickr as well.

Working with Children

They say never to work with children or anmials. But, some times they are just too adorable not to. In this case, the young boy and girl were not difficult at all. I think the little girl was even sad when the shoot was over actually. She was very cute. It was an abbreviated session to get just one picture for use on the client's Christmas card. We did some family shots and some with just the kids in two locations around the client's home. here's one of my favorite's...

Festival of Lights

I visited the Grotto in Portland last night with my wife and in-laws for the Festival of Lights. It was a beautiful night without any rain. The amount of lights and decoration reminded me of the Griswald house from the movie "Christmas Vacation". I took a few nice HDR photos with some long exposures. I still have a couple more shots to work on. Here's a shot of the church all lit up and the blue strip on the right side is actually light projected on the elevator shaft that goes up to the top of the cliff. More pictures from the Grotto are on my Flickr Photostream.