Cyberward.net

Here is a slideshow of some images that I took while on the Texas Landscape Safari last week. What is this ‘Hipsta’ style? These are all pictures taken with an iPhone and the Hipstamatic iPhone app. I am using a B/W film that I will blog about later.

And yes, this is a rip off of Josh Bradley’s video. Kinda. He showed me some photographs taken with his iPhone and I was blown away. I loved the B/W effect he had going. I was already taking iPhone pictures, but this B/W effect really got me going. So, with a tip of the hat to Josh, here is my video.

Most of the images are from on TLS. There are a few at the end from the missions in San Antonio.

I will have another video a bit later with some other images. Same style.

I think the River Walk in San Antonio is pretty cool. Yes, it is touristy, and expensive, but it is pretty cool. I think a lot of cities would love to have as vibrant a downtown area as San Antonio. It’s a pretty walk. Trees, water, rocks, bricks, waterfalls, paths, grass, flowers, and pretty views. The river walk has it all.

We have stopped a couple of times now for margarita’s. It’s pretty nice to be sitting by the river in the shade of a tree sipping a margarita taking a few pictures and people watching.

I just realized that for a post with a title of ‘Falls’, I don’t have a picture of the falls. Anyway, this was one of my better pictures for the day.

Anyway, we spent Wednesday afternoon/evening at Pedernales Falls State Park. It’s quite a pretty place, but when we first got there, the cloudless sky was making the dynamic range a problem. The water has carved all kinds of channels and pathways through the rock. The water was low enough that the upper sections of the rock in these channels was very light. The bottom and the water, was very dark. Too large a range for the camera sensor. I didn’t end up taking too many pictures of these channels. I took pictures of several other things.
Luckily the light was hitting this tree nicely just before it ducked below the horizon. Unfortunately, with no clouds, no sunset. Still, it was a fun day. I’ll have other pictures later.

I thought this cloud, and it was about the only cloud we could find, looked kind of like a spaceship. We didn’t get too many clouds or exciting light for a sunset, so my spaceship will have to do. I’ll have pictures of enchanted rock another day.

We got to Bend State Park just as the sun was coming up. We waited a bit for enough light to be able to walk the trail to Gorman Falls. It is a pretty rocky trail, but probably still doable in less light. But it didn’t matter, as the light came around and onto the falls as we were there. This is just one of a bunch of images I have of the falls. I just wanted to get one up.

We are just heading out for the evening. We are going to be out late. I love shooting when it seems like the light is gone.

We tried to see the bats under the Congress street bridge again today, but no such luck. No bats. Unpredictable nature. You would think that someone had trained them by now So I bolted up the road to get a picture of the capital. There is a lot of light on this building, and the sky is just a little too dark. Couldn’t get a good balance. I was a little too late. Waited too long for the bats. Oh well.

We leave Austin Monday afternoon. No more bat chances.

Unfortunately, no bats. There are supposed to be hundreds of thousands of bats here, but we got skunked. This the the Congress bridge in Austin Texas. We staked out a tripod location on the east side by the Austin Statesman parking lot. They have signs up telling people you can park here. There were a lot of people around, and even more from the bridge.

I had understood that we would see a cloud like mass of bats. I was hoping to get some slow shutter speed pictures. I figured the light would be low anyway at sunset when they are supposed to come out. I guess the temp or humidity wasn’t quite right for the bats, and they preferred to stay hidden under the bridge.

I was pretty excited to find out that David Hobby and Joe McNally were coming to Minneapolis. These two photographers have been a good source of inspiration for me. They both have a ton of knowledge and give it away at the drop of a hat. David’s web site, the strobist, was one of the first places that I saw and dove into on using flash. But manual mode on the flashes still scared me, and I was excited as all get out to come across Joe McNally. I found his material in his books, a DVD with Bob Krist, and got to first meet him at a DLWS landscape workshop in Michigan. I became a TTL fiend, and wouldn’t leave that realm until recently.

Anyway, fast forward to Saturday, and they both rumble into town on the same bus. David with a slide projector, and Joe with an additional 18 wheeler full of gear. Well, maybe not that quite that much, but he sure pulled a lot of stuff out on stage. It was a great smackdown between manual and TT with David taking the morning and Joe the afternoon. Ok, there wasn’t much of a rumble, as both of them are way past arguing whether manual or TTL is better, but it made for some fun jokes.

There was a lot of great information presented. I feel like my understanding of using manual mode flashes jumped considerably. I am sure to use accent flashes more in my shots now. They make a huge difference. I may need another flash though. I am no where near David’s 12, or Joe’s 144. (I made up Joe’s number).

I came to this photography thing, or really any art/creativity thing fairly late in the game. I didn’t study or learn about hardly any painters or photographers that came before me. I started by learning about a handful of photographers in my generation. So I don’t have any real heros per say, but I definitely look up to these guys, so I took the opportunity to get the worst ever pictures taken with them. Taken with an iPhone is very low light by someone with obviously some kind of shaky hand disease. And these are after I ran them through some noise reduction. Quite possibly the worst pictures they have ever had taken of themselves. Hey, at least I didn’t take em!

My family photo gallery has been sorely neglected for quite some time. I have been at a loss of what to do. I was using zenphoto, and I do like it, but was in dire need of a new theme. Well, today I went looking to see if there were any new themes, and low and behold, I found one, zpGalleriffic. The one thing I don’t like is that it appears that there is no room for comments, and they have been turned off. I might need to figure a way to enable them. I also found out that zenphoto has a content management piece built in now. By turning that on I can have little news snippets and additional pages at the top. So far I added an about page, and some links back to Christopher Ward Photography for posts that I used my kids or family as models.

I managed to upload some new photos too. I still have a backlog of family photos to go through, but it’s a good start.

Anyway, if anyone wants to check it out, you can find it at Annie and Chris.net.

First of all, you will have to excuse the grainy pictures. I was shooting at f2./8 with the camera above my head praying that I got something in focus. I was shooting at 1600 ISO under the “romantic lighting” as Scott Kelby called it. PS. what’s the deal with both of the subjects putting their right hands up? That’s weird timing. Anyway, you can get an idea for the room, the stage, and the screens showing Lightroom or Photoshop.

Ok, let me back up. Yesterday I was at the Light it. Shoot it. Retouch it. seminar put on by NAPP, and instructed by Scott Kelby. I’ll let the cat out of the bag right up front and tell you it was well worth the day and the $99 (I paid $79 as a NAPP member) cost. The event was held at the Minneapolis Convention Center. Despite it being a huge room with a ton of people, I think the setup worked really well. I got there early enough that I got to pick a seat fairly close, but I think even the folks toward the back wouldn’t complain too much. There was a thrust stage that the NAPP folks were concerned that Scott would fall off of. He would shoot from the end of this back toward the end of the room with a large backdrop setup. He was shooting tethered into his computer, and the images he took would display in a couple of seconds up on two huge projector screens on either side of the stage.

Read the rest of this entry »