I have spoken about the business project we have been working on in a few posts here on Pixebian.com. Well all the hard work has finally amounted to the official  opening of the website for Shutter Tours.

The company was born out of a trip my wife and I took to New York in 2008. We wanted to get out and see the city, take photos and hit all the iconic locations in New York. Problem was, none of the vehicles stopped at any locations and if you wanted to take photos, well there was the opportunity to shoot through tinted windows at 30 mph. So we started researching the idea and spent countless hours developing the format, dealing with all the paperwork and permissions required to create a tour. We also did sample walk throughs to make sure it was interesting enough and that people learned from our walk.

With a light history lesson and lessons on composition ideas and skills, Shutter Tours will be starting May 1st in downtown Seattle. If you happen to come to Seattle for a vacation or a weekend, check out a Shutter Tours walking tour designed for photographers.

One of the great things for models is they get to play “dress up”, when working in various shoots. As a photographer, I am always on the lookout for interesting clothing and accessories to shoot with. Take for example the middle photo of Sarah. I had been searching for early sixties style clothing to work with as I like the sophistication that Jacqueline Kennedy brought to that era with her clothing style. Hitting eBay, I slowly started gathering lots of clothing from that era and it is quite inexpensive. Everything in that photo maybe amounted to $30 and the great thing is I can resell it on eBay since it is vintage wear and still retains some value. It also allows me to create a photo that doesn’t look the same as every other photographer is shooting as far as styling.

As Sarah and I were shooting in downtown Seattle by Pioneer Square, Tina, the owner of Synapse 206 asked if we wanted to shoot with some of her great clothing and of course we agreed. Her store features one of a kind designs and it was great to experiment with the various styles, especially that blue dress in the first image. We basically had the run of the store and Tina was a great help in picking out styles for us to match with various accessories. Though I wasn’t too hot on the hat in the third image, I went with it.

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I played around with the Seattle image a bit more from this post, adding an image I was able to get through the NASA website. This is a gold mine for texture images and other than for advertising, they are in the public domain.

Check out the NASA gallery and start adding to your texture library.

I have been driving around my Macbook Pro with my new version of Photoshop CS4, trying to learn all the little nuances hidden under the hood. Somehow I got sidetracked and ended up at istockphoto.com looking at textures. Don’t ask me how, it just happens when one has a period of boredom, followed by flashes of inspiration and then some temporary forms of ADHD. Anyway, so I did a search on textures as I wanted to work with some layers in Photoshop and play around with some images I shot over the weekend in Seattle. Not having any textures at the ready, I found this one of a tuscan wall that I figured would work perfect. Yeah I had to pay for it, but I wanted it now and did not have my Europe images close by and the time to spend hours hunting for a texture. Besides I I started looking at my old Europe CD’s, I’d end up on some other tangent and never accomplish my goal , so I bought it.

Originally I was going to use and image of Post Alley by the Pike Place Market, but felt that the Seattle image would work a lot  better. In the upper left corner, you can see the original texture file as well as the Seattle photo I used.

So, let’s see step by step how I created this.

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This is the “Gumwall” in Seattle by the Pike Place Market. Two or three years ago, this was barely covered and the bricks were still clearly visible. Now it has become quite the piece of art with lots of colors and textures. Ideally this should be shot with a tripod and with an aperture of f/8 or better. The light was really bad today and instead of boosting my ISO above 200, I chose to open up my aperture to 2.2 as I was hand holding the shot. The first was shot at 1/125 and the second @ 1/160. I boosted the vibrancy and the saturation a bit, to bring out the colors.The first shot is the much stronger shot, but the second looks like dripping wax, so I thought it a bit in interesting as well.

Had a chance to shoot in Seattle this afternoon and thought I’d try shooting some panorama’s. This is 12 images stitched together with a hand held shot at 18 mm on a wide angle Nikon lens. Shutter was at 1/180 with an F6.7 aperture.

When shooting a shot like this with the intention of stitching together, it is important to make sure you are set on manual mode for shutter and aperture. Since I mostly shoot aperture mode, I took a test shot and then read the settings and then moved my camera to manual mode. If I was to do this over, I would have probably shot 24 photos to make sure the lower part of the marina made it into the image.  The aluminum boat in the center was in my initial shots, but you have to crop about a 1/3 of your final results to get a panorama as the stitching is not aligned with the way the frames were shot. I also overlap about 1/3 of the frame to the next, to make sure I don’t miss any details.

Below is one of the original images, flat and boring, so you can see why I needed to add some tweaks.

In Photoshop CS2-CS4, this is real easy to create. Go to File>Automate>Photomerge and choose all the images you want to create the panorama. Click Ok and PS will do the rest. Once I cropped, I then did a few things to get rid of the muted tones as the light was real flat. I created another layer and ran Filter>Other>High Pass. I then set opacity to 30% and fill to 25% with a color dodge screen. This brings out a bit more of the detail in the image. Bumping up the saturation a bit to bring out the color, completed the image.

I was going through some old hard drives, archiving files for my kids so they would have copies should anything ever happen to me or the data. I ran across tons of files for shoots and stuff I had forgotten about. It is a bit crazy how much I have shot in the past 8 years or so and I thought I’d share some of the more interesting images in the next month or so.

Back in 2001, Seattle was still the protest capital of the Northwest. I forget what this one was about, something to do with Somali illegals being detained for too long. Not sure why I Sepia toned them, but maybe I was thinking it set a dark mood.

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Street photography reflection, shot through a window of a coffee shop on First and Pike in Seattle.

One of the great things about living in the city, is all the photo opportunities Many times during lunch, I would head out and try to capture the energy and vibrancy of the Seattle streets. There is always a fine line between intrusion and observation. Even though many of my subjects are in a public environment, I also feel I need to maintain some level of professionalism when shooting these images. Throughout the years I have befriended many of the homeless people who I have shot, creating a relationship before taking that first frame.

Check out more images after the break and take a look at one of the finest street photographers, Nitsa for more inspiration.

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