The dishes are washed and the kitchen is closed. This was lit by a beautiful sunset outside my door. It was at dusk when I shot this, but I balanced the camera on the counter for a 2.5-second exposure to give the sensor enough light.

What goes on around the sunset is often a lot more interesting than the sunset itself. Or the solar eclipse, or full moon, or the big thunderstorm. Take shots of everything, or take shots of something and focus on it. Usually for me, the first shot I take of an object or …

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Three bottles of orange juice, lined up on the roof of a black car, with shaded trees (left) and sunny trees (right) in the background.

This was store-bought orange juice I dispersed into water bottles. Then I removed the labels from the water bottles.

I like this composition… the colors, shapes of the bottles, lighting, and spacing came together that day. I made the colors warmer in Photoshop, brightened the bottles, darkened the edges. It’s a lot more idealistic.

The bokeh highlights in the background are eight-sided because my 50mm lens has eight uncurved aperture blades. …

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Ashley, resting against a palm tree during a windy afternoon. She’s so cool… probably because of the wind and all.

You can see she’s holding her glasses in her right hand. I told her to take them off since they weren’t working; you couldn’t see her eyes or face because you’d just be looking at her glasses.

Her plants were blue, but I changed them to black with color-channel desaturation. No spot-editing needed! I don’t like spot editing… some photographers enjoy it though.

Canon Rebel XTi, EF 50mm 1:1.4, 1/250, F3.5, 50mm, ISO100, 2008-10-10T12:10:52-04, 20081010-161052rxt

My last work with the Sigma 105mm macro lens. This is a closeup of backlit clouds against a cotton candy sunset. The colors are my favorite part of this; the lens really brings them out.

I used to think sunsets were only good as panoramas, but it’s just as interesting to focus on a small piece of the sky.

Canon Rebel XTi, Sigma EF 105mm 1:2.8, 1/200, F3.2, 105mm, ISO200, 2008-09-04T19:48:58-04, 20080904-234858rxt

Download a perfected high-res JPEG or download the source image (Canon Rebel XTi RAW file).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Credit me as Richard X. Thripp, and link back to richardxthripp.thripp.com or rxthripp.com. Thanks!

A car with yellow headlights illuminates the road on a dark, cloudy evening.

This car had lights that were unusually colored. I bet they had a yellow filter over them, but they looked brighter than normal too.

For editing, I decided to go with really warm colors, much more so than the actual scene. It gives a better mood than bluish tones. Also, I dodged the ground to make it look like the headlights are brighter, while adding contrast and burning the corners to make the scene more eye-catching. Because I shot this at ISO400, I brought …

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This beautiful sunset caught my eye out the window. The skies here are just getting better and better. I ran out with my wide-angle lens (the kit lens) and started snapping different angles of it. It didn’t look like this to start, but I stuck around for ten minutes and the clouds came together in this odd formation. It looks like cotton candy, caramel flavored. I found it really interesting that the sun was like a spotlight, because it was dark outside of the clouds as you can see at the edges of this photo.

I …

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I saw the golden colors flooding in through the window just a few hours ago, so I rain out and snapped this photo of the gorgeous sunset that was gracing my front yard. I haven’t seen a sunset this impressive before. The swirls of clouds were awesome, and went far above what you see in the frame. I couldn’t fit them all in even at 18mm, which is as wide as the Canon Rebel XTi kit lens would go.

I punched the contrast up in Photoshop. …

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A sunset near the Wal-Mart in South Daytona, Florida. I couldn’t move away to exclude the distractions, so I made them part of the scene to represent urban life. The colors and cloud dark clouds at the top drew my eye, as did the cars at the bottom. I made the tail light of a car the dot for the i in City, and the headlight the period for the X. in Richard X. Thripp. Creatively incorporating the title into the piece is nice sometimes.

I …

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I’ve been wondering what the Florida lifestyle I’ve been hearing so much about is, but I’ve found it here. You may not know it, but the Florida lifestyle involves lots of bugs. There were plenty of flies flying around as flies sometimes do, but I shooed them away to snap this shot of an orange smoothie by the pool. I went with a blue border for this photo. Never done that before, but it fits the image so well.

I added contrast, removed specks of dirt from the …

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Orange sunrays emerge from the black clouds. This is from the car like the second; we passed an open field where I had the chance to snap this. I like how the beams are shining down instead of up like you see normally, and the patterns of light and dark in the clouds and between the sunshine were quite a sight.

Added a lot of contrast here, and brightened the sunrays quite a bit, while darkening the spaces in between, to make them more compelling. I wanted the …

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