Shane White's Bachelor Party

HDR Testdrive

One of the things I started experimenting with this summer was HDR photography.  There are many great photographers who produce excellent HDR images.  My favorite is Trey Ratcliff over at www.stuckincustoms.com.  He has a very unique style that brings pictures to life.  As seen in the previous post, there is a lot of range in what HDR can do.  Starting out, I overdid some of it, but that helped me to define what I wanted the pictures to look like.  This HDR was made at sunset in San Antonio, TX. To process this, I used Aperture and Photomatix Pro.  Protomatix is a great program that is easy to use to combine pictures to create one HDR frame.  It also makes experimenting with different styles very easy.  

The Challenge... One Post Per Week - Mission San Juan Capistrano

If you know something about Texas history, it probably has to do with The Alamo and the Texan’s fight for independence.  Far fewer people know however, there are several other Spanish missions inside the San Antonio city limits.  The first one I visited was Mission San Juan Capistrano. 

The Spanish missions in Texas were designed with different objectives compared with their Californian counterparts.  In California, missions were placed a one days walk apart so travelers would have somewhere to sleep at night.  In Texas, the five missions in the south of San Antonio are only about 3 miles apart and are placed that way because they served as a place of protection for the local inhabitants from raiding Indians.  As the case with most of the missions in this area, most of the walls have been destroyed, however now it is part of the National Park System and is well kept.  If you would like more information, visit the NPS website.  http://www.nps.gov/saan/planyourvisit/sanjuan.htm

A Little Decorating Fun...

I took the opportunity this year to create a timelapse of putting up the decorations at my church.  I hope you enjoy it!  Merry Christmas!

Summer Project Part 0

Several months ago I posted I would be going through my entire portfolio on my blog.  That all came to a halt due to a small thing called finals.  Shortly after that I left for the summer for work and am now just getting back.  Now I realize I could have easily posted this summer, however I just had so many other things going on, the posts never really materialized.  So here is the start of a series of posts based on a project I assigned myself this summer.  Why a project?  Well, I have read several photography books and listened to many podcasts including This Week in Photography and The Digital Story, both of which provide lots of information ranging from gear and techniques to where to find inspiration.  One question I often hear asked is, “how do you stay excited about photography when you do it every day?”  The most common answer I have heard from these great podcasters is, assign yourself a project and see it through.  To give you a little incite to what my project was about, I worked in San Antonio, TX this summer and here is one picture to look at.