1st Post- Welcome

Hey Everyone,
So I finally decided to start this blog up to share my photos as I process new ones, and figured this was the best, and fastest way to get them seen instead of updating my site with a new photo or two everyday! I will try to update this as often as I can, with new posts about something new that I did. I will also try to post some tutorials on how I achieve these pictures and you will get an inside look on how I "beautify" a picture! Keep reading as I will post some free shoot days as well, and how you can be part of it.

Feel free to post anything back.. thoughts, reviews, ideas, your stuff.. anything :D I'll look at it and reply back! I promise!

Here's a daily photo to get you started:

Occasionally on beautiful cloudy days, I love to go out and shoot downtown Austin. Cloudy days make for the best HDR pics in my opinion, just because it creates the most amount of dramatic light! Here's one from my recent trip to Auditorium Shores. There were a TON of people running and doing their thing, and tons of people bringing their dogs for a dip in the water. It is so peaceful here, and I wish I had the enthusiasm to go out and run everyday like these people do!
After processing this picture as HDR, I still felt like it wasn't the best depiction of what I perceived that day in my head. I went ahead and duplicated a few layers, made a bunch of layer masks, a little bit of pop, crispness, and smoothness later I got the colors as I wanted. While I was editing this picture, I started reading up on some quicker Lightroom techniques, and came across one for Selective Coloring. Now in the past, I've always saved 2 copies of the picture. One color, one Black and White, copied the BW picture as a layer onto the color photo. Then I make a layer mask, and paint with black to reveal whatever areas I want in color. This has always worked for me, but I want to consolidate all my workflow into one software, mainly into Lightroom because I really enjoy the interface. So when I read about selective coloring through lightroom, I was quite intrigued and I wanted to give it a try. This one's just a simple one where I removed all the colors from the bottom part of the photo, and Lightroom does say me about 2 steps, but overall it's still the same process as it was in Photoshop. I was hoping that there might be a way to possibly just be able to select a color spectrum and only keep that color in the picture or remove only that color, but no such luck! My search for this possible method continues. If anyone finds something, do let me know! Anyway, that's plenty for today. Enjoy the picture!