Lenspiration

Flower in the Forest

James — Tue, 21 May 2013 01:41:40 +0000

Here’s one of many gorgeous flower pictures taken on the family vacation to Grandfather Mountain last week. Flowers were everywhere!

Flower in the Forest

I don’t like to post a picture without giving a quick tip behind it. Usually, I will take super-close-ups of flowers to eliminate background distractions. However, this beautiful trillium was in just the perfect spot between the forest and a field. I wanted to capture the feeling of standing at the edge of the forest so I positioned myself to include the tree on the opposite side of the flower and the field behind it in full sunlight. To make sure the field wasn’t completely washed out, I made sure to choose a flower in the sunlight so the exposure in the foreground would match that of the field, causing the field to stay in proper exposure and the forest to fall into darkness. I also made sure to keep the rule of thirds and color contrast in mind as I took the shot.

It looks like we’ll be visiting this same location along the Blue Ridge Parkway during CAPTURE North Carolina!

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A Walk in the Park

James — Fri, 17 May 2013 00:26:08 +0000

Grandfather Mountain State Park isn’t your typical walk in the park! Even the parks main attractions are extreme. The “singing bridge” boasts of being 1 mile above sea level and the short hike from the bridge to McCrae peak (the closest peak to the bridge) is the most strenuous and dangerous trail I’ve ever hiked, recommended only for experienced hikers and requiring ladders and ropes to ascend the tree-less, windswept cliffs!

Before knowing how strenuous the trails actually were, and upon discovering we could avoid a $18.00/person entrance fee if we hiked in on the back trails, we decided to take the 6 mile route to McCrae peak, All the trails were marked strenuous, but we figured we would be fine if we gave ourselves enough time.

The first four miles were as expected: climbing switchbacks counting off the 2000 feet we needed to climb. However, after reaching Calloway Peak, at 5,964ft, we began the treacherous hike across the Linville Range crossing a few smaller peaks to McCrae Peak. What an experience!

Even after reaching McCrae Peak, we had to make the decent to the parking lot at the Singing Bridge: one full mile of the most difficult trails in the entire park. Thankfully, we were just descending, but still, with water running low, energy depleting fast, and the afternoon waning away quickly, we focused on nothing else but reaching our final destination! It was a long hike, but it certainly was worth it!

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Crabtree Falls

James — Thu, 16 May 2013 03:27:19 +0000

One of my favorite things about the Blue Ridge mountains is the abundance of waterfalls! Crabtree Falls is a gorgeous, perfectly shaped, 70ft waterfall on milepost 339 along the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Reaching the falls required a one mile hike downhill, and a rocky one at that. The waterfall was larger than I expected and thus a challenge to compose. At mid-morning, the sun was shining directly on the falls so a three-stop ND filter was imperative to keep the highlights in the water from washing out and preserving the silky texture. There was a lot of debris and clutter at the bottom of the falls, so I decided to cover it up with some more simple foreground growth and rocks. Praise the Lord the foliage was quite a bit more green down in the valley!

To learn how you can capture shots like this, check out the CAPTURE North Carolina photography workshop; it’s only a month away!

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Lens Flare at Sunrise

James — Wed, 15 May 2013 01:46:44 +0000

Imagine having this view out your living window! It was just so handy to throw on a jacket and step outside this morning at this quaint, little house that my Uncle is letting us stay at for the week!

Sunrise over Grandfather Mountain

I thought about quite a few things while taking this picture:

Even this far south, spring really hasn’t arrived at the higher altitudes. Instead of going for the rich green colors like I was expecting, I had to focus on utilizing the warm colors of the still barren trees.
Including the sun in the image caused a lot of lens flare, so in the above image I composed the shot to crop out the sun just enough to keep that deep contrast over the image.
I had to zoom way in for that shot and I discovered that lens flare looks especially bad when zoomed in. At wide angles, however, it doesn’t have to look bad if you keep a few lens flare rules in mind.

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Off to North Carolina!

James — Tue, 14 May 2013 03:38:17 +0000

Today I drove down to Grandfather Mountain for a vacation with my family and to begin preparing for the CAPTURE North Carolina workshop! It’s gorgeous around here! However, instead of sunset finding us on a beautiful overlook along the Blue Ridge Parkway, it found us in a WalMart parking lot in the middle of town. Not exactly the best spot for pictures, but why waste a good sunset when there’s nothing else to do? Goes to show: principles apply across the board.

Sunset Over WalMart

Hoping to, ahem, add some more, ahem, natural shots tomorrow . . .

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Introducing: CAPTURE Photography Workshops!

James — Fri, 10 May 2013 04:47:21 +0000

Everywhere I go, I’m always meeting new photographers! It’s so much fun to pass around tips, share stories, and simply learn from each other’s experiences. And the more photographers I meet, the more I realize how many of them are following the exact same path of learning and experience that I have traveled; they have the same questions, the same frustrations, the same desire for learning more . . . the same bewilderment of not knowing how to develop their skills in a world that doesn’t think from a Christian perspective any more . . .

To help answer these questions is my motivation behind starting up the Lenspiration CAPTURE workshops. LensCaps, for short. Basically, landscape photography workshops with these three main goals:

To learn techniques for enhancing the emotional impact of your landscape images.
To provide a hands-on environment (vs. a classroom setting) for answering the questions that will take your photographic skill to the next level.
To inspire Christian photographers to hold a Biblical standard of beauty and maturity in their work.

You’re not alone in your desire to serve God with your photography. The first CAPTURE workshop will be held in North Carolina in June and all photographers are welcome! All the details I could think of are on the new Workshops page. It’s been years in the making, but it will certainly be fun to meet more photographers! What’s on your schedule for June 12-15?

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Designing for a Big Event

James — Fri, 03 May 2013 03:18:06 +0000

Been wrapping up these last big design projects! Here’s what I put together for MissionTalk as they prepare for a big conference the week after next. What’s the key for designing for big events? Repetition with variation! We stuck with one design that we liked and then threw in a bit of variation to keep it looking fresh and new. We made sure to add a lot of color and texture too. And we made sure to keep in mind the philosophies of simplicity and less-is-better.

Along with the CEF calendars, these are the different materials MissionTalk will have at their booth. Tons of time went into these!

CEF Calendar Price Sheet (front and back)

Booth Banners (side by side)

MissionTalk Customer Booklet

MissionTalk Ministry Card

Newsletter Update

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New Pictures!

James — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 03:22:46 +0000

Just added more than 50 new pictures to my portfolio; click on the picture below to get a fresh wave of inspiration from creation! And for the effect, when you’re viewing the collection, click “Dim the Lights” under the “Menu” button that appears when you hover your mouse over the pictures. Enjoy!

Recently Added

Want to take pictures like these? I haven’t officially announced it yet, but I’m working on putting together a real, hands-on, landscape photography workshop in June where we’ll visit some “wow” places in North Carolina to learn how to take “wow” pictures! Check out the Workshops page for what details there are so far. Stay posted; can’t wait to officially announce it soon!

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Development of a Logo

James — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 17:25:37 +0000

So, here’s another design project I finished up recently! And you might be asking, “Why so many design projects of late?” Well, as a photographer and designer, I try to do as many design related projects over the winter and early spring as possible because that’s the time of year when the outdoors are least photogenic. I still shoot when I can, but there’s not nearly as many opportunities at this time of year as there are in the late spring, early summer, and early fall . . . at least this far north in Chicago. I remember back in early March when spring was already beginning to spring in Charolotte, but up here, it’s a different story. Yesterday’s snow flurries weren’t helping the flowers to bloom much.

So, the development of a logo: or, at least, how I did it this time. First, I talked with my friend about all the details of his new company. Then I drew up some sketches, or thumbnails, and chose one to digitize on the computer.

Smart folks would probably start with Illustrator, but I’m not the most skilled in Illustrator yet, so I started with Photoshop to throw together the basic concepts. I also went online to find a complementary font. It took a lot of playing around before I got some ideas I liked.

I then showed these ideas to my friend. Well, he said I wasn’t exactly going in the right direction so we had another long chat and started a second round from scratch. It’s important not to spend too much time on draft ideas because often they will never be used. So, with the new info, I sketched out some new ideas and laid them out on the computer. As you can see, they are quite different.

My friend really liked the first one and said that it was the one he wanted to go with. His approval brought me to the last steps of tweaking it to perfection and sending him files that could be used for any purpose. This is when I launched Illustrator and created the logo in vector format so it could be used at any size in any location.

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Victory Banner

James — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 07:02:35 +0000

Just finished working on a quick banner design for the ATI Regional Homeschool Conferences today. Colors, textures, and positioning changed over various versions throughout the process of approval, but here’s the version I liked best:

I never work on a project without learning something new. The shining effect was generated using the Radial Blur filter in Photoshop, the white glow was created using Photoshop’s Lens Flare filter, and I used this tutorial for embellishing the gold-textured Victory text. I would have used more creative fonts besides Freehand and Trajan Pro if they hadn’t already been used as main font elements in the Conference branding, but at least they complement each other well. The banner will be printed at 5ft by 25ft, so it required a bit of patience to save, render effects and place objects while putting the final version together, but I made sure to create preliminary versions used for the approval process at a much smaller size. The final version turned out to be 1.75GB! Now that’s a big file!

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