Nature

Textures

Working on getting enough textures and variety to release my own texture pack. So far I've provided some of these to the space Egypt team to use on the level. So far i have no idea if these have been used anywhere, except on my own stuff.

Ryan Woodward - Photography at the beach

Ryan Woodward came to give a life drawing demo today at the beach. Very interesting demo. 
Here is some photography from the event. 

First HDR photography

 

Not happy at all with it. Going to look up more information on HDR photography. 

This was all basically three shots with three different exposures combined into one picture in photoshop.

Photographing a Sundown

I came prepared with my polarizing filter, perfect for all sky shots, especially anything having to do with suns.
With this set I've decided to start a project with themes. So here's the project I've set up for myself:
A set of pictures for each primary color. So next up is yellow and blue.

The timing for these shots was perfect. When your subject is the sky and its color, then the time of day that you take your shots is key. So I went outside past 7pm right as the sky turned orange-red. I made sure to get foreground objects to have a strong contrast with the sky. Taking the pictures to lightroom I adjusted the color of the sky so that the sky is even reder and slightly more saturated. I also made sure to get a strong silouhette of the trrees by uping the contrast and clarity. Lastly, I gave the pictures some vignetting to further focus the pictures on the sky and guide the viewer to it.

So here they are:

For the rest visit my flickr!: Link to my flickr

Textures!

These pictures are actually pictures I took over the summer. I anticipated having to take textures for our levels sophomore year. For the rest of the set, as always, check out my flickr!

I took some time to focus solely on the software, Lightroom. The pictures were taken at in the afternoon past 6pm, so the light was less than optimal. I had to greatly increase the exposure in order to be able to see anything. In effect there was a lot of noise, so I also had to bump up the luminance under noise reduction. In effect, if bumped too high this caused to image to start looking a lot like plastic, so to balance this out I increased my sharpening and detail up to get back some of the detail. Also, I learned about lens correction, where there are pre-set settings in Lightroom that adjust your vignetting caused by your specific lens.

As I found out there is a lot of balancing to take care of when adjusting an image in Lightroom. If you adjust one slider, you will probably need to balance that with adjusting another and so forth until you get the effect you want.

On my to-do list is going out in the wild. Perhaps go to the beach or explore ringling for some more bright pictures. This time I am going to pay attention to my light and shoot around 12-4pm. For this, I've ordered a polarizer filter for my lens, in order to get richer colors under the sun and counter out reflections caused by the sun.

Magic

Used Lightroom for some quick post-process. Learned that if shooting in low light, shooting situations get tricky. So it's best to shoot in raw format in order to bring into lightoom and be able to later adjust settings and reduce noise caused by the high ISO setting.
Flickr link to rest of pictures