It’s been a slow start to 2015 for me but I’m starting to get back to the grind. The beautiful mountains here in Virginia always make for great photographs. Mix them up with a Formatt Hitech Firecrest 16 Stop ND Filter and you get something like this. I edited this one using Intensify by the awesome folks over at Macphun!
The weather has been cold lately here in Virginia for a few weeks with warm days here and there. I took the opportunity the cold weather brings and hiked up to the Cascades in Pembroke, VA for some winter photography. This was one I took along the way up to the water fall. You should visit the Cascades at any time of the year for a beautiful dose of nature.
I’m adding a new store to my blog where I will be adding presets throughout the year! First I’ve added a Lightroom Split Toning pack which has 7 of my favorite presets. These can be used on landscapes, portraits, macro shots or anything you wish! Here’s an example I created using the included preset Yellow Flowers.
Over the holidays I picked up a DJI Phantom 2 and a GoPro 4… man this thing is super fun! After reading the manual I was flying in like no time, it’s super simple. You can setup both the GoPro 3 and GoPro 4 to take both video and still photo’s at the same time now which is perfect for the Phantom. The 3 axis gimbal allows for steady video and still photographs while the quadcopter is flying around in the sky. Another cool feature is that if you fly it too far away from you or lose signal from your controller the Phantom will fly back to the takeoff location and land.
Flying above some fields near the mountains.
This year during vacation I ventured out into the ocean about knee deep with my Induro Tripod and Canon 60D fitted with the 70-200mm and shot wave after wave as they rolled in. It was a lot of fun trying to capture both the beauty of nature and the power of the ocean. I tried many different shutter speeds from .5 second to 1/60th trying to blend both the motion and stopping time at that perfect moment. I found this to be very therapeutic and calming even though having your camera gear in the mighty ocean would have frightened me to death a few years ago.
This year my son started a new sport Football so to bring in the new sport I shot a couple football portraits. This one is a composite portrait meaning the subject was shot in a studio location on a white background and then the background was swapped out later in Photoshop. I love shooting these things they are much different than my normal work! These allow me to mix the artistic backgrounds with a portrait, to create a one of a kind portrait.
For more information or if you’d like to have your own Sportrait session feel free to contact me.
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