This weekend I had a chance to go up north with 50 guys from my church for a mens retreat. 9 of them were from my mens group that I meet with every week. We had a fantastic time up north at Timberwolf Lodge up in Lake City. We had time to really get deep and get to know eachother and talk about our struggles and really share life with one another. We also had lots of free time for some fun activities. There was skeet shooting, snowmobiling, tubing down a giant hill, snowshoeing, paintball, a full gym, pool tables, foosball, air hockey, etc. etc. The facilities and options were fantastic!!!
For the most part, I did my own thing, just enjoyed the outdoors and watched some of the guys doing stuff and took some photos.

Here is a link for more images:
http://www.arisingimages.com/event/20070218_mens_retreat

Here are a series of nature photos followed by some of our activities:

In my quest to learn Corel Painter, I came across an amazing artist named Jeremy Sutton who works/teaches out of San Francisco. Jeremy has a fantastic set of DVD’s where he teaches some of his painting techniques. You can see some of Jeremy’s work here: http://www.jeremysutton.com/glry-theme-artists.html

One of the techniques that he teaches on his DVD set is a watercolor technique. Here is my first attempt after watching his DVD’s. I still have a long way to go, but it’s a fun learning process.

Today was field trip day for my photography class. As usual we went to the Detroit Zoo which offers a good variety of things to take pictures of indoors and outdoors with varying lighting conditions which leads to many unique photo opportunities. I split the class in half and did an early afternoon session and a late afternoon session. In both cases, we never made it to the animals because we found lots of other things to take pictures of.
I am a firm believer that the image capture is only the first half of making a good image. I love to finish my pictures in Photoshop to dress them up. Here are some examples of the final image along with the out of camera image.

There is a small museum area in the same building as the butterfly house and the bird aviary. This is a hand rail on the second floor. I really liked the sweeping lines and shapes that the hand rails created. I flipped the image horizontally so that the sweeping lines would lead the viewers eyes into the image. I added a heavy amount of contrast and saturation to bring out some of the unique colors that existed in the photograph along with helping to eliminate some of the distracting elements that took away from the patterns.

There was a watertank with some words on it. I loved the blue lighting and the bubbles coming up. Unfortunately the bubbles would be really blurry with a normal picture. I used a slow shutter speed and followed the bubbles as they rose up which made the text get streaked which I thought looked kind of neat and abstract.

In the same area was some really cool windows and I loved the softness of the light coming in the window. This needed a boost in contrast, some softening, some added color saturation along with a bit of distortion to make the composition a bit more pleasing.

These two birds were screaching at eachother but it looked like they were good buddies. This was a very simple edit…just a bit of a crop and brightening up the color.

This was inside the bird aviary. I left the industrial look of this scene and added a heavy amount of contrast along with a light bluish tone to give it more of a cold industrial feel.

These little worms were laid out as bird food and I liked the complimentary colors with the rich oranges and blues in this scene.

I’m developing a new artistic product called The Pirlo which is a blend of photography, graphic design, and painting. The final images will be printed on a fine art canvas and framed in a rustic brown molding. Right now, I’m learning, playing, experimenting, etc.

Coming up March 29-April 2, I will be leading a travel photography workshop in the southwest. We will be going for 4 days and hit some of the major sites including Grand Canyon, Horseshoe Bend, the slot canyons in Paige, Bryce Canyon, and Zion Canyon. We will be photographing at the hours with prime light and having some instructional time in the evenings. If anyone else is interested in joining this trip, we still have room.
The price is currently $989 per person including auto transportation, hotel, entrance fees to the parks and instructional fees. Flights and food are NOT included. The per person price will decrease as more people join. If you are interested, please send an email immediately to info@arisingimages.com