U Pull It

In Omaha, there is this place called "U Pull It." Its essentially a scrap yard for old cars. The cars are carefully mounted on their wheels and left with the hood and trunk open. As you can imagine, all walks of life come to this auto-wonderland looking for parts. Nothing newer than 99', open 7 days a week. Incredible photo opportunities. So I went to this place on a gray morning, which was unfortunate but since I go home for such short times, I cant really pick and choose. Anyway, here is the new Nebraska landscape.

 

FLIER, FLIER!

Return of Rufio the Jedi

I went over to the Sunflower House on Monday to shoot some promotional photos of my buddy and local rap artist, Jamaal aka Rufio the Jedi. It was a sweet good time and we listened to Lil Wayne to help put us in the motion. That is probably key to a successful shoot.

Kansas City / hey-hey-hey-hey

So last week I went to Kansas City for a different scene. I wanted to look around for some sweet spots for portraits and stuff like that down the line.

Quickly, I decided to look exclusively for graffiti, something that Lawrence just doesnt seem to have a whole lot of. These are some photos of what I found. Most of them are taken within a few blocks of the Art District and Grinders. Hope you like!

 

Hip-Hop Noise part 2

Ok everyone, I make a mistake when I confidently told you that my noise reduction was "conservative." It wasn't. The sliders that I adjusted only told the program to affect less noise, not affect noise less. Essentially, it was still set to full 100% noise reduction so I apologize because the photos looked pretty awful on my monitor.

Keep in mind that I edit colors with my monitor calibrated to adobe 1998, for super great color (if only it was that easy, hehe). Anyway, I'm learning more and more about this program which has a huge amount of options. In photoshop, the photos I uploaded originally looked really nice and noise free, but whatever compression happens when a jpg is uploaded to blogspot, it turned them a little more noise-reduced than I wanted.

Lets try them again. Also, in the crowd photo, I know many of you probably thought that fuzzy shape on the bottom was distracting right? Me too. Also, if you wanted me to crop out the visible computer on the left of Greg, I didn't. I just don't like to get too tight if I can avoid it.

A Hip Hop Scene and a Noise Issue

A question comes to my mind fairly regularly: Should I work concert photos up in black and white? My answer varies from venue to venue and to be honest, I usually prefer black and white if the stars of the show are well lit.

If there are obvious and clear separations in the light levels, black and white can smooth out the out of focus faces, extension cords, and other problems and still leave a punchy shot with plenty of contrast while keeping the main act well lit and defined.

The Jackpot Saloon is not one of these venues. The light sucks horribly. Flash photography doesn't do it for me because don't have a hotshoe flash that would keep up with the show. Until I get one, I must use color. Why? I use color because the stage lights have gels over the front of them that essentially convert the color temperatures of regular yellowish lights to greens, blues, and plenty of red. With black and white, these separations come up for me to be very murky. The image looks like a shadow surrounded by shadow. If I, on the other hand, keep  the color, I can use the different colored lights to define the scene and give it more punch.

With this color, comes noise. Unlike film grain, my camera gives me horrid banding (when noise appears in lines through the image) and not the nice spotty appearance of grain. What can be done?! Well, a little. For "Jockin' My Fresh," a hip-hop show at the Jackpot Saloon, I used Noiseware, a plugin for photoshop with some success. To keep the detail, I left mid-tone and highlights pretty much untouched but removed roughly half of the noise in the shadow. With this I lose some detail but I tried to keep that minimized and after some conservative unsharp masking, they look vastly improved.

To demonstrate, I'll post a photo that is untouched by Noiseware or Unsharp mask

And now, the same photo with corrections:

Stik Figa

Ok, and because you've read this much, I'll show you a few more edits. Just click the "read more" button below!

Portfolio (Working)

Ok folks, I've spend more than a few hours trying to prepare my portfolio. This is where I stand right now, though a lot could be cut. Thanks for looking, comment if you want to! Keep in mind that this is not a general work portfolio, but a photojournalism portfolio. What's missing? Well, a bunch of landscapes and event photos.