Sea Lion Caves

We just got back from a two night stay on the Oregon Coast near Yachats. We stopped in at the Sea Lion Caves yesterday morning. It's a few miles north of Florence. I had been there before, but my wife hadn't. She had second thoughts when we stepped on the elevator to go down into the cave and the stench nearly overwhelmed her. Fortunately, the cave itself was much more pleasant. We had the place mostly to ourselves for the first few minutes so I setup my tripod for a few shots. With the lower light, I had to use longer exposures than I'd normally like to for animals and moving objects, but The Sea Lions were mostly subdued and there was more light than I expected coming in. The following is a HDR composite shot with the small island in the foreground and one of the legs of the cave leading out to the ocean behind it. The sea lion on the top of the island seemed to be posing there for me.

I also have a wide shot of the whole cave, but I was unable to position the tripod close enough to the bars protecting us tourists to keep them out of the shot. I'll throw it up on Flickr anyway if you are interested.

New Lights!

Hello all,

It's been a while since my last post, but the last month and a half have been a bit busy. I hope to start shooting and posting more again.

I recently picked up some new lighting equipment including several light stands, umbrellas and a flash mount. I wanted to do some test shooting so I bribed my favorite (and most difficult) subjects with a couple of biscuits... yes, they are our dogs, Mara and Chewie (Chewbacca). As difficult as it was to get them posed or capture their random poses, I think I got a few decent shots and an understanding of how I can best use the new lights and off-camera remote flash. The blanket they are on is not the best color for the tones in their fur, but it the dogs love it and it had already been sitting on the couch. I selectively toned down the color of the blanket in post to help make the dogs pop a little more. Here's a shot of the two of them together, which is rare to capture. More pics are on my flicker feed to the right if you're interested.

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.

Focus Stacking

I did a shoot a few weeks ago where the client wanted some pictures of the family playing poker. For one shot, I had an idea to put a hand of cards up in front of the camera to give it the perspective of another player in the game. However, with the distances and lighting involved, there was no way to get both the family and the cards in focus. But, there is a technique called focus stacking that made this shot possible. I took two pictures. The first with the family in focus and the second with the cards in focus. Then, in Photoshop, I opened the first image and masked in the cards from second where they were in focus. In the final image, all of the important eliments are in sharp focus. Here's the finished shot: