I know it's almost been a month, but...

I finally got around to finishing this little firework thing I was doing! In my mind, it was supposed to come out better, but it didn't. I thought the actual little fireworks were nice, until I tried to add words and that's what made it fizzle out (for me). Trying so hard to figure out how to flatten layers and have them all be seen is getting the best of me!

For those of you that have no idea what I'm talking about I'll explain: I have this nice black square with different firework images (layers) that I added to it spread around in a nice way. I wanted to add "Happy Fourth" (also a text layer) to my picture to give it a little more something. Words with a nice fiery glow to them would add the trick!...but no. Here I am unable to make the text layer play nice and attach itself to the nice black square without erasing my other firework images. Jerk.

I just did the next thing I thought of and typed my own words and made them red, white and blue. Not as awesome as I thought it would turn out, but it's something I can mess with later after I figure out what I'm doing wrong.







Started back at my day job (FINALLY), so hopefully I'll get sent out of town more often so I can bring more landscape pictures (or anything else for that matter) to this blog. Thanks for reading!

Gazebo Update/Fourth of July/Lightning

Boy, I thought I would be able to keep up with this, but I've been SLACKING! I haven't been slacking in terms of playing in Gimp though. I've been slowly, but surely learning how to do different things with it. Mostly by trial and error and the occasional YouTube tutorial (when I give up). If you don't know what Gimp is, it's the poor person's version of Adobe Photoshop. At the awesome cost of FREE! There are many things you can do with it that are the same, if not better, than it's much more expensive cousin. I can't really give accurate examples of just exactly what you can do (because I don't own Adobe Photoshop), just that MANY other people who use the Gimp program have said so. Besides that's what Google is for, right? ;P You can see a piece that took me FOREVER to do (only because it was my first time making such a thing) if you go to www.facebook.com/AmityvillePhotography. You have to be logged out of Facebook though to see it. It's the welcome page to try to get people to like my page. Have you liked it yet??

Anyways, onto what this blog update was supposed to be for. Good thing I write it in the subject line from the start or I'd totally forget and ramble on about who knows what...

Gazebo Update: I signed up on Photography Schoolhouse and posted the 4 pix from the last blog post and the person who cared enough to reply said they liked #4 even though it was really blown out by the benches. I didn't care for the "mist" effect that was going on, so I reworked it again! I think I'm finally satisfied...

What do you think?
















Fourth of July: Kind of a crappy night for fireworks here in Arizona. It was dirty out because a dust storm had just decided to roll through and a storm was coming in behind it. It was so bad, the farm where we watch the fireworks from, wasn't even sure if they were going to be able to set them off for a good 20 minutes after they were scheduled to start. While waiting, I watched the people around us set off their little ground fireworks (where it's so dry I was waiting for the field to go up in flames..now THAT would have been a hell of a picture!).

These children were in awe of the fireworks. I didn't get very good pictures of the fireworks in the sky this year. It was still SO windy and my camera shook around a lot causing the bursts/light beams to be very wiggly. :(








Lightning: Monsoon season has approached us here in the desert region. I get excited because that means I get to practice my lightning pictures! This also means dangerous situations because in order to get a decent one, you sort of have to be in the action. I was in my driveway snapping away at the hopes of seeing a bit of action from the storm that was behind the row of houses in my way. I was just about to go inside because I thought the storm that was coming had died down (like usual), when much to my surprise, a storm cell grew behind me and gave me the best light show!

 It was pouring over there. I didn't get a drop on me until about 10 minutes later. It was definitely time to go in by then. The storm kicked up so ferociously, I was worried I would be struck standing with a metal tripod, close to a tree, without rubber soles on my shoes.

That's all I have to share for now. I'm finally going back to my day job (Wo0 H0o!) this week. Usually I get sent out of town, so maybe I'll get to take wonderful pictures from those destinations! Thanks for reading!

Welcome to the blog!

I've been trying to build my photo business up for about the past year and it's slow going, but I'm getting there. I've read a lot of other people's, "how to get lots of photography business" hints, tips and tricks and every one of them said to take advantage of Facebook since it's free advertisement and quite a few said to add a blog. So...

Step One: I got a page set up on Facebook to get the word out through my friends and family, and hopefully they'll pass it on to their friends and family. I didn't want to make one, only because I am still so afraid to show off my work.

Step Two: Add a blog. I pondered this for quite some time. Why add a blog? I wasn't really sure. Most photographer's blogs are very complex with aperture, exposure, etc and I think they would only be understood by other photographers. It's not going to be complex at all. It's just basically for me to get feedback from pictures I want to sell and to talk about stuff that I want to talk about. All photography related of course!

In doing these two things, I hope that little by little I'm going to start coming out of my "scaredy-catness" and believing that my photos are indeed OK.

Let's begin..

I've been messing around with this image for the past couple of days. I can't decide which one I like better.

<~*~Number 1 the original. Sorry it's small but, it's so people can't steal it and use it as easily.

<~*~Number 2. Fanned out the light a little bit.

<~*~Number 3. Added a new little glow effect. I kinda like it.

<~*~Number 4. Added a little more glow to it. I think this one may be a little over the top. It kind of makes the benches seem like there is mist coming up from them.


Again, sorry the images are so small!



Hope you've enjoyed this so far! Leave your feedback and pick in the comments. Thanks!