Haymes Images

©2010 Tom Haymes

This is an image from my latest trip to Big Bend National Park with my friend, Alex Suarez. We decided to do a photographers trek without kids so that we could shoot with minimal distractions. As usual, we had great weather, it being Spring Break. The Lost Mine Trail was a 1200 ft. climb but well worth it.

I had some good effects with the fisheye and I went with black-and-white to defeat the haze but was happy with the results. I really like the effect of dark skies in my black-and-whites as I find this creates a rather dramatic effect. It also helps to accentuate the forms of the cliffs and the rocks which stand out brightly against the darkened sky. One of my favorite shots so far this year.

©2010 Tom Haymes

I was recently in Austin and did some night shooting with my good friends Brian and Alex. Brian, Alex, and I have been shooting together since the early 1980s when we all attended Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts together.

We decided to do some night photography and I wanted to go to the Texas Capitol to play with my fisheye lens. I decided to try an old trick I learned from a Leica representative from back when I was selling cameras. You place the camera on the floor and use a remote release or self-timer to set it off. I use the trick a lot in churches and it seemed like a good fit for the space.

Lining things up at the Capitol was actually aided by the fact that dead center on the floor is a star so centering things was a lot easier. Getting the angle right was a little trickier but this particular technique is enhanced by digital since you can check your results. The one final thing that you have to watch out for when taking pictures this way is getting out of the shot. I’ve shot quite a few pictures where I thought I was clear of the lens and it turned out I wasn’t. This is a particular problem with superwides like my Tokina 12-24 and, especially, the 10.5mm fisheye.

©2010 Tom Haymes

I bought myself a fisheye lens with my Christmas money this year. As a bit of a wide angle nut, it seemed like a logical choice. I am still working on visualizing with it but in the mean time I am having a lot of fun playing with its possibilities (probably too much fun, actually).

This is the first image that I thought was truly successful. There is no PhotoShopping (other than black-and-white conversion) in this image. Going across Post Oak Blvd. in the Galleria area of Houston there are these curved, polished tubes that are highly reflective (you can see another one on the right of the right of the frame). In order to create the image, I placed my camera up against one of the tubes to make this exposure and got a kind of double distortion from both the tubes and the fisheye effect out of it.

© 2009 Tom Haymes

This is one of those great buildings that just reflects the world around it. In this case I was blessed with some dramatic clouds that really enhanced the photo. I’m sure I could go back and reshoot this building and get a totally different picture depending on the quality of the sky on that particular day. It’s just a canvas for the light.

©2009 Tom Haymes

This is another image from my Yosemite expedition and is yet another example of the amazing light of that place. As a photographer, I’ve become a student of light and that helps me recognize the different colors that nature is likely to provide to me. One of the advantages of specializing is that you can really focus on what works in your areas of expertise. I don’t do much flash photography and so I generally resist attempts to get me to do weddings, portraits, or other studio work in general. This is because that kind of photography demands a completely different kind of eye and expertise than the architectural/landscape photography that I do pursue.

Another advantage I have is that I live in a place that is visually far less exciting than Yosemite. Light and the sky are the main things going for Katy, Texas, photographically speaking. Therefore, I am always looking for an opportunity to exploit those. When I do get the opportunity to shoot somewhere that is visually stunning like Yosemite or West Texas (or even Houston) I take those skills with me and can maximize my efforts in the limited time I have to spend there.

In this case, I was doubly lucky in that Yosemite offered me a great set of vistas in the 12 hours I was actually in the park. The weather was as close to perfect as I could have asked for and I was treated to visually exciting vistas such as this one. This cloud actually sat on the top of Half Dome for over an hour. I first spotted it at dinnertime but I was in a much more difficult shooting location at that time. I did shoot an image at that time but the combination of the warmer lighting and greater freedom in framing the shot made this the stronger of the two shots. However, I trace of the success of this image to knowing exactly how to visualize the shot with the developing light and that comes from my years of shooting light in places like Katy.

©2009 Tom Haymes

I made the pilgrimage to Yosemite National Park. An experience I recommend to any photographer. I was amazed at the number of pictures I was able to get in just 12 hours (I am still going through them). I have a new appreciation for the work of Ansel Adams. It really helps when you live there year-round. The variation of light in only 12 hours was amazing.

This picture was shot from near Glacier Point and was one of the earlier ones from the day. It wasn’t the best lighting but it worked out with the clouds. Punching through the haze required a polarizer and some adjustments were necessary in PhotoShop but I am happy with the result. Check my Flickr page (see link on right) for many more Yosemite shots.

© 2009 Tom Haymes

I finally got back downtown to do some shooting on a decent day this weekend. I really like the Continental Airlines Building because it looks different from every angle. Other shots I’ve taken of it look like this:

©2008 Tom Haymes

And this:

©2009 Tom Haymes

One of the keys to successful architectural photography is finding unusual angles and this building has plenty of them. Architectural photography is both easy and hard this way. It’s possible to make any building look unusual if you think hard enough about it. At the same time, however, you have to maintain the balance of the picture (not necessarily symmetrical either) and still make a pleasing shot.

Also, it’s important to remember that buildings, generally speaking, don’t go anywhere and that, especially if it’s something like a skyscraper or other landmark, thousands (or even millions) of other people have already taken a picture of it. The trick there is to do something unusual while still making a good picture. It’s a challenging, but fun, intellectual exercise. I think the outcome, however, is well worth it.

©2009 Tom Haymes

I really liked the texture in the worn wood of this odd-looking sculpture in front of the Brazos Valley Center in Bryan, Texas. I was there for the Lone Star Art Guild Show.

It’s a funny thing about black-and-whites. Typically, only other photographers appreciate them. I never have much luck with them in non-photographer-judged shows, like the LSAG (which is judged by painters). I also don’t sell many of them (except to other photographers).

A lot of subtlety goes into making an effective black-and-white and many non-practitioners assume that since you don’t have to fiddle with color, it’s easier to do a black-and-white. Actually, it’s usually the other way around. Color pictures (at least for me) tend to work right out of the camera, so to speak. Black-and-white requires you to make two leaps in your pre-visualization process. First, you have to imagine how the image is going to translate from 3-D to 2-D and then you have to visualize the effect of translating from the color reality to black-and-white. It also helps to have some understanding of the filter options and how they will change the look of your black-and-white shot. One of the nice things about Fred Miranda’s B&W Workflow Pro is that it allows you to play with a set of traditional black-and-white filters after the fact in PhotoShop (something that wasn’t possible in the old days).

However, I find that if I don’t get the pre-visualization right in the first place, no amount of messing around in PhotoShop will save the image. In this case, I saw the Red Filter all the way through as a way of distinguishing the sculpture from the somewhat washed out sky in the background and as a way of popping the clouds to complete the contrast of the image.

©2009 Tom Haymes

This is one of my more recent architectural photos. I really like going into downtown Houston and trying to figure out new ways of looking at the buildings under varying lighting conditions. In this case. the rippling reflection of the Wells Fargo building in the Reliant Energy building caught my eye as I was crossing the street. It really reminded me of water. Coupled with the interesting patterns and reflections from the Tenneco building, this shot worked out nicely. I had to shoot from the middle of the street, which is one reason why I tend to shoot down there on Sundays when the traffic is light.

© 2009 Tom Haymes

This image was taken the first evening we were in the Davis Mountains. The state park there has a road that goes to the top of a small hill that offers a dramatic view of the valley in which Fort Davis lies. What really struck me about this trip to the Davis Mountains was the amazing colors created by the dead winter grass throughout the area. Coupled with the evening light, this created a dramatic golden light that accentuated the blue of the desert sky. In this case I also used a polarizer to maximize the effect.

The wizened tree provided a perfect foreground for the valley and mountains in the background. When possible, it is often a good technique to create a “near-far” dynamic in a photo. This is sometimes difficult to achieve but in this case it worked out perfectly as the tree, which was a few feet in front of me, is backed by the mountains, which are 20 miles away. I find this image to be one of the most satisfying from the entire trip.