RONE is back in Australia where he just completed this new piece on a famous abandoned building in the Fortitude Valley area in Brisbane.
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These are some of my old pieces that have been commissioned and some are self promotional
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Collection of awesome ink illustrations by Siam s Escalante.
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Today’s DSLR cameras offer incredible image size (pixel density) and quality allowing digital photographers to bring back the lost art of post-capture cropping. Don't get me wrong. Every photographer tries their best to compose in the viewfinder and today's DSLR cameras with "Live View" make this much easier than in the past. Cropping in the darkroom during enlargement was always a difficult proposition but with 10 to 25 million pixels to work with, almost any image can be cropped for dramatic effect today.
Cypress Reflections – Austin, Texas
Copyright 2009 Jeff Lynch Photography
Shot taken with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II set on manual (M) using an EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM lens tripod-mounted. The exposure was taken at 102mm, f/16 for .3 seconds at ISO 100 using a Singh-Ray LB warming polarizer. All post capture processing was done in Adobe’s Lightroom 3 Beta. Click on the image above for a larger version.
I took this shot last month with the idea that I could use it to illustrate how cropping your images can help focus your viewer’s attention. In Adobe Lightroom it’s very simple to crop your image using any number of different “Crop Guide Overlays” found under the “Tools” menu. When I composed this image in my viewfinder I was looking to capture the beautiful texture of the cypress trees and their reflections in the slow moving river.
I wanted to “lead” the viewers’ eyes into the image using the rocks in the foreground at camera right and then have them explore the beautifully textured Cypress trees before moving to the reflections in the slowly moving water.
As you can see in the original image with it’s default 2 x 3 aspect ratio crop, there was a lot of empty space on the far left that I thought would allow the viewer’s eye to wander out of the image. To correct this I needed to select an alternate aspect ratio to cut off some this empty space.
The first crop I tried was a more typical 5 x 7 landscape aspect ratio (shown above) that eliminated about 25% of the problem. Not a bad start but still a long way to go before the image “felt” balanced to me.
Next I tried using an 8 x 10 landscape aspect ration (shown above) that eliminated about 50% of the problem but still wasn’t quite enough.
Finally I tried using a 1 x 1 aspect ratio with the “Golden Spiral” cropping guide and with a few tweaks here and there, I was finished. I captured all the elements I wanted to present (rocks, trees, water) and cropped the image to eliminate anything that might draw the viewers attention out of the image. I also used the “Post-Crop Vignetting” settings to help focus the viewer on the brighter tree trunk in the center of the “Golden Spiral” cropping guide. Using a 1 x 1 aspect ratio doesn’t always work in landscape photography (it’s fairly rare) but it’s another tool used to isolate your subject and focus your viewers’ attention right where you want it.
I took this shot during last fall’s Texas Landscape Safari on a beautiful October morning. The clouds were incredible all morning long and we were having a great time climbing Enchanted Rock and finding all sorts of interesting shots. I was amazed when this inverted mountain shaped cloud started to form right over the (small) mountain we were shooting. It definitely makes for an interesting shot!
Hill Country – Fredericksburg, Texas
Copyright 2010 Jeff Lynch Photography
Shot taken with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II set on aperture priority (Av) using an EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM lens tripod-mounted. The exposure was taken at 45mm, f/13 for 1/50th of a second at ISO 100. All post capture processing was done in Adobe’s Lightroom 3 Beta. Click on the image above for a larger version.
For more information on the history of Gorman Falls please visit Flying Hats over Gorman Falls by Jack Matthews. The following excerpt is used by permission of the author.
Gorman Falls is located in San Saba County, along the Colorado River, downstream from Bend, Texas, and above Lake Buchanan. Since 1984, Gorman Falls has been managed, fortunately, by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. An artesian spring, ejecting about three-hundred gallons a minute, provide hand-cramping cold water for the falls. The spring is about one-quarter of a mile up from the falls. The sound of the waterfall is loud, a low roar, back down by the cliffs, as you walk under a canopy of sycamores, cottonwoods, and pecan trees that give shade, plunging the ambient temperature ten degrees or more. The temperature change is so vivid, it is like opening the refrigerator in the house after working outside in the heat. It is no wonder that the Comanche, the working cowboys of the Gorman and Lemons Ranches, planned their day to be close to the falls when toil eased at mid-day or stopped in the evening, so that the cool air and artesian water might ease their muscles or give good medicine to the tribe.
I know of these things, maybe not the Comanche camp, by listening to my grandmother who tended the chuck wagon for her husband who managed cattle for the ranches. My grandmother, Effie, took me to the falls many times, always pointing out on the downhill slope to Gorman Falls, “That’s where we camped and set up the wagon, built a fire right there.” And, I would look and see bleached rocks and junipers, a clearing in the trees, and, yes, the remnants of a fire, her fire, many layers below. I thought of the cowboys who herded cattle, sitting down and eating beans, cornbread, and beef that my grandmother cooked. She was not that tough of a woman, of a person, to fix grub on the ranches, but she did. She followed my grandfather because she loved him and would cook for him and his pardners, as they tended cattle in the blazing hot, anvil-hard earth, Texas sun. Gorman Falls, with its cool, artesian water, was Beulah land, paradise, relief beyond belief, for them, for me.
Gorman Falls – Bend, Texas
Copyright 2009 Jeff Lynch Photography
Shot taken with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II set on manual (M) using an EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM lens tripod-mounted. The exposure was taken at 35mm, f/14 for 1.3 seconds at ISO 100 using a Singh-Ray LB Vari-ND-Duo neutral density filter. All post capture processing was done in Adobe’s Lightroom 3 Beta. Click on the image above for a larger version.
How To Get this Type of Shot: An image of water cascading down with that smooth, almost silky look to the water.
