Watermarking

After reading a DPS post on automatically watermarking your images, I've decided to adopt a watermark. Now that I have full-res photos available on Flickr, it's probably a good step to protect them a little more. I will strive not to make my watermark distracting. Here's a sample. If there are any changes you would recommend, speak now or forever hold your peace.





click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 300mm
Monopod


Should I just put the name? Just the site? Smaller text? What do you guys recommend?

Foreground in the Landscape

First of all, an exciting announcement: I finally buckled and bought a Pro account on Flickr. The cool part of this is, (among other things) I can now upload my photos in their original resolution. Woot!

So one thing I learned while reading up on how to take better landscape photos is that you need to consider the foreground of the shot as well as the background. Having one point of interest in each area of the photo allows for a better picture that people are more inclined to look at for a long time.








click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/11
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 18 mm
Monopod


I'm not as happy with this photo as I was with this one, but it didn't turn out too bad, and it's a good one to illustrate this concept.

Black and White Landscape

This is one of the best landscapes I think I have ever produced.





click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/11
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 18 mm
Tripod


It really needs to be viewed as large as possible. I wish I could offer more than 1024 pixels wide, but yeah, Flickr. The custom black & white controls in Lightroom and shooting in RAW made all the difference here. I'm seriously considering getting this printed in a large-ish size.

Vertical Panorama

While at Capitol Reef, I decided to try a vertical panorama, something that I had heard of, but never attempted. Long story short, it worked really well. The nature of this image means that when I crunched it down to 1024 pixels tall, it got really skinny, but rest assured that in full quality, it looks nice :)




click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/8 (all frames)
Shutter Speed: 1/200 (all frames)
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 55 mm (all frames)
Tripod


The composition isn't spectacular, but this was more an exercise than anything else.

Captitol Reef

Sorry for not giving you all a heads-up before I left, but for spring break, my family went to Capitol Reef National Park in southern Utah for the last few days. I took about 3.5 GB worth of photos, mostly in RAW, and I've just barely started to scratch the surface with putting the good ones through Lightroom and Photoshop. So don't be surprised if my posts for the next like, two weeks are all Capitol Reef photos!




click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/11
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 18 mm
Monopod


I found myself using the 18 side of my 18-55mm kit lens far more often than I ever have in the past. I also found myself wishing for a lens hood on many occasions. Hopefully lens flares that occurred won't be too difficult to take out when it comes down to it.