And now for something completely different. Living near the beach is my muse. With the ocean’s horizon, along with its ever changing atmospheric conditions provide me with a wonderful palette of color and scenery.

These images are from 1984 until now, but the majority are from 2005 forward. Enjoy

PS – I’ll be posting more personal imagery in the future.

Without going into specific details, HERE is an example of 11 steps to the final image. You can see that by blending many exposures into 1 that I’m able to show more detail than would otherwise be possible. I’m also color correcting for individual areas lit with different light sources; tungsten, fluorescents, and daylight. It also allows me to hide some elements I’d rather not show. On this particular view I had to select from 49 frames, exposed over several hours while visualizing the combined single image. The last image #11 shows the the final retouched product.

This differs from typical HDR* in that I’m exposing and color correcting for different areas of the scene, sometimes up to 3 hours of shooting while the light is changing, and then meticulously “blending” those areas together. The downside of all of this is being at the tripod for several hours per view and then up to 10-15 hours of sitting in front of the computer display processing and compositing the frames together for one final view.

*HDR is a wide exposure bracket shot in fast sequence and then combined by computer software to capture details from shadows to highlights. It doesn’t correct for varying color temperature lighting. Depending on the software used and how much you pump up the volume (tone mapping), it can and has been excessively abused. The results look otherworldly, to say the least! I don’t produce these style images.

The images of both Tourbillon Boutiques on my website are examples of exposure bracketed images which have been convincingly processed. Because the scenes were mostly tungsten lit, I could manage the color correction in a single bracket, without the need for blending.

From 2002 until now I’ve been shooting strictly digital, which means that the lifespan of the DSLR camera body has declined dramatically from its film counterpart. Film itself used to be the upgrade. Now it’s digital sensor and in camera processing technology that I yearn for. I’m also now the photo lab. The countless hours in front of my Mac processing RAW files and constantly learning the latest wave of hardware and software is both fun and exciting, and a total time suck! But the ease of delivery has improved tenfold. I can send a high resolution “original” off to far corners of the world within an hour. And oddly enough, the “film look” (better known as clumpy grain and high contrast) that I used to despise is somehow still spoken in this brave new digital world as the holy grail of digital post processing prowess. I guess old habits die hard.

It was great to see the transition, I look forward to new improvements, but sometimes it’s just sad to see it all go.

R.I.P.

film

The images are quickly circulating the web too:

tourbillon.com

crystalsatcitycenter.com

perpetuelle.com

elitetraveler.com

affluentpageluxuryindex.com

pricy-spicy.com

These are some images and videos I shot during off hours of the job. The locations include Aria, Vdara, and Crystals, along with the Bellagio, The Strip and Downtown. The videos are rough cuts straight out of the camera and my first experience using a Canon EOS 5D Mark II for shooting video. I obviously needed to read the manual regarding exposure locking control. I have since gotten it wired!

STILLS

VIDEOS

I’ll be posting the finals from the Tourbillon job once the client embargo has passed.

Have a safe and Happy New Year. And please don’t drink and drive. Call a taxi.