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 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.