I loved shooting with the Hamilton family this past week! They were so much fun! And I'm so excited for their son who is leaving on his mission soon (I seriously miss my mission so much and my wife has to put up with my repetitive stories all the time). But they were such a fun family to spend a short time with, and I've never seen so many hand warmers in my life! That's a nice mother who brings a hand warmer for each pocket for the whole family! As usual though, enough of my rambling, here are some of my favorite images of their cute family.

The wife and I had the day off together and spent the day baking cookies... ok, she baked cookies while I played with the cookies :) 'cause ya know, I like cookies and I like pictures. Anyway, here are two of the images I created today that I really like.

I hope everyone is having a great Christmas season and not freezing too much! I have a way cool technique that I wanted to share with you, something I've been trying to figure out for a few months and I think I finally nailed it. So let's go over the basics of how to get a clean, detailed cityscape shot.

HD-what?
First off, what is HDR? HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. Basically it's taking multiple exposures at different values (light to dark) and then combining them later in a photo editor. HDR is very useful in certain situations because you may have an extremely contrasted scene, where your whites and blacks are far apart. Without HDR you would have to either blow out your highlights, or loose some of your shadows to complete black (side note: this is not a bad thing, it really works for some images). But HDR is when you take an over exposed photo, a properly exposed photo, and a under exposed photo and stack them in a software. Like I said, it works for some images and not for others. Personally I think this technique is fantastic for night shots of cities. So let's go over what I did to make this image:


Basic Setup 
This shot is of downtown Salt Lake City Utah. To set of for a shot like this, I would recommend getting as high up as you can. For me that was about 10 stories up. Then you're going to want to set up your tripod and camera, compose your image and find a medium exposure. For HDR's I almost always set my camera to matrix metering and simply balance out the exposure. Since you're on a tripod I would recommend a small aperture and low ISO, this shot is at f/10 and ISO 100.

Hint: I always adjust only shutter speed to insure a clean depth of field and low ISO noise.

Bracketing
After setting up the image and finding your exposure, you need to take a least 3 photos (the image above is 7 exposures). I start at the dark end and work up. So after finding the medium exposure I went down 3 stops on my shutter speed and snapped an image, up a stop, snap an image, up a stop, you get the drill. The exposures on this image ranged from 0.4 seconds to 12.0 seconds.

Hint: I use my histogram to find the lowest exposure that has detail in the highlights, and then keep using that histogram to find the highest exposure that is getting detail in the darkest area of the image, that way I know that I have detail throughout my image.

Editing
After you've taken your image, you'll need to stack them in a HDR software such as Photomatix, Nik HDR Effects Pro, Photoshop, ect; personally I use Photomatix. Once stacked tweak the settings/presets until you find a combination you like and presto! You have an HDR cityscape.

If you have any questions or want specific details on my editing, post a question in the comments below!

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Thank you and Merry Christmas!

This is my favorite time of year, when the snow starts to fall and people start to put up their Christmas lights and the tree finally goes up. I have always loved Christmas, the feeling of love and joy that Christmas brings is so refreshing in a world of stress and sad stories. One of my favorite things about Christmas is the time we get to spend with families, and the love that is felt as we laugh and give gifts to each other. Being a photographer, these times are some of my favorite to try and capture those special moments between siblings and families. But snatching those moments up and keeping them forever is never as easy as we think! Our camera never wants to cooperate, and the kids never sit still long enough. But there are a few tricks you can use to help you save those moments for years to come to share with family and friends! Read below for a few hints and techniques!