I just shot some new products for the guild’s new website, mscraftsmensguild.org (which isn’t up yet as I write this, but the new version should be live next week). Continue reading ‘Craftsmen’s Guild of Mississippi Images’
Author Archive for Roy Adkins
A little over a week ago I went down to Hattiesburg to create some ad shots for the school system. It was a fun little shoot, but despite starting at 7 am it was hot. Which worked out for the shot of the power-lifter . . . otherwise it just made it feel more like work. Continue reading ‘Hattiesburg Public School Sports’
This post isn’t about a dog, or photographing dogs . . . really. Continue reading ‘This is not a Pipe’
I just finished laying out an 11″x17″ poster for the show . . . there are clearly different skills involved in good graphic design versus good photography, but I can afford my own labor.
Jerri and I have been together for about 10 years, married for the last 7. I guess I have had so long to get used to how she is, that sometimes I don’t properly appreciate how great she is. For example, when I told Jerri that I wanted to get up at 2am to drive to Starkvegas and take some night photos and sunrise photos then immediately turn around and drive home, she didn’t even act surprised. When I asked her to go with me and help, she didn’t hesitate. When I actually woke her up at 1:30 am this morning . . . ok so she is never happy when she wakes up, but she got up and helped me load the car anyway. She then helped me lug equipment all over State’s campus, and chase color in the clouds.
A few days ago, while I am sure I could have been productive . . . I instead made digital dupes of some old negatives. I think most of them are from 1997 or before, but I wasn’t very good about dating my work until we moved to Savannah (1999?). One day I will go through and digitize all of my old work, but that goes at the bottom of a very long list of “one day” items. In case you are wondering about the “breaking my own rules” thing, I haven’t done anything to most of these images and I wouldn’t call them print-ready . . . and I normally have a rule that I don’t show people anything I wouldn’t print and display, but these have a certain nostalgic value to me without them being quality work. Hopefully no one will judge my current photographic skill by the quality of things I shot ten years ago. Continue reading ‘Old Work, really old OR breaking my own rules’
I have a photography exhibit that is currently on display at the Mississippi Art Center (former Mississippi Museum of Art) until August 17. The show is a collection of my landscape and cityscape photographs from throughout the Southeast. From September 8 through October 26 the exhibit will be on display at Mississippi State University’s Art Gallery on the second floor of the Student Union. (The MSU show will contain a few more images than the Jackson show.) All of the photographs in the show are printed as 18″x18″ editions of 10.
This project is supported in part by funding from the Mississippi Arts Commission, a state agency, and in part, from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. Special thanks to the Greater Jackson Arts Council for their help in organizing the show.
I’ve previously posted about HDR here on the blog, but it has always regarded taking multiple exposures of the same scene and combining them. This time I have been experimenting with using multiple raw conversions of a high contrast portrait to create an image devoid of any noise artifacts (or maybe devoid of most artifacts). Both of the above images were created from three conversions of the same raw file, using 2 stops of exposure difference between each file. I then converted the resulting hdr images down to 16 bits using Local Adaptation and curves. I would specify the radius and threshold settings, but I have found the radius varies with resolution, and threshold varies with each image (tending to be between .5 and 2).
The lighting for this was a large softbox camera right slightly above the subjects eyelevel, a black nonreflector camera left (as close to the subject as I could get without it in frame), and a kicker light behind the subject camera left feathering onto the background about a foot above the subjects head.
As I patiently wait for flexcolor to process twenty-seven-gajillion raw files into digital negatives (I use a dual-redundancy system, probably a pilot hangup) of the cutest miniature sumo wrestler ever, I figured I could tax the ole processor just a bit more for some small jpegs of fireworks. I looked at a few fireworks shots online today of fireworks that I think were from Laredo, TX or just across the border, which were magnificent displays of pyrotechnics. After seeing those shots it made me appreciate the Mississippi quality of the above shot a bit more; probably not the most impressive display of fireworks to be found in the metro area, but it has the right feeling.