photography Archives - Page 182 of 203

January 13, 2013

Ballroom Dance, Event, Photography | 0 comment

Arthur Murray photos

Tysons, Virginia

More photos from the DC Area Arthur Murray Spring Freestyles. This was the first of their 4 local events that we covered last year. It was held at the Sheraton Premiere in Tysons Corner, VA. This is a site of many of their events, and overall a great ballroom for photography. Additionally with the available balcony, we have a lot of flexibility in setting up our lights. On balance it is always nice to work at a familiar venue!

Elias from the Columbia, MD studio dancing with a student in Tysons, VA ©TimeLine Media

Arthur Murray Event

Carolina dancing with a student in Tysons, VA ©TimeLine Media

As can be seen this room offers a lot of options from photography. With this intention, you need to have different approaches to photos. Especially since you will be there for many hours of a weekend. In order to get a variety of images to keep fresh, it is useful to change your body position, and your angle to the dancers out there. You can go from a low angle, a higher angle, to change the backgrounds in the photos. With the length of the room, it still allows you to blur the backgrounds.

Silver Spring, Maryland studio dancing at an Arthur Murray event ©TimeLine Media

Arthur Murray Potomac Cup - trophy for the Team Match competition ©TimeLine Media — Potomac Cup – trophy for the Team Match competition at Spring Freestyles ©TimeLine Media

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

January 11, 2013

Personal, Photography, Travel | 0 comment

Air Force Memorial – Arlington, VA

Photo project at the Air Force Memorial in Arlington

I forced myself on this Friday to get out of the house early while the sun was still low on the horizon to try to get some photos. Living in the Washington DC area gives you lots of opportunities to make images of memorials, monuments, that are familiar to everyone around the world. That makes it a challenge to make something new.

Having easy access to these sites, gives you an opportunity to get images that tourists, and visitors do not have. Waiting for the best light can be tough, but this was the best day I had in a while. I was hoping for clouds with a striking sunrise, just as everyone does, but this day was something different. Lots of cloud cover, with only the hint of a sunrise low on the horizon. It was not what I was planning, but I made the best of it. The Air Force Memorial rises up above Arlington, VA with a beautiful view of the Pentagon and Washington, DC. Going early in the morning also ensure not too many visitors to remove with software later!

Air Force Memorial - Arlington, VA - www.timelinedc.com

Post-processing with Nik HDR Efex Pro

While shooting, I reviewed the images on the back of the screen, and thought that these would benefit from HDR, or High Dynamic Range processing. In order to do this, I placed the camera on a tripod, and bracketed the exposures. The aperture was set at f/8.0 to get a large depth of field to see all the way to the Washington Monument. Then I took 8 different exposures from overexposed to underexposed around the meter reading in the camera.

When I got back to the computer, I loaded the photos into the Nik HDR Efex Pro plugin for Adobe Photoshop. In the first image, I was attempting to make adjustments to bring out a little drama in the clouds, but make the rest of the photo as close to how I saw the scene. The image below, I cropped out the horizon to emphasize the fact that this was a memorial to those that serve their country in the air. I processed the image as before, then converted it to black and white. This makes the tones in the monument match the tones in the clouds, but with a striking contrast from the organic clouds, and the man-made structure centered in the frame.

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

January 10, 2013

Personal, Technology | 0 comment

Tech Thursday – HP Z420 Workstation

Windows Workstations

It may sound strange in this day and age, but I am a PC guy. Almost all of my photographer friends have machines that run some version of Mac OSX, but I remain a Windows user. Since college, I have assembled my own computers from parts that I select for no other reason than for fun! It used to be a nice hobby to hand select parts, put them together, tweak all the settings to get the most out of the hardware, and enjoy until the upgrade bug hits again. This has served me well. I have not had to rely on “geek” companies to keep my PC running. The internet has so many enthusiast communities that allow you to troubleshoot your own computer, and better search algorithms allow you to search for your specific problem easily.

HP Z420 Workstation

Now, my PC is more than just my email and hobby machine. I need it to run software essential for my business – design, office, financial programs. Additionally it need to run the Adobe Creative Suite that I primarily use for editing photographs.

Apple makes great products. I have a number of iPads to show photos at events, as well as an iPad and iPhone that I use daily. But when it comes to the back end, I prefer using machines that I can tinker with when things start to act funny. Unfortunately, I no longer have the time to work on my PC as a hobby. I need a professional workstation that is built to work on complicated projects. Also it needs to remain online with multiple applications running simultaneously.

My last PC was a home-built machine with an Intel Core Q9550 processor from a few years ago. After lots of specs comparison, I decided to become an HP guy. They had a monitor that was rated well for editing photos. So I decided to pair that with a machine from their Z Workstation line, the HP Z420. It is based on an Intel Xeon E5-1650, 8GB of RAM, and I added a Samsung 840 SSD as a boot drive for Windows 8.

Adding the drive was so easy as getting inside the case was as easy as pulling the big handle on the side to open (see first photo). As my first upgrade in quite some time, this workstation runs Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom 4 much faster which is sorely needed as I go through the thousands of ballroom dance photos every year. Let me know you have any questions on the hardware choices.

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

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Posts Tagged ‘photography’

Arthur Murray photos

Tysons, Virginia

Arthur Murray Event

Air Force Memorial – Arlington, VA