Jon's Photos: Posts tagged with Photo Outing

Wildflowers

April 4, 2010 / Tags: Heather, Pete, Photo Outing, Wedding Photography

As more of our friends start getting married, I've been looking more closely at wedding photography. Last September I covered Carol and Murim's Wedding, but I hadn't done an engagement session yet. Meanwhile, Kathy had been browsing for photographers for our own wedding, and she found this great location for outdoor engagement photos.

The flowers are only in bloom this time of year, so they would be gone by the time Christina and Hao take their engagement photos this summer. Instead, I asked Pete and Heather to come out and model for us. Yes, they're already married, so it's not technically an engagement session. But they're very much in love, and that's what we're really trying to capture, right?

Thanks for coming out, Pete and Heather! I hope you guys enjoy the photos.

The Vintage Look

March 15, 2010 / Tags: Kathy, Photo Outing

I see a lot of photographers post-process their digital photos to make them look "vintage", so I thought I'd experiment a bit to see how it's done. But first, I needed some photos to play with, so I dragged Kathy out this afternoon to be my model.

Once I had the photos, I looked around online for tutorials. Somewhat frustratingly, a lot of search hits took me to sites that were trying to sell Photoshop Actions, but I found this site that offered free Actions — but more importantly, breakdowns of what the actions were doing. I played around with some of the Actions on the site and settled on a modified version of Johnna's Tea Party. I basically followed steps 1-5, then jumped straight to step 10, except I used Overlay instead of Soft Light for step 10. I set all of the adjustment layers to 35% opacity except for the Saturation layer in step 1.

Here's the result:

To get a better idea of what's going on, here's a before/after comparison — before is on the left and after is on the right.

I also tried the Action on a couple of photos from the last post, just to see how they'd turn out. I think it works pretty well, but the effect is more subtle.

Architect's Archive

December 26, 2009 / Tags: Photo Outing

Kathy's uncle is an architect, and he stores some of his blueprints at Kathy's grandparents' house. When I was there for Christmas dinner with my camera, I couldn't resist taking some pictures. They look really neat — so organized, but at the same time, so chaotic.

Carlsbad Beach

November 29, 2009 / Tags: Beach, Carlsbad, Photo Outing

Brad and I hung out at the beach a bit the Friday before Pete & Heather's weddding. We had our cameras with us anyway, so we took a few pictures.

I particularly like this one. In the past, I've tried to take photos to use as wallpapers but was always unhappy with the sharpness of the image or the amount of noise. This photo didn't need any editing, and it's sharp enough for me to use on my 24" monitor. (You can download the original photo and use it for your wallpaper, too!)

This one is kind of neat, too. I had some trouble finding the composition I wanted, but I think I managed to capture it here.

Visiting Philip in St. Louis

October 26, 2009 / Tags: Beer, Calvin, David, Food, Jon, Kathy, Philip, Photo Outing, St. Louis

Since Kathy and I didn't take a summer vacation, we decided to go visit Philip in St. Louis with Calvin and David.

We flew in early Friday afternoon. Philip picked us up and took us to eat St. Louis style pizza. I forgot the name of the restaurant already, but it had these cool red booths that I couldn't resist taking a picture of:

The cheese is a mix of provolone and mozzarella. It tasted very different, but I liked it.

After lunch, Philip dropped us off at the Saint Louis Zoo and went back to work. Calvin was teasing Philip because Philip's mom said "oh, he loves the zoo." But after visiting, we can see why — the Saint Louis Zoo is the 3rd-largest in the US, ranked #1 by Zagat, and admission is free. (A recurring theme in St. Louis, it seems...) We didn't have time to hit all of the exhibits, but we did see some cool ones. I liked how a lot of the exhibits allowed you to get very close to the animals.

After Philip picked us up, he showed us around his alma mater, Washington University.

In the parking lot, Philip was looking for a building or something and didn't see a woman trying to back out of a parking space, so he just kept driving. (This would be another theme throughout the trip...) Fortunately, she saw him and didn't hit him, but we laughed that she was probably cursing at us. We coined the term "pulling a Philip" to mean "purposely blocking someone from backing out of a parking spot." Philip wasn't amused.

We had dinner and some excellent root beer floats at Fitz's. They make all their root beers and sodas on the premises — you can see all the equipment behind a big glass wall. (I didn't take a picture, though.)

The next morning, we woke up early and went to see the Gateway Arch. (Well, Kathy, Philip and I work up early — we had to drag Calvin and David out of bed.)

After the arch, we had lunch at St. Louis Bread Co., what we Californians call "Panera". They had the same design, same logo, etc. — it was just called St. Louis Bread Co. Even the web site on their cups pointed to panerabread.com, but we were joking that Panera is better because this particular location badly burned our paninis. (We took it back and they fixed it.)

After lunch, we toured the Anheuser-Busch brewery. Anheuser-Busch is probably best known for making Budweiser, but they apparently do a bunch of other stuff too, like owning Sea World in San Diego and selling baker's yeast during Prohibition. You learn something new every day. The (free) tour started off with a visit to their Clydesdale stables and ended with two free beers. :)

More than anything else, I was impressed by the sheer amount of beer they produce. During the tour, we visited their secondary fermentation tanks. The tour guide said that if you drank a beer per hour, it would take you 137 years to drink all the beer in one tank. These things were huge, and they had several hundred of them on the premises. (You can't see it in the photo, but the tanks are pretty deep, and there are another set of tanks stacked on top of the ground-level tanks.) And they have several breweries across the country. That's a lot of beer.

That night we had dinner at Rigazzi's on The Hill (St. Louis' Little Italy), then dessert at Bailey's Chocolate Bar. I loved how the place was decorated, and the chocolate brownie was probably the best brownie I've ever tasted. It was a little bit crunchy on the outside and soft and gooey on the inside. Mmm...

Sunday morning we got up a little later, checked out of our hotel, and went to have brunch at Wild Flower. The food was really good. They had this one wall next to where we were sitting that was decorated with masks. The masks were for sale, too. We didn't buy any, but I took a few pictures.

After brunch, we visited the Cathedral Basilica Saint Louis. The pictures don't do it justice. There's a sense of awe that you feel when you're inside that pictures just can't convey.

Other stuff we did that afternoon...

We checked out a condo that was for sale. (We were curious about property values there.) The model unit on the 5th floor (which was recently sold) was nice. Two bedrooms, corner unit, with floor-to-ceiling windows for the entire corner (living room and kitchen) that had a view of the Gateway Arch. The bedroom window on the other side overlooked the 4th-floor pool.

We took some pictures with the pretty fall trees as a background.

We wanted to visit The Cupcakery, but they were closed on Sundays. So we got boba instead. The tea was good, but the boba was pretty tasteless and hard. :( I'm thinking about starting a boba critic web site. ;)

We visited the Saint Louis Science Center. Admission was free.