Bower 11 mm f3.5 Lens for Nikon,

These three photos were shot handheld in HDR with my new Bower 11 mm f3.5 fish-eye lens purchased on sale from B&H Photo on sale for $229.00 during a Christmas sale.  I checked out all of the reviews and it turns out the lens performs better on Nikon cameras than Nikon's own fish-eye lenses.   Read the review that convinced me to go for this lens here.

Click on each image to enlarge.

Our 2012 Christmas Tree

Because of health problems this was a total effort by my lovely wife, Caroline with the help of Luis Toro a kindly neighbor  who helped Caroline set the tree up in its stand, lugged the boxes of decorations off of garage shelves.
As usual the tree was purchased from Billy Wilson off his tree farm.  

A HDR photo of his spread can be seen at earlier posts.  For some reason photos of Christmas trees at night are difficult for me to photograph.  This one required some Photoshop tricks to make it pop off the screen.  Click on the photo to enlarge.

Solstice Cycle Shop

This log building has had a number of business types since we have been living in Burnsville, NC.  The owners have turned it into a bicycle shop.  They asked me to photograph the building.  This High Dynamic Range (HDR) was shot at f22 with a 18-200 mm lens on a Nikon D7000 camera.  I used Photomatix HDR software and rendered the three exposures with the installed default called Painter.  The sky was clear so I made a selection of the sky using Photoshop select command color range.  With the selection loaded I opened the file containing the sky and selected the whole file.  Switching back to the building file I used the Paste Into command.  The sky file was then transformed to fill the entire area of the sky.  Click on the thumbnail to fill your screen.

Raven Whitley

I captured this image of Raven at the annual Mt Mitchell Craft Fair held each year in Burnsville, NC.  Her mothers camera battery died while she was snapping photos during the performance of some of the tunes from the local production of  Big River that was done at the Parkway Playhouse.

Mary Catherine

This is Mary Catherine (Erine) that I was asked to photograph by her mother and stepfather, Jan and Ric Hunter for her resume.  Erine sings with some opera company in Italy and wanted an updated photo.  The camera certainly loves her.  This is my second retouch of the photo shot with my Nikon D7000 with a 50 mm f1.8 FX format lens that is equivalent to a 75 mm lens on a DX camera.  The exposure was f2.0, 1/200 with a single SB-800 flash through a 48 inch umbrella.

My Current Self Portrait

This is my current self portrait (with major Photoshop editing). Hell, if you know how to do it then you must. It keeps me out of bars - except the one that I have at home.