Code|Beta Photography [http://www.codebeta.net]

As some astronomers would say, they look like novas but in fact they aren’t. These are the photos that I took during New Year’s, around midnight, from my apartment overlooking San Jose.

As you can see in the photo above, these are the fireworks that could be seen over San Jose.

These are not shooting stars, the neighbors were also having their own display of fireworks and this is the aftermath of one of those. The following photos are from the fireworks display that was taking place near my apartment

All of these shots were taken with a 30 second exposure using ISO 100.

-LM

Code|Beta Photography [http://www.codebeta.net]

Hello everyone…it’s been a very very long time since I last posted something on this blog. Last night the world celebrated the new year, as it has been done for many years, and one of the most common ways of celebrating is with the use of fireworks.

First off we have a shot of the moon, December 31st had what is known as a blue moon, this means that there is a second full moon in a month and the last time that a blue moon occurred on the 31st of December was back in 1990

There isn’t much to the shot above, it was taken using my 300mm lens, which I hardly ever use, @ ISO 100, the shutter speed of 1/125th of a second and the aperture was set at f/11. Would have been better if there were any stars or even clouds as it would have made for an even more interesting photos, but the clouds moved so fast when they were close enough to the moon that I didn’t manage to catch them…I wasn’t going to wait for an hour for another cloud to go by ;)

The above shot is of the metropolitan area of Costa Rica taken from my apartment. The view is quite amazing at night and tonight would be no different. The green color of the gate is caused by a light to the right of the camera that was placed to light up the parking lot of the apartments and I really like how it came out on this photo. This one was taken with my 18-55mm lens @18mm, using an ISO of 100, a shutter speed of 30 seconds @ f/11.

Fireworks were being shot every now and then but not too often plus if there were any in this photo they would be pretty hard to see as they would get mixed into the city lights. Finally we have one shot of a fireworks display that was being carried out in a nearby area

The settings are like the one before this one with one change, the shot was taken at 29mm instead of the 18mm from the previous. There are other shots that will be posted soon.

Happy new year to everyone…

-LM

Code|Beta Photography [http://www.codebeta.net]

This post is for those wanting a Google Wave invite.

Just add a comment below and I’ll contact asap so that we can get you added to the invite list so that you can access Google Wave.

-LM

Code|Beta Photography [http://www.codebeta.net]

There is this house behind one of the 3 churches that exist in the city of Heredia which is falling apart and has been abandoned for quite a while now. Finally got a shot of the corner of the house that shows the decay that this house has had over the years.

We can see that the house was built using the old style in which the walls were made of a mix that includes dirt and has also cement, if I’m not mistaken.

The photo was taken with my Nikon D60 using the Nikkor 50mm F/1.8 lens set to F/2.8 with a shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second and ISO 400. Post processing involved cropping on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom with a couple of color corrections done with the sliders, then I brought the photo into Adobe Photoshop CS4 to apply a couple of actions from the Totally Rad set, more specifically I used the Boutwell Magic Glasses twice with the second instance set to 50% opacity, the Pool Party action set to 50% opacity to bring a little vintage style to the photo and finally I applied the Vignette and Blur.

Before making it final I applied a technique I learned from Nick Campbell through his Photoshop for Photographers tutorial, I applied a curves layer with bringing up the black tones to a more blue-ish color and prevent the photo from going all the way to black.

-LM

Code|Beta Photography [http://www.codebeta.net]

I’m not really getting into product design, it’s not really my thing, but I spoke with a friend that wants to create a website to sell a couple of things so I told him that I could probably design something for the page that he wants, but first a mock up of the site.

During the creation of this mock up in Photoshop I want to display a listing of products with their respective pictures but since I’m not going to start putting in photos of products which might not even be related to the site, I decided to design my own product box and this is the result

To be honest, I’m actually impressed it came out at all and it looks very cartoonish which is something I find quite funny and I love. I’m going to definitely be saving this image for future uses.

Ok, so back to work it is :)

-LM