Bacon Lettuce Photo

by Joe

This photo is of DeSoto Falls in DeSoto State Park, located in northeast Alabama. This area is the last vesitages of the Appalachian Mountains. While not nearly as dramatic as the huge mountains out West, the terrain in Northeast Alabama is rolling and beautiful. The Little River, which flows over DeSoto Falls, flows for a few miles and then into Littl River Canyon….one of the deepest gorges east of the Mississippi.

DeSoto Falls is one of my favorite places. At 104-feet tall, it’s the second tallest waterfall in Alabama, but certainly one of the most impressive. I feel a sense of awe when I visit DeSoto and particularly love it when the water is roaring over the falls after a good rain.

I shot this photo with a Nikon D80 and a Sigma 10-20mm lens. This is a 1 second exposure, shot at f.14 and a 12mm focal length. I wanted to give a wide view of the falls and the pool/canyon below.

If you ever find yourself in North Alabama, I highly recommend a visit.

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Brought to you by iLovePhotos

by Joe

It was a dark and stormy day in rural Pennsylvania… hazy in more ways than one as we returned from the Roy Pitz Brewing Company in Chambersburg. My girlfriend and I have both been shooting digital for a few years now and whenever we travel it ends up taking twice as long because we shoot everything (30,000 photos in the last 18 months).

Cut to the chase: Over the hills in the distance we caught sight of clouds rushing down the side of a mountain.

Me: “Get off at the next exit!”
Girlfriend: “Are you sure? You don’t even know where we are?”
Me: “Just get off and go north.”

After a series of U turns and backtracking we end up coming over the crest of this hill and knew I was in the right spot.

Truth be told, I’m not 100% happy with the outcome of this shot, but I love the mood and the texture. Its an HDR (5 exposures - blended with photomatix) shot with a sigma 10-20. I love shooting from the hip or setting the camera down with this lens.

Note: Its important to have a spotter when laying down in the road

Thanks Marty, this is a great example of an HDR. Very well done with nice perspective, angle, and point of view.

The best program for creating HDR’s is photomatix. It is payware but definitely worth it.

by Joe

A simple sunset on the Chesil Beach at Portland, part of the World Heritage Jurassic Coast on the south coast of Dorset, UK.

This pebble beach is one of my favourite places for photography, the beach stretches 18 miles from West Bay nr Bridport in the west to my home on the ‘Isle’ of Portland in the east.

This picture was taken one early evening last week, that evening I had already taken some pictures of the boats and other things that I had seen on the beach. I was mainly using a Nikon D90 and a Sigma 10-20mm wide angle lens (love this lens for landscape images) taking bracketed images, 3 exposures of the same image at -2, 0, +2 exposure values for compositing as HDR images, however because the different exposures are captured over a period of time, any movement in a scene (on this occasion moving water) can interfere with the hdr effect by ghosting the edges of moving objects.

It was getting very dark and the sun was just hitting the horizon, the water was quite calm so I grabbed several sets of bracketed images with the remaining available light, hoping that the slow movement of the water would have little effect when compositing the images in my hdr software (primarily Photomatix or HDR Soft by Artizen).

When I did get home and started to look at the images, I found that because of the low light and fairly long exposures (1/30th for handheld) there was substantial water movement between exposures and I abandoned hope of making any hdr images. Nevertheless I opened one set of exposures as a multi layered image in Photoshop and looked at the possibility of using areas from each exposure to combine as one image using layer masks, the attached picture is the result of this.

For the sky I used the shortest exposure - as this was the brightest area (masking out the sea and foreground), the middle sea area was taken from the normal exposure (masking out the sky, breaking wave and foreground) and the foreground beach and breaking wave was taken from the longest exposure - as this was the darkest area (masking out the sky and middle sea areas).

I was quite surprised to see how well the different exposures combined together and with a little adjustment to curves, colour and contrast, I was very happy with the result.

The image does lack any subject content, but the idea was to create an image of restful peace, I hope you like it.

See more photos by Peter.

by Joe

I feel kinda cheap making myself “Today’s Bacon” but I thought this was a special case.

The night sky on the Big Island of Hawaii is something to see, especially at Mauna Kea. Some of the clearest darkest sky is up there. I took the opportunity to shoot the night sky. You can try and replicate these photos as well.

Camera I used was a Nikon D80
My exposure was set for 30 seconds.
Aperture at f/4.5.
The lens I used was a 10-20mm Sigma lens and the focal length was 12mm.
My ISO was set for 3200 which is ridiculously high but needed to gather what little light was out there.

by Joe

The photo was taken on a boat trip in West Cork. The lighthouse is called the Fastnet. We were looking for whales and dolphins, but unfortunately we didn’t see any so the lighthouse was the main focus for the trip.

I asked the skipper to go this side of the lighthouse as I thought I might get a good silhouette with the sun setting. I used a canon 400d with a sigma 10-20mm lens. The boat was rocking in fairly heavy waves but managed to get a fairly decent shot. I then converted to black and white in photoshop and used levels to bring out the clouds and the waves.

Again, notice how the photographer used the strong back light, in this case the sun, to produce a beautiful silhouette of the main subject, the lighthouse.

Also, I would like to add that the Sigma 10-20mm lens is my favorite lens in the whole world. I use it everywhere I go and often times when friends ask me what their next lens purchase should be I always recommend getting this lens.