Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Cars - Rods

I was going through my archives and ran across some photos I took of the 2010 Lonestar Rod and Kustom Roundup. Now, I'm sadly not a car guy, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate the take no prisoners in your face flashy beauty of these amazing (and usually expensive) expressions of kinetic art.

I love to use HDR on this subject. Now I use HDR photography in a lot of situations, but usually I go through painstaking steps to make it look as un-HDR as possible. Usually this is for architecture and real estate projects where they don't want in your face saturation or overly painterly or surreal photographs. They want it to look as realistic as possible. What I love about shooting cars, particularly rods like these, is that I can let it all out and go a little crazy with it.

I've upgraded a lot of my editing software since 2010 of course, and there is a big difference between the results of the old vs the new, so I thought it would be fun to grab a few of the photos and run them through the new processes. I was pretty happy with the results. :)


Originally I processed this in color...

but I think I prefer it in black and white.



Thursday, January 17, 2013

Portraits for Musician Laird Oliver

Local musician Laird Oliver has a new album coming out and wanted some new pictures for self promotion. He contacted me and after sorting out some scheduling conflicts, we finally managed to meet for a shoot. We decided to meet in east Austin at a railway stop - it ended up being the perfect place and we got some good work done there. We finished up at Halcyon coffee shop on 4th street. Really fun day all in all and I was very pleased with the results. If you want to check out Laird's music he is performing at Spider House on the 19th















Thursday, October 4, 2012

New Toys


I've really been wanting a small camera that I can carry with me wherever I go, but still has a large amount of manual control. There are time's where my phone's camera is just not good enough - for one thing I cannot shoot in any kind of RAW format for editing later. (RAW file formats capture all the info from the sensor. Jpeg's are compressed to a smaller size and a lot of information is thrown away). Of course my Nikon DSLR's do all that but lets face it - there are times I don't want to lug a big camera or bag of gear around.

An example is the picture above. I was on a bike ride in the late afternoon and stumbled across this landscape. Fortunately I had with me my newest toy stuffed in my back jersey pocket - an Olympus XZ-1.

Without RAW I would not have been able to process the shot above. The sky would have been completely blown out - just solid white. I decided to use the camera's bracketing feature so I could figure out which exposure would be the best to work with. It turned out the shot that was shot almost 2 stops underexposed was the best. I was able to bring the foreground up to normal exposure and then digitally apply a neutral density gradient filter to the sky to get some of the really nice cloud detail. In jpeg this image would not be possible. I'd either have an underexposed foreground and properly exposed sky or a properly exposed foreground and a white sky.

I'm impressed with the camera overall so far. It has a super bright f1.8 lens which I believe is the brightest out there in this type of camera. Has a very usable zoom range. Controls are very well laid out and you can get to almost anything you want to change quickly. Another very interesting feature is that it can remotely trigger an off camera flash unit. Not sure how often I will do that with this camera but still it is a very cool feature that has me considering investing in one of Olympus's strobe units.

Anyway, I now have no excuse for not having a camera with me when a cool photo opportunity pops up.

Monday, September 24, 2012

Hi all - I'm running a Morgan's Deal and Moolala (who thinks of these names btw?) ads for a $49 portrait session that includes:


  1. 1 FREE 11x14 print
  2. 1 CD/DVD w/low res images (proof cd)
  3. 5 coupons for any print 20% off
This will be for a 1 hour location portrait session with unlimited poses.

If anyone is interested contact me directly at Michael@JohnMichaelHarris.com . Thanks!

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Jason and Chimene Married!

Several months ago I had the wonderful opportunity to photograph two of my friends getting married in Colorado. The event was just outside of Ft. Collins in one of the most beautiful outdoor venues I've had the opportunity to photograph. I'll let the photos speak for themselves. ;)

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

More family portraits

Mother's day was an excellent opportunity to take some portraits of my nieces and nephews running around at my parent's house. I then gave the portraits to my mom for her mother's day gift. Portraits of kids and grand kids is always something a mother loves.







Sunday, April 25, 2010

Chloe

Grabbed some shots of my niece Chloe. Kids with this much personality are fun to photograph. :) Her parents will really dig these.