This picture was taken a few years back in Japan in Fukuoka. I really liked the setting of this picture but it was too washed out by the sun so I decided to play around wit hthe colors a little and came up with what you see here. I'm sure that if I would have done something like this in photoshop that I would have done it a little bit better but I was quite busy with work when I made this photo. Well Thats all for today so enjoy. 
Hey everyone, it's Christmas time now so I will give you a nice picture I took 2 years ago back in St. Louis. This is a nice house that I saw while driving back from the O'Fallon area and pulled the car over to take the picture. I had to use their mailbox I think to hold the camera steady since I had no tripod handy at the time. The setup of this house and the lake infront really makes a nice entrance scene for the subdivision thats called "The Lakes." Well thats all I have time for now since I am really busy finishing up other projects. Have a great December everyone!
Hey this isn't the most beautiful of pictures but I just wanted to show you how fast the weather can change around here. This was taken just one day after the picture below in about the same spot. I thought this picture just looked cool when it is next to the one below.
I couldn't pass up taking this picture yesterday looking out from my studio. It had stormed off and on throughout the day with several tornado watches and warning going on and off. The tornado siren around us even went off several times after this was taken. And as a tribute to Kansas weather, it snowed the next day. In this picture I just loved how the sun lit up the wet Campus landscape, making it seem more like early spring after the snows melted then late fall.
I will give you guys a nice picture of Hale Library at night just before I leave for thanksgiving break. I took this one about a week ago on my trip around campus. It is a photomerge of at least 3 pictures that I put together on photoshop. Unfortunatly, because of the long length of this picture, you guys can't see the picture as well as I would have liked but at least you get the idea. Well have fun and enjoy!
Today I go for a simplistic approach in the composition. This is a honeylocust tree at Marlatt Park that I thought looked cool against the blue sky backdrop. I called it the thorny tree because the thorns on these trees can easily get several inches long! This picture doesn't really show you the thorns but trust me, they are dangerous looking. Well I must get back to work so I will now leave you to stare endlessly into the complex branch structure of the tree.................
Back at Marlatt Park I bring you a picture that I took while walking and through random luck it came out with a really interesting composition. I like how the center tree is straight up and down but the horizion line is really tilted. It kind of make you want to tilt your head to see it correctly. The picture I am showing you is completely unedited and uncropped so this is how it cam from the camera raw.
We go back to Japan for todays picture. This picture was taken in the city of Kitakyushu in the moat between the Castle and the riverwalk. As you can see, it was sprinkling that day but it wasen't very hard so the riples in the water were still distinct in their shape. I tried to crop/balance this picture so that the lilly pads didn't cover up all the open space outside of the flower's area. I think my final composition works out well with the three spots of open water balancing each other out. Well thats it for today so enjoy!
The real question is: Is the tree leaning or are we leaning?
If you look closely enough at the picture you might notice that this building had 2 different facades on it. The front facade is a neo-classical limestone facade while the other one is like an old 1900 style brick facade. I really like this picture because it brings out the hidden (and to me, forgotten) brick facade that normally is not noticed. If I diddn't know the context of the building I would think this building belongs in a major city and was once a train station or old bank or something. Another way of looking at this picture is thinking that at night the long lost spirit of the origional building comes alove in this one spot. Its like the building's ghost.
I present you a beautiful view of out Historic Farrell Library. What I like most about this picture is watching the light come through the windows from inside the building. I took this picture while going around campus taking pictures for my planning project on analysing the urban design of campus. well thats in for now but I will probably post more pictures from the walk since I took over 600 during my excursion around campus.
For today's picture I bring you back to Marlatt Park. There are a few things that I would like to change about the picture like the sky but that was out of my control that day. I really enjoy going to the park because of the variety of plants and grasses found there. This picture was taken at the southern end of the park where some old fences border the park and keep the park separate from the neighboring lands. This composition was inspired by a picture Ethan used last year to draw in our design graphics class. Well that's todays picture so enjoy!
Hey this is my dog Totoro when she was a puppy. After looking through my pictures of her I think this in some way shows her personality. She is now almost 2 years old but still just as soft and playful as she looks in this picture. I have tons of other pictures of her that look just as cute but I won't flood this site with those for diversity sake.
Everything in Japan is small............except traffic cones! This is not a composed image but I thought that something like this should be posted since it is really cool I think.
Well I am posting this one because I enjoy the color and texture of the pucture. This was taken right where I park my bike every day and I loved the variety of colors coming from just one tree. As a total composition they is not the best picture but it does have some rich textures to it.
Well guys it's Fall now and the trees are really starting to show it. Instead of giving you a shot of all the trees changing color with the wind blowing I am giving you this picture. When I took it I thought it represented more of what fall really means. The quiet brown leavs littering the ground with the warm yellow light tells us that summertime is long gone and winter is on the way. I believed that night shows this better then daytime since you can't see the other green plants at night.
Hey this is not a photograph as you can easily tell but this is what I quickly created in a few hours in a program called SketchUp. It is part of my most recent design and it is from the viewpoint of a camper's window travleling along the highway. I am not using this view in my final presentation but I will have one similar to it from out on the plaza. SketchUp is made to create quick 3D models of things and I find it quite usefull when showing people spaces.
I put together this one last year from an old picture I took 2 or 3 years ago. I called i t invasive beauty because these beautiful plants are extrememly invasive in warmer climates and cause some countries to spend millions removing the plant from waterways. In St. Louis is is ok to have them because the winter will kill them off so it never becomes a real problem. Well that is all for today's post.
This is another picture from the same Japanese garden that is pictured 2 postings below. The part I like most about this picture is the little mosses that are growing on the stone lantern. A detail like that only comes from years and years of sitting out in the weather and is something you can't design. Something that I would really like to see but never have is a Japanese garden at night where all the lanterns are lit up, casting their tiny lights across the waters and highlighting bits of the forest. Nightime gardens are probably the most interesting gardens because the other sences like sound are hightened and much more meaningful.
Today I am giving you an image of the Chinese Garden that is in the St. Louis Botanical Gardens. I took this one just after the butterfly picture below so read that one to get more information about that day. I find it interesting to compare Japanese and Chinese gardens together since they are so different in style but still try to reflect nature. One thing that Chinese gardens have a lot of that Japanese Gardens don't is the use of limestone rocks. These odd shaped rocks cant be found in Japan but in China are used extensively in gardens and decoration.
Welcome to Japan. This is the first of my Japanese pictures to arrive on this site and there most likely will be several more before I am done with them. I went to Japan a few years back and took a lot of pictures while I was there. I was able to capture a few good pictures and will post some of them since many of you haven't seen the edited versions of them yet.
I took this one a long time ago with my olympus camera. At the time we had plants in pots out on our back deck which made the deck look great. I had to stand on our upper deck to get an angle like this and I like how it turned out. Not to often do you get to see a potted plant from directly above.
This is an interesting Butterfly shot that I captured 2 years ago at the Missouri Botanical Gardens during the Japanese Festivile. I was walking around with my brother trying to capture spaces with my camera and found a nice butterfly in the flowers. Well I was lucky enough to capture it before it flew away like all butterflys do. I know this is the 3rd posting today but I have a few precomposed pictures that I have worked on before and I would like to get them up here to make this site have a set of pictures to start out with.
We were up bright and early at Marlatt Park this day to sample plants along a traverse and we got to see the sun rise. This was taken on top of a tall cuesta called "Top o' the World" and from up here you get an excelent view of the entire Manhattan area. From this point of view the main city would be just to the right of this image. The part I like most about this picture is the way the light seems to bend around the sun. The deep red part of the sky almost looks like distand hills or clouds to me.
This one is a classic!This picture was taken a few years ago at my house in St. Louis. About 2 or 3 times a year we get a really big rain that formes rivers in the two drainage channels inour back yard. When enough water is flowing the upper channel overflows and runs down through our landscaping to the lower channel. It just so happened that during this storm the water formed channels between the frogs' leggs creating an interesting image.
