August '08 Photo of The Day - # - Welcome to Bill Pador Photography! Professional Photographer Serving NJ-NY-PA Weddings - Sweet 16 Parties

Well August is here and I've started my 6th month anniversary with the Dailies Crew and I must say I have met so many wonderful people and fantastic talented artists here. You all have brought a smile to my face each & every day along with helping my creativity EXPLOAD allowing my artistic ideas to come out on film which can only benefit myself & my clients. I have learned so many new techniques as well, even after 30 years of playing with photography all my instructors were right, you NEVER stop learning in this game. I look forward to another great month here and hope you all continue to enjoy this group of wonderful folks as much as I do.
Best Regards,
~Bill Pador~

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Bill Pador > "End of August Sunset"
While out for a walk in my neighborhood last night hunting for a POD I was striking out capturing anything worth while UNTIL I took a turn toward home and saw the sun setting at the end of the street above the ball park. So I headed towards the light and by the time I got there this is what greeted me. I really liked the small blazing orange hole silhouetting the trees and the light rays springing out along the horizon. Funny how this cloud formation was only on the horizon where the sun was setting because there wasn't another cloud in the whole sky elsewhere.

I thought it fitting to end the month of August with a beautiful sunset image to get ready for Septembers fall colors. Hopefully the trees will present some interesting colors again this year since it's my favorite time of the year to shoot out door landscapes.

Hope you are all having a wonderful holiday weekend, enjoy your labor day and all of your end of year BBQ's. Me, I'll be home alone looking for the next POD drinking a nice cup of coffee! ~Thanks for looking~

~Bill~

Bill Pador > "KISS - Keeping it Simple Silly"
I wanted to show that you don't need to hold sacred any special techniques or TRICKS in your bag to display a creative image, you just need for your heart to be in what you do and to do it to the best of your ability no matter what it is that your shooting. While looking for an idea for my POD today I saw an old box of ZIP disks I had stored, which started my mind spinning how could I show the progression of computer memory storage? This SIMPLE yet effective image displays various storage media since the good ol' Floppy Disk days is what I came up with! No tricks, No major Post Production, Not much beside taking the shot, framing it and placing it on the internet - PERIOD! Is it artistic, to ME it is and that's all that counts right ? If it Inspires someone, evokes emotion in someone even by making them smile because it brings back memories, well then it's ART to someone else !!! Shazam Mission Accomplished LOL

*For a GREAT INSPIRATIONAL READ "PLEASE" take a look on Scott Kelby's blog and scroll down to the post "It’s Guest Blog Wednesday” featuring David duChemin "READ DAVID duChemin's POST HERE" & the comments below it, I think you will all find and awesome, inspiring and well thought out advice in his post, I know I did and it really made me think of my roots and why I love this art form so much inspiring me to shot this simple image for today.

Bill Pador > "I Love My Job"
This was an interesting shot for me, more of a great accident or event I should say. While I was outside shooting some wild flowers I have around my mail box I was hand holding with my Tamron 90mm macro on this flower & waiting for the wind to stop blowing. Just as I started cranking off a few shots this bumble bee landed right in the middle of the flower I was shooting to do his job and I was amazed that I was able to capture him pretty much in focus without moving a muscle LOL.

PP consists of a crop, some unsharp mask and the custom vignette I made to flow with the shape of the flower to give it some depth & to draw your attention to the bee and all the pollen he's covered in especially that huge blob of it towards his back leg.

Have a great day everyone, it's almost Friday !
~Bill~

$Bill Pador > Good Morning all - I had gone outside to shoot some of the flowers in my garden before mother nature takes them away for the fall so I wondered over to my wild flower bed and started shooting these and low & behold I saw this LITTLE TINY (and I mean TINY - size of an pencil eraser head tip) Single Spider (on Right) sitting on the pedal. Well I started to frame it up and by the time I started to shoot he had moved up the middle and I started to witness a war between these 2 fellows. I don't know where the other one came from but he appeared and BAM they stared at each other for 10 seconds or so and then started battling. It was over in 5 seconds and the left one high tailed it off to another flower. I racked off about 30 frames in about 4 seconds and this is the only one that came out focused in the proper area because of the narrow f/stop I was using to get some good bokeh. I just love this lens! * * / / Check it out at X3LARGE size to see the spiders face up close the eyes & nose can be seen pretty freaky \ \* * Not much PP here, a slight bit of unsharp mask and the framing was all that was needed. So I'm glad I was able to hand hold this puppy and get a good enough exposure to share with you today. Thanks for all the wonderful comments on the Badge image from yesterday, that was a fun shot for me to take. SPECS: Tamron 90mm SP Di f/2.8 1:1 Macro ISO: 640 SS: 1/640 f/7.1 Hand Held ~Bill~$

Bill Pador > Today I'm keeping it simple, I'm really tired and need some sleep so here's a macro shot of my retired police badge that's been sitting on my desk the last 7 years staring me in the face so I decided to shoot it. Simple frame and off we go ;) Hopefully I'll have more energy tomorrow - Thanks for all the great comments on my POD yesterday I really appreciate the kind words. Have a great day all !

Bill Pador > 'Artistic HDR Abstract' - "GHOSTLY COUPLE DRINK WINE"
~best viewed large~
Tonight I was at home relaxing when my good friend John Murphy gave me a call from his vacation location (BTW-He sends his regards to everyone). Well we were BS-ing & started discussing photography (imagine that) while I was setting up my POD for today in my still life studio which 'WAS' planned out to be a simple shot of 4 Crystal Glasses set up a certain way so that I could get an effect I had thought up. Well our conversation happen to change to HDR some how which made me scrap my original idea in turn for an HDR capture of the glasses.

"The Set-Up & Post Production Details"
The original image/layer of the Glasses themselves you see have very little post done to it after the HDR tone mapping believe it or not. I set the studio up with several small canister lights and covered them with 2 colored plastic cups you use for outdoor for BBQ's and such (not the throw away kind but thick picnic re-washable type) that were laying on the table from a previous project I just happened to see and decided to see what effects I could get using them over some lights. 1 Blue and 1 Purple plastic cup covered light were set to the left of the crystal glasses pointing towards 2 separate 12" x 12" mirror squares on both sides to reflect the light back onto the stem ware. The crystal glasses have black stems with a small flower type design just under the glass itself (you can see the light reflected on this part in color). The glasses were lined up straight behind each other and then the shot was made off-setting the camera about 25' to the right allowing the glasses to appear in a diagonal pattern. (5) bracket shots were made with a total exposure adjustment of +1.0 EV capturing the colored light reflecting off the stems and through the crystal in complete darkness with just the 2 small 40 watt bulbs casting their magic making it look like the glasses had neon lights on them (perfect for a HDR project I thought)

The (5) RAW images were then combined into an HDR and then tone mapped in Photomatix Pro 3 and saved. Passing into CS3 the image was then sharpened slightly and saved. I then made a copy of the image, flipped it horizontally 180' to make a mirrored image and combined the 2 on an adjusted re sized canvas. After cropping I was really impressed with the results and almost posted it as is but really felt in an artistic mode so I carried it to the next step. Multiple layers were constructed and I began airbrushing in the slight white cloud texture on the sides to frame it using the shapes of a man & woman preparing to drink (look closely you should see the shadows of them - man on right woman on left), then another layer was added to extend the canvas and I began molding the orange smoke you see (which was a smoke image I had captured for my smoke art project) I combined approx. 12 layers of smoke (all the same image section) at different angles were laid down then erasing the edges with a soft brush and changing opacity levels while rotating them into place resulted in the effect you see on the final smoke/fire shape (*representing the adult madness that shadow couple will have after those drinks LOL). *Just a note: Only a small cropped section of the original smoke image was used, the same cropped piece was used to create the entire orange platform image you see here by pasting & rotating it with various opacity levels.

Thanks to John Murphy for inspiring me to create this image, without you John I would have been done with my POD in 30 min. or less but since we had our HDR conversation it resulted in a FOUR & HALF hour mega project (I'll get you back don't worry pal LOL) Really tho Thanks John, it;s really amazing how your artistic mind is inspired by everyday things. Hope you like it ~Bill~

*Mr. Murphy is unable to sign onto SmugMug for uploads where he is on vacation due to a poor internet connection, but is doing his POD's everyday and will upload upon his return at the end of the week. . .

~"AVAILABLE FOR PRINT PURCHASE"~
This artistic creation is available for purchase in High Resolution for up to 30" x 40" Canvas wall mount prints in signed & unsigned versions in my 'PHOTO ART 4 SALE' Gallery by CLICKING HERE

Bill Pador > "SEPIA STUD"
view larger for best detail
I stopped at the horse farm around the corner from my house today because it's a favorite place of mine to visit & shoot. Most of the horses know me very well from visiting there for the last 10 years. It's loaded with male studs and is a very peaceful place for me to gather my thoughts and enjoy the wild life. No matter where I am on the farm property fence when they hear the camera clicking they all come running over to me (I've been know to bear gifts -'bribes' of apple slices or sugar cubes LOL)

I've photographed this guy for the last 3 years or so (I call him 'Big Brown') and this time I managed to get a nice side view of him just a few feet away. The original image was great in color but I wanted to do something special so I did a creative sepia conversion and hoped for good results, I hope you all like it.

PS: To prove that even professionals make mistakes DAILY I just wanted to let you know that I screwed up this entire shoot, I shot all my images at ISO 1000 during a Blazing Sun lit day because I forgot to change my setting from last nights work LOL I should have realized when it was giving me a SS of 1/1600 - 1/2000 every image in AP mode that something was wrong but I didn't realize it till I started looking at the images in Nikon ViewerNX after transfering to the PC ;) Not a huge mistake because I was in AP but had I been in SP it would have provided a boat load of unnessesary noise and a lot of work to remove it from each image.

Image Specs:
Lens: Nikkor 18-200mm @ 200mm
EX: 1/1600
AP: f/5.6
ISO: 1000 (yes 1000 - opps)
WB: Auto

"WORK FLOW"
Image was taken through several steps of work flow starting off in CaptureNX for some minor selective area noise reduction. Then into CS3 for my normal Sharpening routine and then into NIK 'SILVER EFX PRO' (*Fantastice B&W Plug-In set)for the B&W/SEPIA conversion & tweaks. I simulated 'ILFORD DELTA 100 PRO film and used a slight green filter to bring out the darker areas a bit more, then saved full size/full resolution as shot - so I can order a Large High Res Print for myself, this is going to hang on my studio wall!
The ORIGINAL IMAGE can be SEEN BY CLICKING HERE
~Bill~

Bill Pador > Another HAPPY ACCIDENT! I took this while driving last night and didn't see the awesome sun rays & lens flare coming through my sun roof until I looked at it in CS3 just now. Some small adjustments to levels & exposure were needed to lighten it up a bit so I could be seen clearly but that's about it.

"RECENT SPAM": I was wondering if anyone else is getting that SPAM left in your Dailies gallery comment area the past few days ? How aggravating to have to delete this junk every day. I hope SmugMug gets these guys under control before we get flooded with junk, I'm going to be making a complaint about it later tonight :(

Bill Pador > "Happy Mistake"
"seeing it bigger is better"
I felt it was about time I looked to do an abstract piece since it's some of my favorite things to photograph for fun and I haven't done one in a while. So when I left the house before I started thinking of what I'd like to do and as I drove down this one lane road (all 9 miles of it) to the main highway I started cranking off some frames at the road side, lakes etc. as I passed them using a slow shutter speed after choosing an aperture that would allow me enough light but slow everything down to blur the road side out. Well this one turned out to be a HAPPY MISTAKE and was not planned at all. I was just testing my settings as I drove about 45mph and using my right hand I laid the camera across my left forearm out the window and got this one. I didn't even see what I had until I returned home a short while ago and started looking on the monitor at my results LOL.

I really liked the lines in the road, guard rail and tree blur but then to have the image in the mirror be so in focus and having the road curve off into the blurred road like that really gave me a smile, with the telephone pole and bright sky right in the middle of the trees up top between the shadowed trees, now that's a abstract mistake I'll take any day ;)

This is straight out of the camera except the file size was downsized a bit, I tried a few things in post, even some frames but everything I did seemed to screw it up one way or another so I just left it alone. Hell I liked it so here it is but I was torn between this one and my ALTERNATE HERE in my over flow gallery, which was a car passing by a short time after this one was shot and reminded me of that car from that scary Car Movie "CARRIE" from the Early 80's (OK so I'm dating myself LOL) what do you other MID AGED folks think? Does it remind you of CARRIE too ???

CORRECTION: Thank You LESLIE for pointing out that the car movie was was "CHRISTINE" and not Carrie !! That's definitely the one I was thinking of ;)

Ma-halo
~Bill~

"ATTENTION NIKON D300 OWNERS" ! ! !
Please Be Advised that I have just learned that Nikon released a second FIRMWARE UPDATE last month for us that updates you from versions A-1.02 (if you updated last time from 1.00) & B-1.00 and Upgrades you to Version A-1.03 B-1.03 - - - - -
This upgrade fixes something with a Blinking Battery meter that occurs no matter how charged your batteries are. Just go to http://nikon.com/ and do a search for D300 Firmware Upgrade for the proper Windows / MAC edition !

Bill Pador > "Mighty Reds"
best viewed large
While on my nature walk I managed to find this huge clump of massive Red trees which are not that common around these parts. So I decided to capture them and see how it would look looking straight up through them. I had my 18-200mm on but I wish I had something wider or a fish eye for this one, maybe next time. It still came out like I thought it would and I'm really happy I found this growth of trees because they are really cool. I'm sure in other parts of the country these are plentiful but not here, matter of fact this is possibly the only time I have ever seen them here. Another good thing about this image is that I was able to get farther under them due to me shooting from a ditch giving a little more depth to the image.

In post I enhanced the sun rays, pumped up the contrast a little bit and gave it a frame to match the mood.
EDIT: Camel - The sun rays were produced by a Cokin Sun Ray Filter that disfusses the rays and then I also enhanced them in CS3 bringing them out more!

Have a great day everyone
~Bill~

Bill Pador > "My GXP At Sunset"
This is my 325hp 08' Pontiac Grand Prix GXP. I've been planning this shot out for a while now but had to wait for the right conditions which finally were available last night. It was a very technical shot and certain things had to come together in order for it to be successful including the orange sunset in the background, the moon in the front coming up early and then having a car drive behind me on the access road. The set was also a bit technical having to use several small LED flashlights to light the rims which were placed at 7 o'clock and 5 o'clock at different angels pointed upward from the ground to enhance depth and color of the rim reflection and a small street light above left for the hood. All of the colors you see here are NATURAL and have not been manipulated by photoshop what so ever. This image doesn't even have an adjustment layer on it, only a small amount of unsharp mask for the rims was used so I didn't disturbed the natural pattern of the long exposure of the fog/parking light rays or the tail lights going by giving the effect that my car had been moving from the rear (see tail lights how they match up with the car that went by). I actually took about 15 shots every time a car went by behind my car over the course of an hour (not very many cars travel this road) and I am located in a parking lot.

The exposure was 4 seconds at f/9 ISO 800 and a Custom dialed in Kelvin White Balance temp of 8680 to enhance the sunset and reflections, I also am using Center Weight metering to get my car in balance and not over exposed because I wanted it to look like a shadow & outline with the rims & hood lines being high lighted. The moon is directly behind me giving off the soft light on the side of the car & hood and the sun is setting behind my car which is obscured by the wood line and just peaks through the trees. Again this is almost as it was Straight out of the Camera besides a small amount of sharpening, it's all natural and came out much better then I had planned with so many wonderful colors, textures & reflections going on! Enjoy

PS: Yesterday I shot over 1000 frames over 7.5 hours during a personal nature shoot at 4 different lakes, 2 parks, 2 forests etc., covering birds, trees, fisherman, mountain landscapes etc. that I will share over the next few days! I got some very interesting shots
Have a great day everyone
~Bill~

Bill Pador > "Those Eyes"
details best seen @ size X3
While walking through my kids TV room last night I noticed a great beam of natural sunlight coming through the front window as the sun was going down and then saw my daughter Alexa's eyes catching the light as well. So I made her get off the couch (I know I'm a terrible Dad LOL) and had her stare out of the window. I should have went to get my 50mm Nikkor or 90mm Tamron for this Portrait to get a sharper image but I was lazy and stuck with the 18-200 VR that was on the body but I think it did a fine job, impressed me really. When seen as large as possible you can see each individual eye lash reflected on her retina, pretty cool!

I then hit this with my normal Portraiture work flow & slight glamour treatment, removed a bunch of small hairs in between the nose, shaped her brows and did some very minor burning to bring out her cheek bone a little bit and that's it. The shadow is all natural just using proper exposure settings and shooting tight to prevent any of the background in the room from showing. Alexa's eyes are usually a nice blue but she was wearing a purple shirt which turns them a wild greenish aqua blue seen here. She's my favorite model and loves to have her photo taken so we both make out on the deal whenever I want to do a portrait to keep my skills sharp ;) I like this one so much I'll be ordering it in a large format lustre print or possibly a canvas to hang on my office wall! ~I just love my kids ~
Hope you all like it, Have a Great Day everyone !

PS: This image has been the #1 Rated photo on my site since it's post date. Please click on the 'Green Thumbs Up' sign over the image if you agree to keep it rated #1

~Bill~

Bill Pador > Added 8/13/08- (#1 of 9)

Hello All, Sorry I've been away for the last 3 days due to my back again but I'm back and feeling better. I have added (9) photos I took today (all tagged Added 8-13) to catch up on my dailies so if you would all please just take a quick look at them all it would be appreciated. everything in order from this one till the Star Filled Sky shot were added.

Now this little guy was on a rock all alone under a tree and really liked this shot with the tree branch lines in the reflection in the ripples, kinda like a tiger which I Think were the tree branches above him

** My captions for the photos I added today will be brief so you don't have to read a lot and can get through them quickly!

"Some folks have emailed me in the last week to ask HOW you look at other members older dailies, well it's very simple,"
HERES 2 WAYS HOW:

If you came into the picture via the Dailies MAIN page or POPULAR page and you don't see the persons gallery just look UNDER under their photo where it says SEE IN GALLERY & click on that and you will be transferred to that persons entire Active Daily Gallery "OR 2nd Way" If you came into the picture via the Dailies MAIN page or POPULAR page and you don't see the persons gallery just look on the LINKS LINE where it says DAILY PHOTOS>BILLPADOR (or any member name)>GALLERIES>PHOTO OF THE DAY (or whatever they call it) you just click on their MAIN GALLERY NAME (usually members name) on that link line and that will bring you directly into their whole gallery for that month and you can see ALL of their photos that way and go one by one. Then when your done you can just click on DAILY PHOTOS on that same link line and it will bring you BACK to the MAIN DAILIES page again if that's where you wish to go.

I know this info should help a lot of you since it's been asked quite a bit lately and I see a lot of people apologizing to others for not being able to find their older photos from just days ago because they don't know how to navigate to the images. I hope this helps you all for the future!

Any questions you may have in reference to this please feel free to ask, I'm quite knowledgeable on how to get around the galleries and would more then happy to help you.

Bill

Bill Pador > Added 8/13/08-(# of 9)

Another duck floating towards me and liked the perfect reflection of him in the calm water

Bill

Bill Pador > Added 8/13/08-(#3 of 9)

This old train is located near my home and is part of a small DISPLAY I guess you would call it of 3 very old train cars & ca-buss. I liked the way the windows were frosted over giving it a Ghostly effect against the blue sky in the background and the hills of rock in front of it.

"End of August Sunset"

While out for a walk in my neighborhood last night hunting for a POD I was striking out capturing anything worth while UNTIL I took a turn toward home and saw the sun setting at the end of the street above the ball park. So I headed towards the light and by the time I got there this is what greeted me. I really liked the small blazing orange hole silhouetting the trees and the light rays springing out along the horizon. Funny how this cloud formation was only on the horizon where the sun was setting because there wasn't another cloud in the whole sky elsewhere.

I thought it fitting to end the month of August with a beautiful sunset image to get ready for Septembers fall colors. Hopefully the trees will present some interesting colors again this year since it's my favorite time of the year to shoot out door landscapes.

Hope you are all having a wonderful holiday weekend, enjoy your labor day and all of your end of year BBQ's. Me, I'll be home alone looking for the next POD drinking a nice cup of coffee! ~Thanks for looking~

~Bill~