Utah GOP Convention in a Few Pictures

I went to the Utah Republican Party Convention on Saturday to help out a few candidates with their campaigns, but I made sure to get some photos while I was there.  All were taken with an Nikon D700 at 3200 ISO.

Ben Franklin - inventor of the cell phone*

Orrin Hatch vs Dan Liljenquist - the primary battle begins!

I guess Sandstrom thought if it works for Salisbury Homes and Little Caesar's Pizza, it must work for him too!

The image is a bit blurry, but his mom told him to smile for the photo after this.  He clearly wasn't the happiest camper in the world!

*Note: I know Ben Franklin didn't invent the cell phone.

Utah Republican Party Convention by Beau Sorensen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at sorroforro.blogspot.com.

Jolly Old Fellow

One of the areas of photography that I'm really working on is getting good portraits.  My kids are part of what's driving it - my daughter is a poser extraordinaire, but my sons are no good at it, so I have to be good at capturing it.  This is an image of my grandfather that I took at a restaurant with surprisingly good lighting.

Jolly Old Fellow by Beau Sorensen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at 1.bp.blogspot.com.

The St George Temple

Rachelle has told me I ought to start posting some of my photos on the blog since it doesn't get as much use anymore as a "stuff to say" outlet.  This is an image from just a few days ago when we were in St George.  The temple there has been around since 1877 and they somehow manage to keep it extremely white.  I don't know how with the copious red dust, but they do it!

St George Temple at Dusk by Beau Sorensen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at 2.bp.blogspot.com.

The Super Cool HDR Look

For those of you who couldn't give a hill of beans about photography, it might be time to move past this post, but a look that I've really liked but is so trendy I hate to do a lot with it is HDR.  What it is, in a nutshell, is when you take a range of pictures (typically 3-7) at different exposures (ex. -2/3, 0, +2/3) and then merge them in photoshop.  The person who is most identified with it is a guy named Dave Hill, and it's quite amazing stuff, but I just hate to overuse it, like any cool photographic technique that you just find out about and do it ALL THE TIME.  At any rate, I do my HDR experimentation the old fashioned way, which is to say, I take one picture and run it through Photoshop to clean it up, then I run it through a series of adjustments in a plugin called, appropriately enough, Topaz Adjust.  I've got a sample here to give you an idea.  At any rate, I've done this with a bunch of pictures from a bunch of places, just trying things out, testing, and in general fiddling around with my pictures.  Some look better than others, but one city that I think you could put in this technique on any photo taken in Vienna and it would look amazing.  I don't know why Vienna looks so good with it, but it does.