8300 Calera Drive

I was recently contacted by a new client to photograph a luxury home in the Barton Creek area. Her regular photographer wasn't available for several days and she was in a bit of a rush. Great news is that she was very happy with the results and I think I might have a new regular client. Always happy when the customer is happy.

Shara & Roger

Loved shooting this wedding. It was a small wedding at La Villa Vista with only immediate family members. Beautiful evening and venue, and a wonderful couple to work with. Wishing Shara & Roger all the best.

Andi at the Villa

Hi all - my friend Andi offered to model for me out at La Villa Vista. Wanted to practice some portraits and bridal shots out there. Here's a few I liked. Enjoy. :)

Paul and Cammie

Engagement shoots with friends are always fun. The couple had a very specific idea which made things easy. I had fun with this. :) We got everything they wanted in less than 70 exposures which is practically unheard of. Also, many thanks to the Austin Speed Shop for putting up with us while we did the shoot. They were awesome. Wishing P & C all the best. :)

Seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary

I like it when you can take something either very ordinary and plain, or even something that you would normally consider an eyesore and make it interesting or beautiful in a photograph. I had this weed that kept popping up in my back yard. It had a very thick stalk and very broad leaves, so I decided to let one grow and see what it did. It ended up being a very large sunflower plant. It's now about 6 feet high. One evening last week I noticed a couple of flower pods were about to open. I thought they were interesting and the soft light was kind of nice so I grabbed a couple of shots. I really liked this one.

View from the gallery

Hello all. :) I love being downtown at sunset. So many cool building reflecting and bouncing the last few rays of the day in crazy ways. You almost wish it lasted a little longer so you had time to wander around in it and take it all in.

The shot above was taken when I stepped out of the Alpha Omega gallery opening for the Austin Gathering of Photographers on Thursday for a bit. That's the Frost Bank tower - I believe its the tallest building in Austin at the moment.

I decided to test the RAW capabilities of the Panasonic LX3. I had to use Silkypix as my other RAW editors will not work with the Panasonic files. I manually developed the file into 3 different pictures with 2 stops variance in exposure. I then used Essential HDR to generate a high dynamic range image.

One thing that really bugged me though was the distortion created by shooting up with the camera. Its just what happens when you shoot up a tall objects - the lines converge as they go up. The best way to deal with this is with a tilt/shift lens. I didn't happen to have one on me, plus they are very expensive, so I used a program called PT Lens. Great product, and not too expensive. I believe it runs about $25 or so and is very useful at correcting all kinds of distortions. It even has a database for putting in certain lens/camera combos for automatic distortion correction - barrel/pincushion, chromatic aberration, and perspective distortions such as in this case. Anyway, here's the image before it was corrected, you can see what a difference it makes. Although side effect of correcting this distortion is that it crops in quite a bit in the final product, so you have to shoot with plenty of room around the subject.

Photo Exhibit Tonight

Time to iron my jeans I guess. :) The Austin Gathering of Photographers photo exhibit opens tonight at the Alpha Omega Gallery downtown. Several Austin photographers were asked to show work, including me.

I'm hanging 4 images in the show. Since many of you won't be able to make it I thought I'd post the images here. Unfortunately a few are repeats from previous posts. I promise I'll put some fresh work up soon!

If you're in town and can make it, the opening starts at 6pm tonight. I believe the show will be on display at the gallery through the month of July however.

Found the Train of Fools

Several years ago I was taking some pictures for a band for their upcoming CD. They wanted pictures around railroad tracks and run down rail road cars. We found a location just off of I35 in east Austin that fit the bill perfectly. There was an abandoned box car we were working with on one set of tracks. However, the tracks behind me were still functional, and while we were shooting a train approached on those tracks. I looked up in time to see it was a passenger train, and at the end of one of the cars down a ways a fleck of red stood out. I took a Canon point and shoot I had with me, and snapped the above shot just as the fleck of red, which turned out to be someone dressed as a clown, passed me.

This has turned out to be one of my most successful images ever. It has been featured as photo of the week at Photo.net, and is currently being featured at a photo exhibit in a gallery in downtown Austin. The photo has been labeled 'Clown Train' and 'Train of Fools' (the former is the file name the second is a title I came up with later that I prefer). Everyone, including myself, seems to really enjoy this image.

I photographed the image originally in color. However I used a program called ACDSee to do the post processing work on it. ACDsee may not be the most powerful software in its class, but I find it does make for an extremely quick workflow if you just need to do some basic things. I first selected the center area of the train with the freehand lasso tool. Then I inverted the selection and applied a gaussian blur. I liked the dreamlike, surreal affect it had on the image. I then converted the image to a greyscale image for black and white as I felt the colors distracted from what was going on in the image.

I've wondered about the train though as I've looked at the image the past couple of years, and wondered about its story. Then one morning last week as I'm leaving my favorite local coffee shop here in Cedar Park I happen to notice something between some buildings in a strip mall across the street. I drive over to take a closer look, and low and behold there is a train yard I didn't know existed back there. Not only that, but my train in the above photo was stationed there. I drove around and found the gate which was closed, but they had flyers posted. Turns out it belongs to the Austin Steam Train Association. They run the train for various excursions on weekends. I was pretty stoked to find it, and am contacting them to see if I can do more photos, so stay tuned . :)

Agave Plant Before Breakfast

On my way to the coffee shop this morning in Cedar Park, TX, I decided to take a back road I had not been on before to avoid some rush hour traffic. They had landscaped the median of the road with Agave plants, which were flowering. Agave's apparently don't flower until they reach a certain age - around 100 years depending on the plant and its environment. I thought it made for a nice couple of pictures with the sun rising behind it. This is why I try to keep my cameras with me at all times. First image is a high dynamic range photography exposure blended from 9 exposures and then run through Essential HDR. The second image below is a normal exposure and has very little post processing done on it. Third exposure below is another high dynamic range exposure run through Photomatix. I thought it would be fun to compare the two different editors.

The Cliffs Above the Austin 360 Bridge

A lot of people don't know it but on the north side of the Austin 360 bridge there is a trail that is fairly accessible that goes to the top of the cliffs overlooking the bridge. It's a beautiful place for portraits especially at sunset. I shot this about 45 minutes before sunset. I wasn't planning this shot. I was looking for a place to set up my tripod and looked back at my girlfriend looking out over the cliff. The light was perfect. So on the fly I shot a single RAW capture and then used a program called Essential HDR to generate a HDR picture from the single exposure.

Yes, you can generate a HDR image from a single exposure. It helps a lot if the exposure is in RAW format, as RAW files have several exposures worth of information to work with. Some cameras are better than others for this as not all sensors are created equal. One of the best cameras to use when taking this approach is the Nikon D700. It has a good 5 or 6 EV's of information in the RAW files. That gives you a lot to work with from a single capture.

As far as how you create a HDR image from a single RAW file, its pretty simple. You just use your RAW editor to create 3 or more separate jpegs at different exposure settings, then use your HDR editor to combine them into the HDR file. Essential HDR is really convenient for this - it will do all the heavy lifting of generating a HDR from a single capture for you, you just tell it to generate a HDR from a RAW file, point to the file, and then a couple seconds later it gives you the HDR image. The advantage to using this method is that you can capture moving subjects sharply - notice the waves in the water below are sharp. The disadvantage is that it can't cover the range of actually taking multiple exposures - you're limited to what the RAW file can capture. 5 or 6 EV's is ok, but I've run into lots of situations where I had to balance up to 15 EV's, so a single RAW capture wouldn't cut it there.

Side note, one thing I like about Essential HDR is that it is very good about not introducing a lot of unwanted HDR artifacts. I also processed this shot through Photomatix and got some pretty bad halos around the tree. I tend to use different HDR editors for different things. I like Photomatix very much for my car stuff (its kind of slow and clumsy to use though). Essential HDR I use for architectural, people/portrait, and pretty much anything where I need a more natural look.

Party at the Austin Speedshop

There was a party at the Austin Speedshop this past Friday to benefit an employee who had a medical emergency and no health insurance. Worthy cause and the shop went all out. For those who don't know, Jesse James is a part owner of the shop. I believe while we were at the party Jesse James was busy setting a new world record for a hydrogen powered car. 199 mph - very cool. Anyway, lot of really cool cars hanging around. so I couldn't resist taking a few shots. These are HDR images + extremely long exposures. Tricky stuff especially with all the people around.

Photography tip: red light is not your friend. Sometimes it can't be avoided however, such as in this shot where the car is illuminated almost entirely by the red neon from the building. Enough color from the car is coming through that it looks ok on the screen. However if I were going to print this I'd either try and tone it down or even go black and white with it.

Started to remove the piece of paper from the tire for the shot and then I thought it kind of went with the beat up nature of the car.

Cool Car Pictures Using HDR

One of my favorite things to do for fun is take car pictures and run them through a post processing procedure called HDR. HDR stands for high dynamic range and boy can it make car pictures pop. Its a process where you take multiple exposures at different exposure values and then blend the results together. Depending on the photographer you can either go for a very realistic looking photograph that just has more detail in the highlights and shadows, to a very amped up effect that looks like a painting or cartoon. When I shoot cars I love to play with the more extreme settings.



A couple of months ago a huge vintage and custom car show was here in Austin. The Lonestar Kustom Car show (yes, they spell it with a 'K'), is one of the top 2 or 3 shows of its kind in the US. It draws hundreds of custom cars and thousands upon thousands of visitors. I had wanted a couple days to shoot it but the weather only gave me a window of a couple of hours.



These cars are amazing. Many of them cost over $100,000 to build. The paint job on one car I shot was $30,000 alone. I consider this type of photography 'automotive portraits' in a way, and occasionally I do get clients who want portraits done of their cars. If I had a car like some of these folks I wouldn't blame them for investing in some quality shots of their pride and joy.

Nice Intimate Wedding Venue with Spectacular View on Lake Travis

I don't have any weddings or portraits to share today but I thought I'd share an awesome wedding venue if you're planning a small wedding. La Villa Vista on Lake Travis is within walking distance of the famous Oasis restaurant and offers almost exactly the same view without the crowds. You get a spectacular view of the lake and the sun sets directly across the lake from the Villa. The Villa also offers an assortment of rooms, so you can have your wedding, reception, and private room to retire to after the festivities all in one beautiful place. For more info contact Ken and Eva Wiley at 512-266-6000 or evawiley@austin.rr.com.

Welcome to Harris Photography

Welcome!

I have to admit, I've never been much of a blogger until now. I suppose that I've never really had a specific purpose for one until I realized it might be a good way to share my business and passion for photography.

I've been a photographer since around 1988. I went on a trip to South America - Quito, Ecuador specifically. I was there for a little over a month, which included a week in the rain forest. My dad had let me borrow the only camera he had, which was a little point and shoot that was very old and had not been used in some time.

I saw so many amazing things there. Two images stand out in my mind. One was we went to a resort on the edge of a volcano crater in the Andes mountains. It wasn't active of course, and a lake had formed in the crater from hundreds or thousands of years of daily rainfall. The water in the lake was like crystal. Very pure and undisturbed. You could see the bottom from the edge of a pier where the water was over 10 feet deep. I also remember there was a small island in the middle of the lake, and as the sun set a rainbow formed that appeared to be going from the island to the elevation deepened blue Andean sky. Of course I snapped a ton of exposures. The camera was clicking away so I assumed everything was alright.

The 2nd image I remember was in the rain forest. The lime farmer we were staying with was an American veteran of WWII. His name was Tio Day. He had taken a bayonet in the face during a battle then killed the Japanese soldier who stabbed him. He was also a POW for a while - but those are other stories for another blog. He asked one of his farm workers to guide us up a creek to find its head waters. I remembered we made a turn where we literally had to hold trees on the edge of a small grotto. As we made the turn I saw one of the most amazing things in my life. The grotto widened to an opening where the creek flowed through a jumble of large boulders that were a dark grey in color. The boulders were covered in this bright emerald green moss and there were hundreds of bright electric blue butterflies on the rocks. I think I remember the farm worker telling us they liked something either with the moss or the rocks, I can't remember, but the view was stunning. Again I clicked away like mad with the dusty old point and shoot. Click. Click. Click.

In the end, when I got home, I had taken 9 rolls of 36 exposure film (ah, remember the film days). I eagerly ran off to get them developed. A couple days later I went to pick up my film and guess what, one exposure had something on it - everything else was blank. I was crushed. All those incredible things I'd seen would have to live on in my memory.

I entered my sophmore year of college the next year and had some electives to fill. I immediately decided that I would learn how to use a camera. That trip had awakened both my desire to capture images as well as a desire to become competent at doing so. That elective ended up becoming my major, and I've never looked back since. :)

Since this is a photography blog, let me post a few pictures from my portfolio. I particularly love taking pictures of people. Sometimes I even get paid for it. :) Honestly though, what is even more gratifying is watching people get excited about their pictures. There's nothing better than that.