Amazing Grace

This is a picture of the Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, very beautiful building inside and out. We took this picture from the park across the street. This is a three exposure HDR but it still looked a little to plain. We then added some clouds from another image, and then converted the picture into an infrared version. I guess you would call this an HDIR. Below is one of the exposures that we started from.

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iPad Wallpaper

We now have iPad wallpaper's on our website available for purchase, go to http://www.stoutandstout.com/Other/iPadwallpaper/15816567_wXNtC#1185840069_nnr2A if you would like to purchase some.

Shot Through The Heart...

In honor of Valentine's we decided to post a couple of photos we took in San Francisco. On the Embarcadero there is a sculpture of a bow & arrow, we have heard it's called Cupid's Bow & Arrow. Here are two photos of it, both are HDR, and one is in black and white. Happy Valentine's.

Chris & Ngoc Stout

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To The Clouds...

It is always nice to have a clear day when shooting, but clouds a lot of times can add to your picture. Here are a few examples of what I mean.

Here is a before and after of a beach in Pebble Beach, California that we added some clouds to in Photoshop,

as you can see, it was not bad without clouds but with them it makes the  photo a little more interesting.

Next is a before and after photo of the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. This house is believed

to be haunted and their is a lot of strangeness associated with it, so we wanted to add some clouds to add a dark feel to it. The after image is in HDR so it also looks a lot different from the original.

You can see here the original image was ok, but adding clouds and doing an HDR gave the image a kind of mystery and dark feel that we were going for.

If you would like to see these photos without the watermark, please go to our website at stoutandstout.com , these images as well as many others are available for purchase.

So be sure to start taking pictures of clouds (really good activity too if your out of ideas on what to shoot), you never know when they can come in handy.



California Dreamin

If you live in California, or you plan on visiting some time soon take a look at this blog by Andre Gunther, http://ca.myphotoscout.com/

This is a great blog that shows you tons of locations to photograph in California. Each location tells you how to get there, the GPS location, best time and season to shoot, suggested ways to shoot it, and samples of his own photographs.

Even if you live in California you will probably find some places you never thought of or heard of to photograph.

Elephant On Vacation

So I wanted to create a fun image but really didn't know what to create. So I was going through our photos from Hawaii, and when I came across this elephant we took a picture of in the Honolulu Zoo it hit me, why not send the elephant on vacation? So below is a picture of an elephant hanging out on Waikiki beach.

If you would like to see an unwatermarked version of this photo, our would like to purchase it, please visit our website at http://www.stoutandstout.com/

Sunset In Hawaii

My wife and I went on our honeymoon to Hawaii, and the trip did not start out well plane problems caused us to be stuck at the airport for 4 hours before we could get going. As a result we got to Hawaii late and the only thing we could do after checking into the hotel was go to the closest beach and take a few pictures at sunset.

Turned out to be a good thing, while we were taking our pictures we looked over and saw this woman dancing on the beach, we only saw something like this the one day in our entire two weeks so it turned out to be a lucky chance, see the photo below:

To see this photo full size and with out the water mark please visit our website at http://www.stoutandstout.com/ , this image as well as many others are available for purchase.

Too Many People

Have you ever gone to a popular destination and wanted to take some pictures of it, only to find that it is impossible to get a nice shot without anyone in the picture? Take a look at the example below of San Francisco City Hall we took:

If you look closely you can see people standing in the doorway of the building as well as near it. Also some people are walking behind the fence. If you have Photoshop CS5 you can use content aware fill, and this will get rid of some of the people, however it does not do a good job for areas such as behind the fence or in the doorway.

One key to make your life a lot easier when you are trying to get rid of the people is to take a lot of pictures of the scene, in this case we took about 20 pictures of the same thing. The reason for this is in each photo the people for the most part are not going to be in the same place. What we did in Photoshop was first used content aware on the easy parts to get rid of.

The harder parts such as the door we took some other images we had of the scene where no one was there, we took that photo and put it in a layer with the main photo we were working with. We then took a layer mask and painted in the door where nobody was standing, we did this as for other problem areas as well. After doing this we got and image of the scene below, which has no people in it:

As you can see no more people are in the picture, and it was not that hard to do. To see the final touched up full sized image please visit our website at http://www.stoutandstout.com/ , this image as well as others can be purchased at our website.