Every Other Year Temple Square Photo Session

I won't go over all the reasons that I love Photographing the Temples of my Church. Suffice it to say that I love it, and that Christmas Lights make it even more enjoyable.

It was unfortunate that I only had an hour and half on one night to go. Fortunately it had snowed recently and it looked fabulous! I stayed on the East side instead of running around through the crowds, and managed to mostly stay dry and warm. Hope you enjoy the photos!

And a belated Merry Christmas!

More with the Pentax HD-DA 16-85 f3.5-5.6

The more I get to know it, the more I am impressed with the sharpness of this lens. I have not had a chance to shoot off a tripod yet. That is usually my last and best test of sharpness when I get to go with that. I have just been too busy to really get after serious photographic endeavors yet!

I can say that the bokeh is nice, and it is quite sharp, the colors are very nice indeed. And when I hold it steady it performs well. User error always sucks!

These were casual shots out in front of my work bright sunlight and all.

Temple Square in Downtown Salt Lake City is one of my favorite places to shoot, my wife and I were there for a wedding reception, and took the opportunity to wander and take a few shots in the evening light. I was shooting to preserve highlights and not blow out the sky completely. More or less accomplished that, but had to do some work in Post to bring up the shadows. K5 can handle that though, marvelous sensor that it has. Because of the size of the temple this environment can test the edge performance of a lens, here it performed admirably!

I struggled with this shot, ACR doesn't have a profile for this lens yet so I had to fake the distortion correction and then the perspective correction was a bugger too. I kind of think I got it too straight, I usually leave a little perspective distortion and took this one all the way, which can make it look funky.

This I leveled but didn't fix the perspective at all, the distortion of the lens is slightly visible if you look closely on the left side. Can't wait for ACR to bring out a profile. I am going to try to enable the camera to do that, but it takes time on each shot for the camera to  process the profile on the RAW file.

The old Hotel Utah, now known as the Joseph Smith Memorial Building has some fabulous detail work on the exterior and interior. I really need to spend more time on it.

Statue of Joseph Smith and his wife Emma on Temple Square.

One of the things I do a lot of is long exposure work on a tripod. I have been wanting to shoot downtown from up on the foothills for a long time. I think I may have found the spot I was looking for to shoot from. I was in dress shoes this night and I really didn't think it wise to climb up all the way!

This is downtown Salt Lake City with the Salt Lake Temple and The State Capitol. Most of these were 15-30 second exposures.

Getting a little CRAZY with things!

Sometimes I find myself wanting to push things a little bit, I try to not alter reality too much, in fact I try to use the manipulations I can do to create images that look more realistic than the camera can capture in a single exposure. This particular trip into downtown after work I decided that I wanted to just let it all hang out and capture the weirdness of the clouds.

This shot is actually flipped, it is a reflection in a pool that just begged to be turned so that it looked like the actual thing. The reflections made for a cool look once run through Photomatix, HDR is pretty much a have to use with this kind of backlighting. Makes it look like the temple is on fire!

If you could term any of my HDR's to be conventional this is more that way. Still pretty crazy.

These used to be used as the main entrance to the temple, I wonder how many hands have used these knobs!

I stooged around waiting for the sun to get DIRECTLY behind the spire, then I stood in the slightly wrong spot and slightly missed it. Like the effect a LOT though!

This is my FAVE!!!! I truly want to print this one. Maybe Canvas????

Saturday Morning Downtown Salt Lake City.

Dedicated photo time is a rare and beautiful thing in my busy life. As it turned out I got lucky Saturday and got some time behind the viewfinder. I had to take my car in for some warranty service, expecting it to take 20-30 minutes I really didn't think about taking any camera stuff along until I was running out the door and grabbed my older camera body with the lens that was on it. My 200mm f2.5 prime lens. This is not what I usually would take with me for a walkabout. The field of view is narrow, it only focuses down to 5 feet and you have to be careful with the light because you can get some pretty bad Chromatic Aberration at the larger apertures. But it is what I had, and ya dance with who ya brung.

This was right across from the dealership, a warm up shot as it were. There is a different discipline to shooting manual focus, especially with a prime. You have to try to "See" the focal length you are shooting. This is hard with a telephoto lens, your eye doesn't see that way naturally.

I almost deleted this one, I wasn't enamored of the depth of focus, I shot at f4 of 5.6 when I should have been at f11...ish... I kept it because it conveys the cluttery setting of that part of State Street. It is a street of contrasts, parts are very nice and almost ritzy and others are, um, less so.

This is purely about texture, shot from across the street, if I had my 24mm on, this shot would not have been anywhere near the same no matter how close I got.

I'm not sure why these windows were filled in, I would love to have seen the building when they were there.

I have wanted to shoot this painted wall for YEARS! The juxtaposition of the differing ages and styles of buildings was icing on the cake.

The further I walked, the more I saw that "fit" the lens. It is different to see in telephoto, when your eye naturally sees in wider angle. This is why I like to shoot primes, it forces me to look more closely. And the more closely I looked the more I saw. The little bits and pieces that together make the stuff around us, isolated and beautiful in their isolation.

On a Saturday? REALLY? Don't want anybody washing my windows on a Sat. A.M. when I am sitting around in my jammies...

This shot is why I LOVE the rendering of this lens, viewed full size, it is crisp and the textures of the statue just look... 3D. There is just something special, this focal length, and distance to subject.

I almost never take photos with people in them, but I couldn't resist. Something about his contemplative pose and the reflection tugged at me.

Again, details, details, Isolating small parts of the whole, allowing you to see the world in a new way. The symbolism of the carving on the outside of the Salt Lake Temple is always fun to look at. They took their time and paid attention to their craftsmanship.

Nothing special here, except my first flowers of spring. YAY!!!!!

Two shots stitched together, it is my wallpaper at this moment. For some reason it looks cockeyed but I swear it is straight.

Just down from Temple Square is the old ZCMI building, it is some other gosh awful big box retailers home now, but shall remain ZCMI. I have fond memories of the gingerbread houses on display every year at Christmas as a teenaged Choir Boy performing at Temple Square, then wandering downtown, singing Spike Jones inspired versions of Christmas Carols in fabulous harmony.

Need to take a tele on walkabout more often.