Jason Daniel Photography

This was a quick shot as I got up one morning. I just love how the buildings & trees came out. You don’t have trees and buildings like this in Chicago.

I don’t think things could have gone any better during this photo shoot.  Period. 

I wanted to catch a sunrise at the beach before I left Miami.   Unfortunately, the beach was about a 10 min drive from the hotel, and I didn’t have a car.  I was planning on getting up alone, grabbing a cab to a public beach, and do my own thing.  A gentleman who I hit it off with at the conference, Kevin Maire, wanted to go as well - so the both of us got up and took his rental car to the beach at 6am.

When I told my wife Kristi this part of the story, all she could say was “how romantic”

It was a partly cloudy morning, which is great for sunrises, as the sun plays with the clouds is amazing ways. To cap it off, this fisherman strolled into frame early on in the morning, which created some added interest in the shot. 

During the morning, I had boats going across the horizon, birds circling the water looking for breakfast — everything was going perfect!  I took 500+ shots, and I swear to you, 200+ of them are solid keepers.  Even Kevin with his cell phone camera got some great shots!

These shots are just proof of an amazing God, and I really felt His presence this morning. 

I will post a “Miami Sunrise” collection in the coming weeks, so you can see the amazing shots.  I picked this one because it’s a great HDR shot I took right at the end of the morning.  I struggled if I should make it an HDR, because even the individual shots are amazing without the HDR-ness. I’ll include the non-HDR version in the post as well.  Which one do you like better?

Non-HDR version:

I struggled if I should have brought my tripod on the trip.  It was a pain in the butt, but I decided to bring it, and I’m very happy I did.

This shot is from my hotel room, and is an example of HDR, or High Dynamic Range.  HDR is when you merge multiple pictures together to get the "best" of all of them.  No more underexposed areas.  No more blown highlights. All the goodness wrapped together in one amazing photo. 

This is my very first attempt at HDR. Below are the three photos I used to generate this photo. 

I was getting ready to head to the conference in the morning, and I was struck by  the view from the balcony, the interesting textures in the room (carpet and drapes), and the morning light flooding into the area.  I quickly grabbed my tripod (again, *so* glad I brought it), bracketed off three shots of different exposures, and began to play with HDR. 

Whatcha think?

This is the first of 4 shots during my trip to Miami. I was fortunate enough to go to a conference at Fairmont Turnberry Isle Resort & Club in Miami, Florida. It was one of the best conferences I’ve been at – period. I did find time to take some amazing photos – it was a great time to walk around the grounds and find interesting architecture, lighting, and other subjects of interest.

These lamps jumped out at me right when I got to the hotel. Taken with my Canon XTi and Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 lens.

I can’t *wait* to show you the rest of the photos in the coming days!

My son Miles sleeping over his train town. He’s a typical 3 year-old boy who loves trains.

Right now I’m finishing up my work trip to Miami.  Starting tomorrow - pictures of warm weather!

This will probably be the first of many photos of Molly’s Pond during this Project 365 effort.  Molly’s Pond in the pond right outside our house.  I woke up “late” on Sunday morning — I had my alarm set for 5:30am, but either I didn’t hear it, I turned it off without knowing I did that, or it just didn’t go off period. 

It was 7am when I woke up, and I stumbled down to the kitchen.  I saw an amazing sunrise, fog on the still pond, and ducks going for a swim.  It was game-time for me!  I *very quickly* put some shoes on , grabbed my Canon XTi, and went outside. 

130 shots later, I had a plethora of photos to pick from.  I’m rather proud of myself, because I usually just shoot on Program mode and go nuts. Afterwards I either disappointed with the shutter speed (too slow and a bit blurry), DOF (too shallow for landscape), or wrong exposure (Program Mode overcompensating for something like the sun in this shot).

This time I was smart.  First off, made sure I had the right aperture.  I tried to stick around f/11.  f/11 then pushed my shutter speed to 1/10 of a second, which would not work for handheld shots.  I could grab my tripod, but that would have killed another 5 minutes. With time ticking away with the sunrise, that was not an option. I kicked the ISO up to get around 1/60 to 1/100 second. 

Second, when the sun was directly in the picture, I went to manual and metered with the sun out of frame, set the shutter speed to *that* proper metering, and then brought the sun back into the shot.  This was one of my last shots, and thought it was the best.

I’ll post the “rejects” from today and other days that the rejects I thought were “Project 365-worthy” in the coming weeks when I accrue enough rejects for a separate post.

I have to admit, I was pretty excited about this photo.  There are photos that I take (this being one of them) that I want to share with my readers right away.   I don’t, because there’s about a 3 day lag on when a photo is taken and it gets up on the site.  This allows me to batch up a few photo posts about twice a week, so I’m not tied to the computer post-processing and posting the photo on a nightly basis. 

I took this shot on Fri, March 20th, but you aren’t seeing it until Wed, March 25th.

I was driving in Grayslake down this street I’ve driven a hundred times, and saw this busted old greenhouse.  I’ve never seen it before, nor have I seen the farmhouse next to it.  This house and old greenhouse is surrounded by a  ‘90s built subdivision – which leads me to conclude that this house and old greenhouse was the original homestead of the farm land the subdivision was built upon. This photo was taken with my Nikon S52 point-and-shoot.

This location is a treasure trove of photos.  I can’t way to go back and get more!

On a different note, by the time this photo is posted on the blog, I’m in Miami for a conference.  Expect to see photos of sun and beach when I get back!

Lamps… that aren’t in my house!  My wife Kristi and I went shopping without the kids, and we wondered into Restoration Hardware.

This shot is with my Nikon S52 Point-and-shoot (as you can see in the first lamp!)

Not my most favorite shot of mine to date — but I found this one interesting nonetheless. I’ve been playing with the tools to make Black & White shots, and after tweaking some settings in Photoshop CS3, I thought the picture became a bit more interesting than the color version.

Another shot of my kids Ella & Miles playing.  I love this shot, because you can see the smile on Miles’s face and in his eyes. 

Do do do do dooo — He’s loving it.