Photo Study: Immanuel Methodist Church

In Boise's Hyde Park neighborhood is an old church that has served various roles over the years. Until fairly recently it was used as a kind of apartment building. Currently they tell us that it's planned to be remodeled to become an arts institute. The point of this exercise is to just spend some time studying the setting in question and looking for interesting pictures to capture. So I spent over a half hour walking around this old church, finding details I wanted to capture and then experimenting with various angles to see what I could get. Here's some of what I came up with.

Be sure to click on an image to see the larger version of the picture.

ND Filter Fun

I recently acquired an ND filter and decided to have fun with it. The filter is kind of like putting welding goggles on your lens. You may ask "why would you want to do such a thing?" The cool part is that I can now do long exposures in broad daylight. There's various tricks you can do with long exposures like light painting and such. Day time long exposures open up other possibilities. This weekend I went out with the intention of doing long exposures of moving water. The Boise river was up to flood stage and I wanted to see what would happen when I captured all of that moving water. Then I went up to the foothills and took some pictures of streams and the runoff canals. I hope you enjoy the results.
Also I might add that you should click on the pictures to observe the full effect.

Stage Coach Theater Fund Raiser Open House

Stage Coach Theater asked me to take some pictures of their fund raising event at their new building. It was a very successful event and they raised a lot of money towards their eventual goal. For me it was challenging because the lighting was spare and a lot of it pointed straight down. Not the most complimentary angle for viewing people's faces. Another challenge is that I try to avoid camera mounted flash photography. Sure the target is clear and sharp but too often you get pasty white faces and the background fades away into darkness. Since this event was very much about the building, I really wanted get the space in there as well. So I was shooting with a low shutter speed but fortunately the full framed sensor in my Canon 5DmarkII was up to the task. Any sudden movements caused blurring but my strategy was to shoot as many pictures as possible and then harvest the best of the bunch. It turned out better than I had predicted.