My favorites of 2009

I thought I'd take a moment and post up some of my favorite photos of this year.
I've taken the advice of a few friends that shoot and got away from shooting moto every single weekend and gotten into some different things like studio portraiture, scenics and some other stuff.

To start off, here's from the one weekend I've gone to the track this whole year. It's my best friend's son Michael on his new 250F. Seems like yesterday he was putting around on his PW50.



In May, I attended the Joe Martin stage race here in town. The Joe Martin Stage Race is part of the National Race Calendar (NRC) which is the pro and elite amateur cycling tour of USA Cycling. This year's big name was Floyd Landis. I was surprised at just how big he is off the bike.

I enjoy panning shots and have always had pretty good luck doing it with MX photos, so here's one of Floyd from the inside of a curve as the course approached a slight uphill section during the down town crit race.




Back in the summer, I got turned onto HDR photography by my friend Joseph (www.staticsparks.com) and thought it would be cool to play around with. HDR is a semi-controversial style of photography as it takes multiple photos of different exposures and merges them together to make one photo. Personally, I think it's like any other kind of photography and subjective to the viewer as well as the photographer. There really is no "right" or "wrong" when it comes to art, in my opinion.

This is a barn I saw one day while on a drive with my girlfriend. We were out looking for waterfalls and wildlife and as soon as I saw the barn, I pulled over and shot several photos and came up with this.



After getting the barn photo printed at 12x18 inches, I decided to print one at 20x30 and take to the lady who owns the barn. She loved it and last I heard, got it framed and hung in her house.

The next HDR pic that I really liked this year is of the parking garage down town. I know several of you have seen this before on here, but this is a different look altogether.I waited and waited until they finally turned on the lights and here's what I got......



Below is a pic of the hospital just down the street from where I live. This is just at sunset. I printed this out at 12x18 inches and took to the hospital and spoke with a couple of the admin people to see if there was any interest in buying it to use for advertising. They were interested for sure, but they use a third party ad agency and I didn't feel like the hassle. So I gave the print to a nurse. She seemed to like it.



Also, if you get a minute, go check out www.stuckincustoms.com and check out some of Trey Ratcliff's work. It's definitely inspiring. He's also great with tutorials and online workshops.

Below are a couple studio shots that I really like.

First one is my best friend's wife. She knew I was starting to experiment more and more with lighting and stuff, so she volunteered to work with me a little. We tried a lot of different stuff and toward the end of the shoot, I got this.....



And my favorite shot....maybe of all time, is this one of my friend April. I had my friend Wendy (www.wendydunnphotography.com) help me edit it and I entered it into a statewide photography contest in two categories: Fashion and Black and White. I didn't score well in the fashion category, but took home a 2nd place for black and white.



Hopefully, 2010 will be an even better year.