Perhaps not my best work

So, I got a cool opportunity to go visit the new glass boxes at the former Sears tower, now the Willis tower. They glass boxes are 1,353 feet up on the 105th floor of the observation deck. I was able to snag a few cool pictures, but nothing reall worthy of offering for sale. Still I figured I would share a photo with you here just so you could see what it was like.... kind of scary!

Shooting HDR for the fall/Pictures for sale

This past weekend I got the chance to shoot some photos out at Morton Arboretum in the West Suburbs. It was a beautiful weekend, and everybody was out to see the leaves. I took a three mile walk through the woods and I got about 150 great shots.

Lately I have been obsessing over HDR so I shot four really cool sets of HDR photos and I wanted to share them with you. I also posted a really cool shot of a retaining wall I shot on the way out. I punched up the green in it a bit, and tried to make it a bit darker to set a mood. Overall it came out pretty well.

Also, I have set up a site selling some of my photos. Right now it is a bit informal, but it is out there if you are interested. The website is barry-smith.weebly.com

Hope you enjoy!

All my pictures in one place

blog

Here are all my pictures to date in an album. I will update this as I go. If you are interested in purchasing one, let me know and we can discuss price. For now this is very informal, and I will modify it to be more professional as a need arises.

Night Time Shots of Chicago

The other day I made it out to a great location to take some night time long exposure shots of the Chicago Skyline and the Kennedy express way. The people at the Fletcher Jones Mercedes Benz dealership were awesome and let me use their rooftop deck to shoot all of my shots. They were also kind enough to let me take some pictures of cars on their lot. There was no SLS :(, but Mercedes really does make some cool cars. For now I just have pictures of the skyline, but will be posting some of my favorite car shots later. The settings all varied on these shots, and aren't really worth discussing, but I did learn that using a low appeture helps to bring out the reds of the tail lights as you can see in the top 2 shots. You just sacrifice some ambient light and have to expose longer (30 seconds). I also learned that using long exposure noise reduction is very important for the black sky. Overall these shots turned out pretty well. I did no post processing on these at all except to add the watermark.

My photo made the internet!

The photo I submitted for the Gizmodo photo challenge made the internet. It didn't even really place I suppose, but I am still excited to see it up there. I can see how I didn't win, but it was very cool to see some ideas. Check it out if you want on their website. http://gizmodo.com/5655562/gallery/4

A sample of my best

Hope you enjoy some of what I think are my best shots so far!

Expeimenting with silhouettes

This week Gizmodo is trying a new photo challenge called sillhouettes. I want to participate, but it also got me thinking about some cool photos I took last month while in Michigan during the sunset at a pier on Magician Lake. I can't use them in the contest because they have to be current photos from this week, but I thought that they might inspire me. I wanted to post them here to share them with anybody that might be interested in checking them out. You should also check out Gizmodo, one of my favorite sites of all time.

The top shot is probably my favorite. We were right on the Marina and I snapped a picture of a pylon with this light on top. I didn't realize how much it would stand out against the darkening sky (I think this was about 15 minutes after civil twilight began). The settings are 32mm focal point, f/4.2, 1/25 exposure time, 600 ISO.

The second and third shot are shot with the same settings, only on the second I used a manual focus from much closer to focus in on one of the plant stalks. I am pretty happy with how the manual focus came out, though, I do wish that I had timed the shot or gotten the idea about 30 minutes earlier to get some more blues in the background. Settings used are 38mm focal point, f/ 4.5, 1/100 exposure time, 400 ISO.