Bayou Vista Sunset

Bayou Vista Sunset 4, a photo by Daniel Ray on Flickr.

On the way back home from the Galveston Art-walk I stopped in the small community of Bayou Vista and just happened to be in the right place at the right time to be able to capture this image of the setting summer sun.

San Leon

Along with several other local photography enthusiast from the League City Photography Meetup Group, my wife, children and I visited the small community of San Leon, Texas in hopes of getting some sunset photos and possibly catching the full moon rising over Galveston bay. 

We started off with an early dinner at the Topwater Grill (the stuffed flounder is AMAZING!) and we talked photography and whatever else came to mind while waiting for the sun to fade and the 100+ temperatures of the sweltering south Texas summer to subside. The record setting drought that has impacted Texas for the last six months has provided us with near cloudless skies, but not today.  We instead were greeting with an overcast sky, and a much needed light rain for most of the day and continuing into the evening.  As dinner wound down the light rain stopped and the temperature dropped allowing us to enjoy the end of the day and capture some amazing photographs.

All images copyright Daniel Ray Photography.

Chinatown Musicians

While walking through San Francisco's Chinatown I heard music playing and though it was coming from one of the many small shops that lined the street. As I rounded a corner I came upon this group of five men playing authentic Chinese instruments.  A small crown was gathered around them listening to them and taking videos.

Creative License

When I first started on my journey into digital photography I had a purist mentality where I thought the image should be created in the camera with little to no post processing using the computer.  Through research I came to realize that even the legendary photographer Ansel Adams didn't capture the final image in the camera, he too used some sort of post processing in the darkroom to create his final images, so why can't I?

So, with the purist mindset pushed aside I set out to create the image that was in my minds eye but didn't actually exist at the moment I captured the original image.  I used Adobe Lightroom to convert the image to black and white and used a bit of dodging and burring (old darkroom terms for darken and lightening and image) to get just the right look.

Below is the original image straight out of the camera with no post processing.
 



Self

I think every photographer needs to do a self portrait at some time to capture how they see them self. I've been wanting to do a self portrait for some time now and finally got around to it.

This image started out as me just playing around with a single off camera speedlite (Canon 580EX II) to try and get a low key image illuminated with only the flash. This image was taken in my home office with the lights turned on, the camera mounted on a tripod with the 10 second self timer enabled and the speedlite sitting on a side table while I sat at my desk. The exposure was set to F8.0 at 1/125 of a second using ISO 160 to limit the ambient room light so the speedlite's flash would be the key light.
The color image was converted to black and white using Adobe Lightroom with some contrast, clarity and sharpening added. There was no heavy Photoshop editing used to produce the effect in this image.

So, what does this image say about me? Am I trying to hide something or expose my dark side? Maybe, but what I think it says is that I tend to see things as black and white. Not black and white photography but rather that I view the world as a contrast of black or white, good or bad, true or false. I'm typically not a "shades of grey" kind of person. I think my subconscious drove me to express this about myself through this image, plus it looks kind of cool.