Dennis C. Boyd bio picture
  • Welcome to my Adventures in Photography

    This blog has been created to document my adventures in Photography as well as the day to day learning of new techniques and composition skills I am obtaining along the way.

    My intent is not only to showcase my experiences and photos taken, yet to help others along with their learning experiences as well.  I will be posting not only my favourite things, yet my mistakes and my attempts at various techniques.. the whole thing.

    I would love feedback as well... comments, critiques, questions... you name it... would love to hear what you think about my mis-adventures.

    Thanks for visiting... and hope to hear from you soon :)

    One last note:  If you are interested in learning more about Photoshop and Lightroom, head on over to the National Association of Photoshop Professionals.  I wasn't sure at first if membership was worth it, but the magazines along with the discounts for the programs paid for itself within the first week.  Yep... big fan.. lots to learn, but a great place to start.

Snowmachine trail at -7 Celcius

It was a gorgeous weekend and I just didn’t have it in me to stay inside and finish the wiring in the basement.  Nicole had already spent the morning at the farm working her horse while enjoyed a morning sleeping in.

I needed to do something creative today and Nicole was up for anything.  We took off driving around town trying to find something (bright sunny day, no beautiful coloured sky, lots of white everywhere from the fresh snow… hmmm) and ended up behind New Prospect School on the Snowmachine trails.

I took two lenses; the EF 70-200 f/4 IS USM and the Lensbaby Composer.  We started shooting on the upper trail, just out of the bright sunlight and despite the -7 Celcius temperature… it was still cold:).

Here is Nicole goofing around without her jacket on, a quick snap when she wasn’t expecting it…

For the next shot here we were back deeper in the trail, deeper in the shade…

Once we ended up at the bottom of the trail by the stream I fired off these last two as we were rushing to head home and out for supper.

The Lensbaby shots didn’t turn out as I had expected, maybe because I was in a hurry at the last minute, maybe because I couldn’t focus… ha… either way… lets just keep those shots hidden for the time being as I still need more practice with the Lensbaby.

But… I did learn a lot today…

We were shooting mostly in the shade of the trees, deep within the trail for the first two shots here and later with the third shot the sun was to Nicoles back.   What did I accomplish you ask?  I shot these with my 580ex II on ettl for fill.

Yep… I was shooting with a flash in broad daylight… trying it out in the worst way (on camera) possible to see how it would light up areas needing some fill lighting.  I can really tell the shots are done with a flash though… can you?

Prophoto 3 update

Well… I have to say… I love the ProPhoto wordpress customizations.  I’ve just installed the V3 updates to the blog and will be changing the layout this week.

Stay tuned for some visual changes to the site… lots of customization with ProPhoto V3….

Fall adventures, Portrait Professional and Photoshop masking/overlays

Phew… that’s a title in itself isn’t it?

As I’m trying to learn more each day, well… today was one of those.  I’d seen a photo on Model Mahem that I liked today and thought why not try and emulate the shot in a way or at least the effect.

So I decided to start with one of the simple shots Nicole and I took this summer, this is her standing on the site of the future shop (aka the garage pad in the middle of the yard).

I started of running the shot through Portrait Professional to clean it up a bit.  Unfortunately Portrait Professional (or from what I know of it so far) only works on the head area and some cleaning up of the rest of the skin could be done manually.  For now… this is what I’m using for the rest of the testing and besides… she’s beautiful enough to start with so why mess with it ?:)

For the second round and to start the layering I added an overlay from OnOne PhotoFrame (but any would have done) and masked out Nicole so she was not covered by the overlay itself.

For the third and final attempt tonight I added a second overlay on top of the first and the mask, reducing the second overlay to 20% to not obscure the skin to much but also add depth to the first overlay.

So not the same effect as seen in the Model Mayhem shot, but fun playing around with texture overlays and such and happy about the learning experience.

Fall adventures revisted

This fall I had the chance to try out some “silhouettes” as Nicole threw on her black dress and “posed” for me and the camera.

Ha… yes… it was fun having a live person to try shots out on… and we had a blast.  I’ve posted a few of the shots before but last night came back to them to see what other shots I’d overlooked.

Here is another one from that same day (September 17, 2009) that I worked on in Photoshop last night.

I am learning Photoshop CS4 day to day and knew this was shot I wanted to play with a bit while scanning through the raw files.  Here is the info on what I did…

Brightness/Contrast, Levels and Vibrance tweaked in Photoshop CS4.

Shot with the Canon EOS 50D and the EF 70-200mm f/4L IS USM

ISO: 400
Exposure:1/8000 sec
Aperture:f/8.0
Focal Length:100 mm

Now here is the original untouched…

Did I get it right… what are your thoughts?

admin - Haha, but I am just a Paramedic trying to find a creative bone in my body ;)
I’ve sooo much to learn…soo much. Thanks for the comments though David :) January 30, 2010 – 11:45 pm

dave salonen - wow this site is cool nice – and i just thought you were a paramedic !January 30, 2010 – 10:28 pm

Back on track…

Well folks… Thank YOU!!!

I truly appreciate the e-mails lately and honestly… it has renewed my faith that others out there are simply enjoying photography as I do.  I appreciate the thoughts and advice and you have reaffirmed that we truly do have an amazing local photographic community.

On other notes though (and skipping ahead from this last issue) I am still working on the new web site for our local camera club.

John had mentioned last summer that running the club was taking up way too much time and like most, he has his hands full doing many other things.  I bumped into him recently at the Pool and Fitness center and I mentioned I’d love to help out, later on realizing that my offer to assist was going to take on more than I knew.:) Ha… but I am looking forward to it and the adventure ahead.

A bit of a backgrounder on this though before I go into it more:

A while back I was lucky enough to bump into a few people around town who were out shooting with their cameras.  Each and every time I’d meet someone we’d always talk about forming a little group of locals who were interested in photography.  It never really materialized, maybe because we had just met for the first time, maybe because some of us were not as involved with it as others, maybe because I never got off my butt to do so, who knows… but I kept on meeting new people and the same topics kept coming up.

Soon after I bumped into a local “kid” who was out dirt biking for the day.  I asked the group of kids dirt biking if I could practice shooting them in the sand pits and this guy comes up, quietly and we start talking about the cameras and such.  ”Joel” has that eye that I can only dream of, I’m better with the tech side of things…  Hmm…

So… we start shooting together, learning about off-camera lighting, experimenting and having fun teaching each other.  Joel led the way on the Internet for our little group creating a challenge site where we could try things out and post our results on Flickr (3Day Challenge).  The next thing I know, Chris and then Bruce join in and we have our own little group that is not really into the class thing but hands on shooting things in my living room.

In the mean time, John has managed to pull together over two dozen others in town and formed the local photo club.  Wow… we didn’t even know about it at the time and our little group was growing day by day on the opposite side of the coin.

So even though we had basically two small groups meeting about photography in town, we didn’t really know what each other was doing.  I then decided to join up Dryden in the Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photo Walk this past summer and knew that to get more involved I’d better go to the other club meetings.  Sure enough… I meet Derek, Ed, Doug and a few others and our Photo Walk got a bit bigger.  Actually, so did our little get togethers… with Derek coming along (and Doug and Ed expressing interest) and lighting up the yard and house with the rest of us.

Going to the local Photo Club meeting was a great experience and a tremendous realization that there were a LOT of people in town and the surrounding area interested in Photography.  I kept thinking to myself… how do we get all these people together, those who are Internet savy, those who have just bought their first computer to use these new fangled digital cameras, those who love the classroom style learning to those who avoid it with a passion?

John had put together an amazing group of people whom were just doing that… from all walks of life, sitting in a meeting room sharing and learning to getting out on “adventures”.  Yep… now how to take it a bit further?

So… he had my interest big time… how to get our group involved with the others and how to get the others involved with our group?  How do we get those who are just getting into Photography involved with those with experience in it?  How do we take our enthusiasm and learn from experience?

With that, after I had met John again at the Pool and Fitness Center and he asked me if I was willing to help with the club, he forwarded all the locals e-mails and sent out a note last month telling everyone I’d be on contact with them soon.  He also handed over a disc of notes and such that I’m going through to try and figure out what all has been accomplished and what the plans were for the upcoming year for the group.  I had an e-mail all ready to go out and then decided to merge a partition on my second hard drive… crashing the entire computer.  Luckily enough I had bought the HP MediaSmart 470 Server to make daily backups of my computers on (3.5 terabytes of storage)…

Sure enough, the backups will not work, the Windows Home Server 2003 backup software has corrupted the files and is unable to reformat the hard drives… BAM… all that secure information and backups were lost.  Well… sort of:) Yes… I’m hacking into the files to retrieve what I can, and crossing my fingers that my outlook files (with all my subscriptions and passwords) are more recent than my manual backups from last month.

I should have the e-mails back this week and will be sending out one ASAP.

In the  meantime;

I do have a web site domain name ready to go and will be setting up another copy of Invision Power Board for the group to use to communicate here on the web.  I’ve also set up a Facebook group (Dryden Photo Club) for anyone on Facebook as well as I have have posted some information to our local Flickr group (Northwestern Ontario Photography).  The name for the new site will be www.nwophoto.info and will be FREE to anyone interested in Photography in our area and will include a calendar, discussion forums, gallery, blogs and much more.

Stay tuned… hoping that we can get a meeting up and running to find out what people would like out of the club, where they would like to meet, what they would like to learn and do…  and hopefully we can do it on the first week of February at the Centre again.

So… again… Thank you all for enjoying photography as much or moreso than I do:)

Look forward to seeing you out with a camera in hand soon:)