Tillo13 Photoworks

The Mediocrely Dark Tree Near Kent, OR

andy — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:12:17 +0000

This shot really made me mad – Photomatix has been letting me down lately as I’ll edit the photo how I want it, and when the process comes in, the shot is very dark. I’ve tried to compensate by brightening the photo before I process it, but I’m just not as happy with the program lately – another sign I spend too much time trying to perfect it. So it is…

Lake Goss Sunrise

andy — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 00:04:52 +0000

I hadn’t taken a lot of shots lately, been busy with other things; but the family and I took a long weekend to the Toivola cabin 8/14-15 which was almost precisely HERE. It was a great time, had some good food, good friends, and mediocrely behaved dogs. All in all, a great weekend. The girls learned how to swim with lifejackets on, they also learned how NOT to swim with one off – they sunk like a ton of bricks when they tried to swim without them. Thanks Ayla for teaching them to swim on Wednesdays, they clearly like it a lot!

Anyway, with the photo itself, it was a unique one in that it was a perfectly clear morning, no texture in the sky and very little on the water. I loved the composition of the shot so I wanted to bring it out. A lot of people ask the process, well for this one it was:

1. It was a .jpg file so I pulled it up in Photoshop and sharpened the image.
2. I then went to the “exposure” dropdown and pulled the gamma down so it’d be darker in the bright spots (better contrast).
3. Opened Photomatix and used the darkened image and the original image to put a light HDR feel to it. Fiddle with the settings here, to each their own.
4. Saved that photo and pulled back into Photoshop, dug into my standard background texture file and pulled out 2 I liked. Created separate layers for them, set the opacity down on them, and set the first one (scratches) to a soft ‘overlay’ and about 35% opacity and the 2nd one (brown mesh frame) to ‘screen’ and opacity to 20%.
5. Saved and popped it into Adobe Lightroom and tossed in a ‘general punch’, and ‘basic bam’.
6. Back to Photoshop to clean up the edges and edit out a few watermarks that showed on my poorly cleaned 10-24mm Tamaron lens.

That’s the long and the short of it, but I do like doing these projects that are a bit off the norm of shooting though. It was a good weekend had by all!

Big Loop Near River

andy — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 15:40:38 +0000

This is another stitched shot right above the Columbia River on the Washington side. We pulled off and I walked back from the road and took 30 or 40 shots of things but when I came back to the car, the lighting and cloud cover was a perfect setup, so I snapped a few more:
BONUS SHOT!
I took another about 210 degree shot of the river with my macro lens just before I left too – if you look at the FULL SIZED image (60MB) you’ll see people on the bridge and across the water – stitching it up makes it look way too small, but a neat concept.

Down To The Columbia River

andy — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:29:51 +0000

This one actually is a set of about 10 shots that I pivoted on each step to take. The full size version is HERE, it’s 33MB, but it makes for a pretty sweet background!
There is a turnout right as you go up the hill after Biggs, OR on the Washington side of the bridge over the Columbia that had a nice cloud cover that day that I wanted to capture.
Additionally, I wanted to test out the photo stitching capability of Photoshop CS5, and I must say that seems pretty similar to CS4. Not a bad thing, but does eat up a lot of memory in completing.

Barbed Wire Tree

andy — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 16:05:15 +0000

I wasn’t going to keep this one in the mix to process because the whole point of getting the post of the fence in the picture was to be able to get the texture of the grain in it, but I under exposed the shot and wasn’t able to pull any of the texture or color out of it. I’m a fan of the barbed wire shots and it’s clearly cut into 3rds, and was easy enough on the eyes that I decided it could still fly anyway, here you be…

Yellow Flower Above the River

andy — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 16:47:57 +0000

There weren’t many things growing in the rocks above the Columbia at the i84/highway 97 interchange at Biggs, OR – but these flowers seemed to be growing just fine. Toss in a dramatic background and bam, you got yourself a shot. I’m not usually a flower guy, but I DO like to take shots of landscapes, and this one fit.

Crooked River Ranch, May 2009

andy — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 00:19:56 +0000

When we were in Bend earlier this year, I remembered that I had a bunch of photos that I hadn’t processed from the LAST time we were there. I remember I took a handful on the golf course. Jay and I played with these guys that were very into the game, but very horrid at the game. They had bad tempers.,

We also have some shots of the windmills along the Columbia River, and some snapshots at Grampa’s house. Lilla and Chloe and their rabbits. I don’t remember what they named them, but one was like “Lollipop Johns” or something.

One shot in there is a an abandoned house I found. I want to say it is of this one HERE, but I’ve been wrong before…

A Dying Tree

andy — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 16:22:38 +0000

I always like stumbling onto these trees – the downside is that it is usually on the highway somewhere and I’ll need to pull over fast or else turn around at the next exit; either way makes Heather ask what the hell I’m doing. To my side of the story though, I don’t ever do it if there are cars right on my ass behind me. This is along highway 97 also just past the Shoe Tree (that is no longer there because some chump burned it down) – it’s not got any shoes in it, but still makes for a pretty dramatic shot.

Another Old Barn in Oregon

andy — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 16:07:53 +0000

If you are a watcher of any of my shots, I really like to photograph old rundown barns and structures. This one I think was outside of Shaniko around HERE somewhere. Heather wanted to get home quick, but we’ve driven by this place like 283 times without stopping. Thought it’d be a good stop; think it was.

An Old Gas Station in Kent, Oregon

andy — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:00:56 +0000

Heather’s dad always said that he wanted to stop by this gas station and shoot a couple of shots of the old gas pumps. I thought I’d do that for him; coincidentally the site had a few other really good shots in it. Again the bane of my existence is photo processing. There always seems to be one more thing I want to change up, or a color I’m looking to find, but I think I found most of the big ones in here on these shots.