Dave Wilson Photography » Monochrome

Art Deco Ceiling, San Francisco

Dave Wilson — Sat, 12 May 2012 12:33:45 +0000

One lesson I've never managed to learn while out shooting in a new city is to take notes. This shot offers a prime example. Jesse Nichols, who graciously showed us around downtown San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, took us into this beautiful, art deco foyer in some office building or other. I was so taken by the ceiling (and the fact that the doorman was happy for us to take pictures of it!) that I completely forgot to note down where we were! If you happen to know, please drop me a comment so that I can update the description.

Sand and Tracks, Mustang Island

Dave Wilson — Wed, 09 May 2012 11:13:19 +0000

I feel like a temporary diversion away from California today so here's a shot from our Easter weekend visit to Corpus Christi.

This was taken in Mustang Island State Park just south of Corpus on Easter monday when, for some reason, very few people seemed interested in spending the day on the beach. We pretty much had the place to ourselves and had a great time boogie-boarding, watching birds and looking for critters in the seaweed that was washing ashore.

Fire Escape, San Francisco

Dave Wilson — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:17:56 +0000

I'm now home from my week-long photography extravaganza and have had a chance to go back to the images I shot in San Francisco a week ago.

This ornate fire escape near Union Square made a great black and white subject when I passed it on Saturday morning. By the time I returned in the evening, the sun angle meant that it fell into the shade and the great shadows had disappeared.

Tiny Dancers

Dave Wilson — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 11:06:17 +0000

As anyone who knows me will tell you, I'm not a weddings and portraits type of photographer. The thought of being the primary shooter at another wedding (I've done two) gives me the shakes. That said, I love taking candid shots at weddings when I'm there as a guest since, occasionally, I manage to get a shot like this one.

This is undoubtedly my favourite snap from Saturday evening's wedding. The positioning of the two little girls, the rim light on the closer one's hair and her expression are just priceless as far as I'm concerned.

The other great thing about not being the official photographer is that I can come home having enjoyed the party and feeling great about the fact that I got a couple of good shots. The main photographer, has to produce a hundred or more excellent shots in the same time. I guess, I'm just lazy though :-)

Dancing Sisters

Dave Wilson — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 14:46:45 +0000

Nikki and I went to the best wedding ever yesterday. A couple of friends got married outside on a gorgeous Texas spring evening and had a lovely reception in a marquee on their lawn. Great food was provided and great company was present. All in all, it was a fabulous evening and one of those wonderful weddings where you just know everything is going to be great for the happy couple.

I wasn't taking pictures officially (remember, I don't do weddings) but I brought a camera and 50mm lens (giving me no opportunity to get over-obsessed with the picture taking at the expense of having wedding-reception fun) and grabbed a few candids during the event. This is one of my favourites showing three precious little girls who were dancing after the ceremony. The minute they saw the camera, they lined up and posed beautifully. Although I could have cropped her out, I also loved the other little cousin looking mischievous in the background!

Fractured Granite, Enchanted Rock

Dave Wilson — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:17:27 +0000

Enchanted Rock is huge. The main batholith (an erosion-exposed granite magma chamber forming a huge, red rock dome) rises 425 feet from the surrounding countryside. Erosion has peeled layers off the rock over time and the area around it is strewn with enormous boulders and slabs of rock.

The biggest problem when shooting the rock, I find, is to leave the viewer with a sense of scale. Take this shot, for example - is it half a mile across or just a few feet? Normally, I don't like to include people in this kind of picture but as scaling elements they are rather helpful. Here, the single person in the top left of the shot provides that much-needed scale reference and shows that these are not just tiny flakes of granite after all.

Presidential Seal, LBJ Library

Dave Wilson — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 11:23:54 +0000

On the wall of the LBJ Library building opposite the array of files shown yesterday, there is a huge presidential seal carved into the limestone. The lighting is such, however, that you can hardly see it, so this picture was as much a post-processing exercise for me as anything else. The trick was to pull out the seal without the rest of the wall ending up looking completely unnatural.

Normally, I would jump straight into Photoshop and apply a black and white adjustment layer (biasing the mix to the channel with the highest contrast) then a curves layer or two to selectively add contrast to the areas that needed it. In this case, however, I thought I would make life difficult for myself and do what I could in Lightroom 4 instead. The LR black and white adjustment allowed me every bit as much flexibility as the Photoshop version (although in other circumstances I would miss the ability to dial down the overall opacity of the effect since I use this a lot to partially desaturate images in PS) and a combination of the basic Contrast, Shadows, Highlights, Whites, Blacks and Clarity controls did a pretty good job on bringing out the almost-latent seal image. A tweak to the Tone Curve then finished everything off nicely although, again, the lack of maskability and lower control over the curve shape in the Lightroom version of this tool would cause me problems with most images where I want to tweak the curves.

Overall, though, despite their limitations compared to the more powerfull tools available in Photoshop, the Lightroom develop adjustments were perfectly capable of doing everything this particular image needed.

iPhone Week: Chrysler Grille

Dave Wilson — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 13:05:24 +0000

Thanks to this photoblog's birthday falling on the 15th and the fact that I had to slot in another picture at the last minute (you didn't think I had that candle shot planned, did you?), iPhone Week actually stretches to 8 days rather than 7 but, on day 8, here's the last in the series (for now).

I took a few pictures with my iPhone during my recent visit to Dick's Classic Garage in San Marcos and this is one of my favourites. It shows the grille of a 1939 Chrysler C-24 Custom Imperial Parade Phaeton. Once again, processing was done inside Camera+.

iPhone Week: Cubes

Dave Wilson — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 14:19:24 +0000

The most appealing thing about iPhone photography to me is that it can be so spontaneous. The camera is always with you so, when an opportunity arises to make an image, regardless of where it is, you can get the picture.

This image is a great example of that. My car was in for service and i was working in the dealer's waiting room when I saw this cool piece of wall art and reckoned it would make a great pattern picture.

iPhone Week: Ducts

Dave Wilson — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 14:12:33 +0000

Here's another shot from last summer's UT iPhone photowalk. It shows a pile of metal ducts sitting outside one of the buildings that was undergoing renovation at the time. The postprocessing on this one was done inside the Camera+ application.