My idea for my HDR picture came from my love of nature again.  Outside my
house our flowers were blooming like crazy so I decided to take a pictures
of different ones. Once I put them together using tone mapping I really
liked how the yellow flower turned out the most.  I chose the grunge look
and I liked how the contrast of  green, yellow, and orange looked together
the best.  It really does look surreal.  I had a few others that I liked
and messed around with other HDR and tone mapping, but I will save some of
them for my book.  Overall, I really like how the picture turned out.The top
one is my finished HDR and the bottom one is my normal. 

A Face of Lyme

For my photonarrative project I decided to take a picture of someone with Lyme disease. This disease is very important to me because I currently suffer from it. Since I cannot take a picture of myself for the project I met someone who suffers from this disease, her name is Betty Gordon. Betty has suffered from Lyme for 40 years and misdiagnosed for 35. Every time I've seen her she has worn this hat. I really wanted to show that each of us with Lyme look perfectly healthy on the outside, but on the inside we have an unbelievable amount of pain. Nobody looks at us, because we look healthy, and it is a hard concept for must to grasp. In this picture Betty wears her hat to help shed out some of the light and sometimes she has to wear dark sunglasses, because the light is too bright. In lightroom I tried to do the picture in color and I just didn't like the way it turned out, because her walls and her shirt are almost the same color, so it just looked funny. I fixed the exposure, clarity, detail, and messed with the grayscale a little. I decided black and white looks better, because it is still getting my point across that those of us with Lyme disease look perfectly healthy. I did do another picture in color, so you can see her green hat and green shirt, which I plan to put in my final book.

Death by Drugs

My idea for this picture came from all the antibiotic drugs I have to take to help cure my Chronic Lyme Disease. I figured I could at least put them to good use. My brother Tyler got into my medication while I was out of the house and when I came home we found him dead at the desk. There was blood on his arms and pills everywhere, with a glass of water that had been knocked over on the floor. I knew the cause riht there and it was a drug overdose. I really like the way the picture turned out and I feel that black and white looks better than color with all the stuff in our house, making it black and white looks more like a crime scene to me. In lightroom I fixed the grayscale, detail, exposure, blacks, and contrast. It took me awhile to fix the picture in lightroom to get it just the way I wanted it, but overall I like the way it turned out and he looks really creepy with is eyes open.

Swim5

This is my series picture of five kids and my theme is swimming. I love little kids and taking pictures of them, because you never know what they are going to do. That was my reason for doing my single portraits projets of little kids. It was summer when I was working on the project and I thought it would be cool to do a swimming theme. I took the pictures during the summer on a really hot day. I love how each kid has a unique expression on his/her face and that's what I really like about this picture. In lightroom I messed with the color, detail, and a few other things. I had one picture that was very difficult for me to get the right background color, it's supposed to be yellow like the rest of them, but for some reason it is a lot light. I don't know if the sun was a lot brighter when I took his picture or why it would be so different compared to the others. I took all of the images back to back, so there wasn't much time in between. I had to resize the images in photshop quite a bit to make them fit on the canvas better. Overall, I like how my final picture came out and love the expressions on each of the kids faces.

Gotta Love Mother Nature

I was riding in a car on my way home from my Lyme appointment in Minnesota and it was storming like crazy. I took several shots hoping to get a lightning bolt shot and I actually got one. Not too bad for in a moving car. This is for my create my own project. In lightroom I messed with the detail, exposure, and color quite a bit. I really like the way it turned out. I love nature and storm pictures, so that is what inspired me to take this picture.

MichaelFranti and Spearhead at SITP

Mary's ClothesLine