Kenneth Reynolds

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Yesterday’s sunrise was a pleasant surprise. After literally weeks of missing just barely missing gorgeous sunsets and sunrises I finally managed to find a nice, relatively open spot to shoot the sunrise from, with just enough time to spare to set up the camera and compose the shot. Overall, this is possibly one of my favorite sunrise/sunset shots ever. The dynamics of the clouds interacting with the rising sun are just incredible! This photo was captured from directly in front of the Bolden community swimming pool at Vandergriff Park in Arlington.

The transition from the blue clouds to the deep orange is one of my favorite aspects of this photo. This is the natural coloring of the scene as I witnessed it with my eyes, however, because I shoot in Auto White Balance mode on my camera, the camera did not capture the scene as you see it above. In fact, the camera captured the scene much warmer, with almost no hint of blue in those clouds. This was easily color corrected in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom by manually adjusting the white balance temperature. For this photo I ended up with a white balance temperature of 3383. The original white balance temperature, as captured by the camera, was 5700.

Final processing on the image was done in Photoshop CS3, where I began by creating a fake Grad ND filter effect to balance the exposure between the sky and foreground. One of these days I’ll finally get a Grad ND filter to put in front of my lens, instead of relying on Photoshop to do it for me. Once I got the exposure balanced to my satisfaction, I completed the image with my customary sharpening technique in Photoshop, which simply consists of converting to Lab mode, selecting the lightness channel, applying an unsharp mask filter and adjusting the settings until I get the desired amount of sharpness and added contrast. Finally, I convert the image back to RGB mode and save.

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Lately it has felt like my creative vision and, as a result, my photography, has become unbearably stagnant. Photography is essential to who I am, so stagnation simply was not an option. Not no way, not no how. As a close friend of mine wisely advised, the key to staying creative is to change up your approach; try something completely new and different. I’ve done this before with pleasant results. I knew it was time to do so again, as suggested. The photo above is a result of this drastic change. What’s so different? Everything, really. For starters, when I went out to the Village Creek Drying Beds to shoot landscapes on this day, I took only my Canon 50 mm f/1.8 lens with me. That’s right, the 17-40L stayed at home. I knew that if I brought it with me and even left it in the truck while I hiked around, I would eventually make my way back and switch out lenses. In order to force myself to see differently, I had to force myself to use only one lens. And what better to lens than a fast normal lens? Quite frankly, I should have begun my adventures in photography with just a cheap-o 50 mm lens 3 years ago. Alas, here I am now.

Overall, I am pleased with this photo. My main focus going forward is to simplify my compositions. I’ve noticed more and more that my landscape photos have been lacking a clearly defined subject portrayed in a simple composition. Because of this, my photos have not been nearly as dynamic as they should be in order to provide the greatest visual impact and intrigue. The photo above is my first step in the right direction, though still it is too busy and definitely lacks a clearly defined subject. That’s okay, though, because experiments exist for our learning benefit. I am getting quite excited, though, as I am beginning to see scenes differently. Dynamically. Photographically. And it’s about time.

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I couldn’t resist heading over to the Village Creek Drying Beds wildlife refuge for a photo outing this afternoon after noticing the giant, puffy white clouds floating lazily in the sky. What can I say? I’m a sucker for puffball clouds! Once I arrived at Village Creek, I headed straight for the somewhat secluded pond near the northwest corner of the refuge. I started out shooting your typical “point and shoot” landscapes, but quickly realized that approach was not working out to my taste, so I opted instead to hike a little closer to the water’s edge and lay down on my stomach amongst the tall grass. I shot over 100 RAW images from this spot and finally tried this composition, which ended up being my favorite of the day.

Aside from experimenting with different compositions and camera positions, I also experimented with focusing at different depths in the scene. In the photo above, the focus is roughly in the middle ground, on the tall weed that is sticking straight up. I feel that having that area in tack sharp focus draws the viewer’s eye through the image rather well. Another thing to note about the focus and depth of field in this image is that it was captured at an aperture of f/8.

Post processing was not much different from my normal process. I did all of the heavy lifting in Lightroom, which mainly consisted of tweaking the Tone Curve to be more curved, instead of straight, in order to add the proper amount of contrast to the scene. Aside from that, I tweaked the luminance values of the blues, yellows, and oranges to make them pop just a bit more. Finally, I completed the image in Photoshop with my customary sharpening technique.

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Thanksgiving at Village Creek was quite cold. Despite the cold, there were an abundance of various ducks populating the different ponds inside the refuge. Ducks, or wildlife in general, were not on my shot list today, however. My goal was to seek out areas from where I could photograph some of the unique landscapes that capture the essence and personality of the Village Creek Drying Beds. I was successful in discovering a couple of very cool little spots that are tucked away a bit from the main thoroughfare. I’m really excited about the direction that my photography is headed toward in regards to shooting landscapes at Village Creek. I really feel that I have a chance to build a comprehensive body of work that is a clear and concise representation of what makes Village Creek such a special place to visit and photograph.

I captured the photo above in color, originally. Unfortunately, due to the gray, heavily overcast sky, the colors in the scene were washed out and there was simply no contrast at all. The scene, however, was way too killer for me to just write off the image. So, I did what I normally do in situations like this and, upon importing the photo into Lightroom, I tweaked the curve to give it more of a curve, instead of a straight line, and then converted the image to black and white. Obviously, it works quite well, yet again. My usual sharpening technique and the presentation frame were done inside Photoshop to complete the image. I’m beginning to see a couple of themes emerge from my photographs of Village Creek landscapes and I can’t wait to experiment more with them and see where the path leads.

I had a couple of hours of free time this evening after my friend’s funeral and was in need of some quiet, alone time to just be with God and heal. Obviously, there is no better combination of quiet time and healing than to engage in photography. So, I stuffed my Canon 40D with 17-40L attached into a discreet canvas bag, grabbed the tripod, and set out in search of something to photograph. After driving aimlessly for about an hour, I decided that my subject today would be a Thanksgiving Eve sunset out at Lake Arlington. This will probably be my last sunset photo from Lake Arlington until spring, at the earliest, although I won’t stake my life on that, either.

At any rate, I feel that this photo perfectly captures the day’s atmosphere as well as the mood I was in. I did leave in a much brighter, and more positive mood after packing up my gear and leaving, which is exactly what I had hoped for when I set out. Over the next few days I hope to spend a significant amount of time capturing landscapes out at the Village Creek Drying Beds, so keep an eye out here for photos from there over the weekend.

Hope everyone has an awesome Turkey Day!

After an extended absence I am back in full-force. I will be posting about once a week, for a while, until I build my image library up to a large enough size to warrant new posts every day. Plus, because of my new job as a Laptop Tech at GameStop, I will only be able to get out and shoot during the weekends, and maybe a weeknight or two, here and there. At any rate, I am settling back into a regular schedule that will include regular, weekly photography outings again.

The image above was captured at the Village Creek Drying Beds wildlife refuge in northern Arlington. It has been well over a year since I have actually gone to Village Creek to shoot wildlife, mainly because there is not much wildlife to see out there these days. But, Village Creek is still an awesome place to go for anyone interested in general nature or landscape photography. Nothing special about this image, aside from the fact that I converted it to black and white in Lightroom and then applied my customary sharpening technique in Photoshop.