After a fun afternoon spent photographing the Santa Monica Pier, I started walking home. I hadn’t walked very far, when I noticed that the bridge that crosses over the PCH would make a wonderful photo. I have a tendency to shoot photos that focus more on nature or interesting architecture. This is one of the few photos that I’ve taken that has a distinctly urban feel to it.

The only change that I would make to this photo, if I went back to take it again, would be to shoot it from a different angle. I feel that the stairs and the buildings beyond, are too centered and that I could have capture a more dramatic mood if I had shifted the angle a little to the left or right. I guess that means that I should go back to Santa Monica and take it again and see what I can come up with.

No photographic tour of the Santa Monica Pier would be complete without a photo of the pier itself. I was really fortunate with the weather this day. It’s one thing to go and test out a new camera on a normal sunny day, you get nice pictures and learn how your camera functions. But to go out on a day with clouds as dramatic as they were on this day, and it almost feels like you can’t take a bad photo.

No photographic exploration of Santa Monica would be complete without a shot of the beach. While walking around the Santa Monica Pier, I realized that for all of the photos that I was taking, I was always facing out toward the ocean. I turned around and started taking photos of the beach to see if I could capture any interesting images.

Most people when they think of the beach in Santa Monica, picture the portion that is to the south of the pier. I wanted to get a photo of the northern side partly because that’s the side of the pier I lived on at the time, and partly because when looking north, you get a fantastic view of the Santa Monica Mountains off in the distance.

Back in 2006 I had purchased a new camera and so I decided to explore Santa Monica and take a bunch of photos to get more familiar with that camera. I wandered down to the pier and took several photos. Most of them were only ok at best, but then I reached the Ferris Wheel. This is one of the more iconic features of Santa Monica. The Ferris Wheel on the pier has been featured in numerous movies and tv shows and a large percentage of postcards that you see of Santa Monica contain the Ferris Wheel in the shot. The original Ferris Wheel that was on the Santa Monica Pier was replaced by this one back in 1996. This new Ferris Wheel is the only solar powered one in the country.

I wanted to try and take a photograph of the Ferris Wheel that would be reminiscent of the photos I had seen that were taken at county fairs in the 1950s. I purposely framed the photo so that the wheel itself doesn’t even fit entirely in the frame. I then moved to gain a better angle so that the wheel would look as large and dramatic as it did in real life. It also helped that the clouds that day were spectacular.

After snapping off a few photos, I chose the one that I was happiest with and converted it to black and white. The colors of the buckets and the blue of the sky I felt took away from the dramatic impact of the Ferris Wheel and so the conversion to black and white brought this image closer to the way I had envisioned it. Of all the photos that I’ve taken over the years, this is one of my favorites.

Back in 2006 I had upgraded my camera to the Canon 5D. This was my first professional level camera. The day it arrived I was extremely excited to try it out and see what kind of photos I could take with this level of camera.

I was living in Santa Monica at the time and figured I would walk to the pier to snap off a bunch of photos. On my way to the pier, I walked through Palisades Park, where the statue of Saint Monica resides. I noticed how the sun was breaking through the clouds and thought that this would be a wonderful test for my new camera. This photo turned out just as I had envisioned it would and I’m very happy with the results.

It’s interesting for me to go back and look at this photo again, now that I have six additional years of photographic experience. There are a few things I would have done differently if I had shot this photo today. The most important change I would have made is where I would have used a flash for this photo so that I could have had better fill light for the statue. This would have allowed me to retain more detail in the clouds above. All in all though, this photo turned out quite well considering my lack of experience and having just picked up my new camera.

Back in 2007, Tracey took me on a day trip to Santa Barbara for my birthday. We had a wonderful time visiting the Chalk Festival at the Santa Barbara Mission and we also visited several beautiful gardens.

One of our stops was at the Santa Barbara Zoo. I had just recently purchased a telephoto zoom lens for my camera and was looking forward to trying it out. The zoo provided me with plenty of opportunities. During our walk through the zoo, I noticed this Toucan seated on his branch. I loved the contrast between how devoid of color his environment was, but how vibrant his beak appeared.

After snapping this photo I decided to enhance this effect and so I converted the image to black and white and retained only the color of his beak and eye. This is one of my favorite photos and I’m quite proud of it.

One of my favorite uses for black and white photography is emphasizing shape and texture. Color in a photograph can be rich and beautiful, but it can also distract from some of the finer qualities of the image.

When I shot this photograph, I always intended to convert it to a black and white image. The color of these leaves where muted and uninspiring in real life and I had no desire to try and bring any of that color out. Instead, I was drawn to the shapes and patterns that the plant had created. I love how light the main body of the leaf is and that the edges and tips are so dark.

When I was framing this image, I kept in mind that I was going to play with the shapes and contrasts that these shapes provided, so I made sure to position myself as best I could to capture these contrasts.

It’s funny, the more I write these blogs, the more I realize that, as beautiful as flowers are, it’s not easy finding topics to write about photographs of them. They’re still fun to take pictures of and work great as practice subjects since they are inherently beautiful. Finding something interesting to say about them on a regular basis though is quite challenging. So for today, I’m going to post this photo of a flower I took over the weekend at Huntington Gardens and just leave it without any further fanfare beyond the fact that I like the way this photo turned out.

One of the important things that I’ve discovered about photography is that you have to find your individual workflow. I understand the importance of using a tripod, especially when taking extreme close up photos using a macros lens, but I always feel more constrained creatively when my camera is locked down on the tripod. I prefer to hand hold my camera and move around my subject until I find the framing that drew me to the image in the first place. One big problem with this method of working in the past, is that I wasn’t able to get a fast enough shutter speed so that I could effectively hand hold my camera for the type of macro photos that I enjoyed taking.

Enter my new Canon 5D Mark III. This camera is incredibly sensitive to light and it’s ISO settings go much further than my previous camera. So when Tracey and I took our field trip to Huntington Gardens last weekend, my focus was on taking as many macro photographs as I could and see if I would be able to hand hold my camera for all of the shots and still maintain a pleasing depth of field.

This photo is a fantastic example of my success this weekend. The only issue I have with this photo is that I wish I had used a slightly smaller aperture to get just a little more of the flower in focus. The camera was absolutely capable of this, but I just didn’t quite dial in my settings as much as I should have. That’s why I went out there though, to get the practice and the experience so that my future shots can come even closer to how I envision them.

Over the weekend, Tracey and I took a photo field trip to the Huntington Gardens in Pasadena. Our goal for this trip was to practice our photography. We had recently purchased a new camera for both Tracey and myself. I wanted to get better acquainted with how my new camera worked and Tracey has never owned a DSLR before. I spent the afternoon giving Tracey advice on how to use her new camera, and some basic lessons on why you would want to use different settings to achieve different photographic looks.

One of the first things I taught Tracey was how to use your aperture to control your focal depth of field. I was shooting with my 100mm macro lens and so I was able to really play with the various degrees of my images depth of field. One of the first examples I showed Tracey was with this Lion sculpture in the Japanese gardens.

I used this as an example of when you would want to limit your depth of field. In this example I wanted to draw the viewers eyes to the lion and I didn’t want anything in the background to distract the viewers attention. By limiting my depth of field I was able to completely throw the background out of focus, while retaining very sharp focus on my subject.

I know that this is an extreme example, but I found it to be quite effective. I also ended up with a photo that I am quite pleased with.

Tracey and I love to make weekend escapes to Santa Barbara. For my birthday several years ago we took a trip up to Santa Barbara to see the Chalk Festival that happens every year in the parking lot of the Santa Barbara mission. If you are ever in Santa Barbara over Memorial weekend, this is one of those must see events. The talent level of these artists is inspiring.

I feel it’s cheating a bit to take photos of other peoples artwork, but it can still be quite tricky to find a way to best capture their work while you’re surrounded by hundreds of people. This chalk drawing was about 5’ by 6’. I loved the artists use of color and hard black lines. There is just something warm and happy about this image and I’m quite pleased with the way it turned out.

The Transamerica Pyramid is one of the more iconic buildings in San Francisco. You can see it’s peak from most points in the city. Most of the photographs that I’ve seen of the building were taken far away from it so that you can get the entire building in the shot. I wanted to try and capture something different.

Since it’s really the top of the building that is the most interesting to me, I wanted to find a way to keep the top in the frame and then fill the rest of the frame with interesting lines and shapes to contrast the building itself. When I happened upon this angle I knew I had my shot.

No walk in San Francisco is complete without taking a stroll through China Town. The sights, the sounds, and the colors are all so different from the rest of the city.

While Tracey, my Mom, and I were wondering down one of the streets, I saw this collection of lanterns. The building behind the lanterns was a deep brick red and I knew that it would compete with the wonderful reds of the lanterns. It’s not often that I choose to spend the time to create an image that has only specific subjects in color, but this photo just screamed out for this technique to be used. I realized that before I even pressed the shutter.

I was having so much fun discovering new perspectives of San Francisco on my walk with Tracey and my Mom. We walked up to the top of Telegraph Hill, which is where Coit Tower is located. From this vantage point I was able to see even more of the city from angles that I wasn’t used to seeing before. 

With my camera in hand, I searched out to see if I could any additional photos from our excursion. I noticed that Alcatraz could clearly be seen from the base area around Coit Tower. It would have been easy enough to take your standard photo of Alcatraz, floating and isolated out in the middle of the bay, but instead I opted to peer through some of the bushes that lined the base of the tower. Having these bushes as framing elements in the foreground of my image help add not only a better sense of distance, but also add a little intrigue to the photo.

I’m still working on adding elements of story to each of the photos that I take and I feel that I managed to accomplish that goal with this photograph.

There are times when I’m out taking photographs, I am unable to find inspiration anywhere. There are other times, where every turn I take provides me with another shot that inspires me even more than the last. My trip to San Francisco with Tracey and my Mom is a perfect example of the latter.

Standing out on one of the piers and looking in at the city provided me with views of San Francisco that I had never seen in person before. I have seen Coit Tower throughout my childhood and to me it is one of the defining images of San Francisco, but I had only seen it from the opposite side of the hill. From this angle the tower feels to have even more strength. It stands tall and proud, watching over the city that it loves.