Work Shall Set You Free

This is a picture of the front gate of one of the first concentration camps set up to imprison and eventually murder political prisoners of the Nazy regime, including Jews. It in the city of Dacau, which is a suburb of Munich in the south of Germany.

It's ironic that the inscription says "work shall set you free" because rarely did that happen. This was a sobering place, especially when you consider the conditions in which they were all forced to live...and some die.

I thought this shot looked better in black and white than in color. And something about skewing the composition fit with the mood of the day. I darkened the photo up a bit to make the iron in the bars stand out a bit more.

Download the full photograph by clicking on the image below.

Sunrise along the Mediterranean

I remember this shot well. I had been up for hours watching the Presidential election coverage in our hotel room in Spain. It was like Christmas morning. Shelley wouldn't let me get up too early, but I just couldn't wait to see how the election results turned out. (By the way, election day television for me is the best television in the world.) I was up at 4:00 AM and quietly turned on the TV.

This shot was taken as the sun came up in Marbella, Spain - a Mediterranean coastal resort town. I'd never seen a sky so vivid with color. This picture was doctored a bit only to intensify the color of the sky and to completely blacken out the buildings in the foreground.

You can download the full image by clicking on the image.

St. Peter's Basilica

This is the inside of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Shelley and I were here in 2005 on our trip through Germany and Italy. What I remember most about this visit was us stalking a priest to get him to bless a rosary for a friend of Shelley's family.

This shot initially didn't do much for me until I put it into sepia tone and darkened the shadows. The result was more pronounced rays of light pouring into the Cathedral which constrast nicely against the general dark tone of the rest of the image.

You can download the full image by clicking on the image.

Rome, right before the rain

Photography is an emerging interest of mine and I'd like to share some of my favorite shots from over the years.

My first photo is one that I didn't really think much of until a few months ago. I was fooling around with Adobe Fireworks and I found that if I turned the original photo (shot in color) into a black and white shot, then I could colorize parts of the Italian flag and superimpose it on the black and white photo. I played around with the lighting and voila, I created a shot that I really thought was cool.

You can download the full image by clicking on the image.