Adjectize

Coming or Going

Bradley Leyten — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 21:00:17 +0000

My father and I ventured out last weekend to do some photography. It was mainly and excursion with no destination but we did have one place for sure we wanted to stop at, the Blue Water Bridge that you see in the photo. This is the bridge that connects the U.S. and Canada in Port Huron, MI by crossing the Saint Clair River. One of these steel bridges used to handle both directions of traffic but due to the rise in population the second bridge was added, you can notice slight differences in the architecture if you look closely. No one bridge handles traffic coming from Canada to the U.S. and the other vice versa. This photo was shot from the U.S. looking at the Canadian side.

This photo was processed as an HDR using 3 bracketed exposures (0, +2, -2) and was compiled using Photomatix 4. I then made some modifications in Lightroom 3 and adjusted color and contrast using an Adobe Photoshop plugin called Color Efex Pro.

Ridin’ Dirty

Bradley Leyten — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 00:59:49 +0000

Yesterday I ventured down to the abandoned Packard Plant in Detroit, MI once again. Since the last time I was there I found a few more, presumably, stolen vehicles propped up on blocks and covered in graffiti scattered around in various wings of the old factory. Most of the abandoned vehicles, like this one, had been driven of the ledges into truck bays and such. I liked this car because among the spray painted graffiti someone had written “Ridin’ Dirty” on it, which is slang for driving a stolen car (and other felonies while driving). As with most urbex photos there is also the usual piles of debris such as broken concrete from the partially knocked down cinder block walls that give some texture to the photo.

Although I love urbex (urban exploration), it’s a bit creepy walking around in the dimly lit decaying buildings especially by myself. I’d really like to get a group of urbex photographers together and do a city walk in Detroit. If anyone has information on how to organize city walks please let me know!

This is a composite of 3 RAW images that were combined and edited with the software listed below.

Software:

- Photomatix 4 was used for combining the 3 RAW photos used to create the HDR image and tone mapping

- Lightroom 3 was used for minor exposure tweaking and color modification, noise reduction, and cropping

- Adobe Photoshop was used to remove any imperfections or blemishes, resize the image, watermark also the below listed plugins were used.

- Nik Software (Photoshop plugins):

Sharpener Pro – Sharpening

Color Efex Pro – Adjusting contrast and detail

Viveza – Color modification

Adventures Of A Goodman

Bradley Leyten — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 14:47:41 +0000

This week I’d like to introduce a truly inspirational photographer named Greg Goodman that I follow on Twitter. Greg spends a lot of time traveling, usually with little more than his camera gear. He has captured some amazing photos in countries that I have only dreamed of visiting to photograph.

While browsing through the photos on Greg’s website , Adventures of a Goodman, you can see that he has an amazing eye for capturing the culture of his journey. You’ll have no trouble navigating through the wonderful photo albums from his travels in Southeast Asia, Central America, Nicaragua, Germany and places around the USA like Route 66. My personal favorite of his photo albums are the photos of Southeast Asia in particular the photo taken leaning out the side of the train which you can see in the screenshot above.

At this point in my life I have been unable to travel the world but thanks to the astonishing skills of Greg Goodman I was able to embark on virtually journey to many foreign lands . Be sure and visit his website Adventures of a Goodman

Nelly Moser Clamadis

Bradley Leyten — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 00:57:27 +0000

One of the perennials we added to our flower garden last year was the Nelly Moser Clamadis you see in this photo. It never flowered last year however over the last couple days the Clamadis has presented a dozen or so of these big beautiful flowers. I couldn’t help but get the camera out and take a few photos.

This photo was taken in RAW format and processed as a single photo HDR using Photomatix 4. I then performed a few minor tweaks with Lightroom 3 and finally added a filter using Topaz Adjust 4.

The Violin Monster

Bradley Leyten — Sun, 22 May 2011 16:28:39 +0000

In downtown Royal Oak, MI there’s a pretty diverse culture so last night I headed there to try my hand at some street photography. I was crossing a busy intersection when I heard violin music. As I looked ahead it appeared that the soothing melodies where being produced by a man, who’s back was to me at this point, with long gray hair. As I stepped up onto the sidewalk, to my surprise, I realized that the gray hair was in fact a werewolf mask worn while he was harmoniously strumming away on the violin. His violin case was propped open accepting donations with a wisely placed a piece cardboard in the lid that read violinmonster.com. His website is interesting and some of his writing even a bit humorous, apparently he plays in random cities. I certainly admire the creativity, if you wanna get noticed you need to stand out in the crowd and this guy has certainly managed to do so! You can see the girl in the photo looking back to catch another glimpse of the Violin Monster.

Black-Capped Chickadee

Bradley Leyten — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 01:56:57 +0000

One thing is for certain… wild birds are not easy to photograph! While recently trying to get pictures of some Black-Capped Chickadees on a cold winter day here in Michigan I realized just how little these birds stay perched. Another obstacle is that birds often pause in the midst of branches which causes the auto focus to hone in on the wrong thing. This poses the need to use manual focus which takes more time to complete the shot. When the little Black-Capped Chickadees are bouncing around a feeding area it can get very frustrating trying to get a scenic in focus photo. My solution… rather than following the birds with my lens I instead observed where they paused at most frequently. At that point I would adjust my focus and wait patiently pointing the camera on a particular spot. Once the bird entered I simply had to press the shutter button. When taking photos of this Black-Capped Chickadee I used continuous shutter mode and riped off bursts of shots. This is my favorite because I like the way the branch is protruding from the snow as well as the shadow of the Chickadee on the ground.

Reflection Old Barn Window

Bradley Leyten — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 16:00:37 +0000

The picture you see here is one of the windows from the large old barn I posted about the other day. There were several windows on the old barn, some with glass and some without. When I first glanced at the photos of the barn windows on my camera LCD admittedly I wasn’t too impressed. Once I uploaded the pictures to my computer however I was able to see all the detail around the windows in particular because of all the detail of the grain on the barn wood, some of which is rotting away. Although there are a few other photos of the barn windows I’ll be posting I chose this picture first because I liked that the trees, blue sky with clouds are visible in the reflection of the glass. Another thing I found interesting about this window was the was the vines are growing in behind the boards of the barn popping off some of the barn wood.

Blue Morpho Butterfly

Bradley Leyten — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 22:00:34 +0000

Some of my favorite subjects for photography are insects and this Blue Morpho butterfly made for a great photo. I wish I could say that this photo was taken in the wild but it was actually taken in the butterfly house at the Detroit Zoo. When you see the Blue Morpho butterfly with its wings closed is doesn’t look very spectacular. It has a brown camouflage pattern that is interesting but not at all colorful. As you can see, with its wings spread the Blue Morpho butterfly is very beautiful! I followed this elusive insect around for quite a while before it landed and spread its wings giving me a perfect photo opportunity.