Darrin R. Doss Photography

Points of Pride 2010!

It’s not that often that you will find me boasting about some of my photographic work.  But this is one of the few times that I will.   Recently I entered the Martinsville Bulletin’s, Points of Pride Photo Contest.  As usual I waited till the last minute to enter my submission.  I decided on this picture of the Martinsville Dam mainly because I am an avid trout fisherman, and kayaker.  I always seem to gravitate to images of the river or to images that have some form of water in them.   

This shot was taken on a whim.  We were in town visiting family and on the way back home I decided to grab a few shots of Uptown Martinsville.  This particular night had a very bright full moon to light the scenes around town.  I was mainly looking for architectural shots in uptown, but this scene struck me as I drove by.  Night scenes are naturally more saturated due to the longer exposure times as well as the pale light that falls on them from the moon.  They also require tripods due to the very long exposure times that are require to record the scene.  The shot of the dam require a 30 second exposure at f/4.5.

Below are a few more shots from the same night.

Darrin

View Full Album

Digital Before and After – Working in LAB Mode.

Dixie in the Snow!

Digital Capture straight from the camera

This is an image of my Golden Retrieve, Dixie, taken after the last big snow we had here in Franklin County.  Overall it is a fairly good shot straight out of the camera, but there are some things that could be better.  First off, there is a stick coming into the frame on the left side that is fairly distracting.  Before doing any other work, I would clone that out with the healing brush, or the patch tool.  Secondly there is not much detail in the snow, this is fairly common because you have to increase your exposure to get details in the subject.  After all, almost everything is darker than snow.  To deal with that we are headed to the Lab Color Mode!

To get to Lab Color: Image -> Mode -> Lab Color.

Once there, I almost always convert my image to a smart object.  To do this:  Layer -> Smart Object -> Convert to Smart Object.  This gives you the ability to go back to your filter or adjustment layers and make changes, instead of having to undo and try again.

Now we can start working on the images lack of detail in the snow.  First thing to do here is select the shadow/highlight adjustments and pretty much just play around with all of the sliders to get the desired look you are going for in the image.  You will be amazed at the power of this tool to save highlights that appear to be blown out and/or shadows that show very little detail.  I also put a highpass sharpening layer set to a blend mode of vivid light on while I am using the smart objects layer, just because I can go back and tweek the amount of sharpening much easier at this point.  Now I flatten my image and convert back to a RGB file so that I can work with all of the filters in Photoshop.

Here is the shadow/highlight dialog box

Here is the final product.  I have also added some noise to ease the transition between some of the bright highlights to the darker shadow areas.  I have also added a vignette with a curves adjustment layer.

Final Results

Cold weather

Brian Williams fishing on the Smith.

Winter hasn’t even fallen upon us yet, and I am already thinking about next spring and summer.  I know there are tons of photography opportunities to come, but there is just something about being on the river during the spring and summer months.  But for now we will have to settle for the texture of the dried plants along the river banks as the trout turn their attention to Blue Wing Olives and a host of nymphs.  Hopefully this year we’ll get some snow to liven things up a little.

This photograph was taken at a fairly slow shutter speed considering there is a person in the frame.  I needed that slow shutter speed to enhance the fly line coming back towards us.  Without just a little bit of motion blur, the line was almost invisible.  It was also taken directly into the sun, thus the lens flare coming across the image.   Which by the way, was a complete mistake….

Canon EOS 10D set at 1/30sec @ f/4

Now that I have that out of my system, look forward to some exciting cold weather photography to be heading our way!!

My First Post!

Smith River just below Philpott Dam

I just had to throw a new post out there.  I have been up all night playing with the new features on my new web hosting software which includes this blog software.  Hopefully this is the start of many new things here at Darrin Doss Photography.

Stay tuned for more!

Darrin