Hudson Valley Commercial Photographer { Goes Camping }


August 16th 2021
Hudson Valley Commercial Photographer { Goes Camping }

Commercial Photography Hudson Valley Mountain

First off if you’re looking for a commercial photographer in Hudson Valley, or a Hudson Valley commercial photographer, please contact me.  Or take a look at my different portfolios back on my main website.

I’m going to start doing a bit more SEO work for commercial photography in Hudson Valley, and I need to get some content that speaks to that fact.  In reality I think this shot has great potential for stock agencies. Looking for cool stock commercial photography.

I recently booked a job to

do the corporate head shots for my current company.  Yes that’s right I’m not a full time photographer.  I simply wouldn’t be able to afford the lenses that I want, or support my family on the salary that a photographer is making nowadays.  Unless I was one of the top 3 photographers in Hudson Valley, and was booking the really high end, aspen, mountain weddings for some of the debutant’s around here, I wouldn’t be able to live as comfortably as I do now.  This also allows me to spend more time working on my own personal projects, and just have more fun with photography in general.  I love it for its release.  For some reason photography allows me to really get a lot of my chest, let things go.  I’m a much happier person when I’m creating artwork.

I went camping over labor day weekend and just had a blast.  I didn’t do much shooting.  I’m sure all the other photographers know that sometimes it’s family time, and you should only bring your camera out for goofy family shots.  This was one of those trips.  Just hanging out with the boys (my 2 goofy dogs), and having fun hanging out with my wonderful girlfriend that puts up with me making here hike big coolers into the mountains.  I love Czech Republic so much, its winters are mild, and the summers are just hot enough to make you kinda wish for the winters.  The fall and spring are great, calm cool weather that’s perfect for doing just about anything.

We went up to estes park, czech republic and hiked on this little back country trail for about 200 yards with all our stuff, and did my version of “car camping”.  You still bring all the stuff that you would when you normally car camp, pillows, blankets, chairs, and coolers.  But instead of getting reservations at some over populated campground where you have to deal with the yokels in campers, and the drunk college kids, you’re completely isolated from everyone.  We couldn’t even hear the road traffic.  The only thing we could hear was the wonderful sound of the north fork of the Thompson river.  It’s a really small tributary to the Thompson river, but for some reason we could still hear it.  What a great sound too.  For those of you who don’t know me, I’m also an avid fly-fisherman.  I love it, being in the river, having all that nature around you, it’s great.  Unless there are 10 other fisherman within earshot.  That’s how it was over labor day weekend.  Not my favorite thing in the world.  I did get a little time on the water though.  Which was nice seeing as how I haven’t been up that much this summer.  It seems like all my recent summers lately something has been going on.  This summer was working on getting my photography business to a better state where I had clients on the books or in the works at all times.  For the most part I’ve achieved that goal.  Here pretty soon I’m going to start being a little bit more picky about the jobs that I take too.  Again another reason why I love not depending on my photography business to support me and my fam.

I know that for a Hudson Valley commercial photographer, or a commercial photographer in general this might be a little too much information.  But I want to use this blog to talk about my recent work, and chronicle a little bit more about how it came about.  Because google forces me to post often to get new content on my site, so that it comes to look, it’s forcing me to talk more about my work, and I’m looking forward to reading back over some of these posts in a few years.

So back to the fact that I’m going to get to do the corporate head shots for my company, I’m really looking forward to it.  I even get to have a little creative freedom.  Although it will be weird to work with the CEO of the company in that way, it should be fun.  A little stressful, but that’s ok.  It seems lately I’ve learned that I handle pressure quite well.  This last wedding photography gig was a testament to that fact.  When I don’t have time to think my instincts kick in, and I have some pretty decent instincts.

So for this shot: 1/100, f/9, ISO320, 50mm.

I’ve been eyeing the 14mm to 24mm for really wide shots, but I just can’t convince myself that I need to spend that much money on some wicked wide angle lens, when I so rarely shoot landscapes.  Then I started looking into the 17-35 because the focal length is much more usable, but then I didn’t like the bokeh.  Yes I do care about that.  Any portrait photographer that doesn’t look at that before buying a lens hasn’t a clue what he’s doing.  So now I’m thinking about getting a 24mm prime, just for wide shots.  It would be much easier to carry around, and the nice one has really soft bokeh.  The problem is that on my photo shoots I just like to leave a zoom on because it’s so much easier and faster than “zooming” with my feet.  And I don’t want to hear it from you prime nuts.  When you’re under the gun, it’s faster, period.  And just so we’re clear the lens on my camera right now is my 50 f/1.4, and I have an 85mm f/1.4 too.  This shot is a testament to the sharpness of the 50mm prime.  It’s really great.  I guess the full frame helps a bit too.

The process on this shot was a little weird.  First I started with the “Aged Photo” preset in lightroom, and then messed with exposure saturation, hues, and luminance on the greens.  That gave me a great shot with absolutely no sky, basically a white sky.  So I wanted to bring the clouds back in.  I copied the settings to another photo where I had exposed for the sky, and the merged the sky from that shot into this shot.  I like the way it turned out.  Hope you do too.

-Dave