Edwin Villanueva

What a great weekend for shooting and being outdoors. I was back in San Jose this weekend to attend a couple events. The first was on Saturday for Scott Kelby’s 2nd Annual Worldwide Photo Walk in downtown San Jose. The second event was AIDSWalk San Francisco 2009 on Sunday held at Golden Gate Park. I’ll be blogging and posting more pictures from both events soon.

For now, I wanted to share my favorite picture from Saturday. This is one of my entries for Scott Kelby’s Photo Walk contest where he will select a Grand Prize winner and 10 Honorable Mention photos from thousands of participants all of the world who participated in this historic event.

While doing the Journey Into Africa Tour a couple of weeks ago at W.A.P, we had a brief encounter with this little guy on the trail. He was actually “outside the fences” so I’m not really sure he was part of the attraction. Nonetheless, he gave us a great photo opportunity.

I Heart Gorillas.

Next to the Lion Camp and Cheetah exhibits, I love watching the Gorillas at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. I’ve always been fascinated by them since I was a little kid and being able to see them in such a close proximity has been a dream come true. I can literally sit for hours just watching them interact with each other.

Here are few facts about Gorillas:

- Gorillas are the largest of the living primates.

-The DNA of gorillas is 98%–99% identical to that of a human, and they are the next closest living relatives to humans after the chimpanzee species.

-Gorillas live in tropical or subtropical forests.

For more information, check out the Wikipedia on Gorillas.

I met up with my brother-in-law Ramel and nephew Tobey at the golf range after lunch today. Tobey is pretty active in different sports like gymnastics, swimming, tennis, karate and of course, golf. I took some pictures of his swing and finally had the opportunity to use the 6.3 fps (frames per second) of the 50D. With the exception of wearing two gloves (my dads influence on him), he’s not doing to bad.

Tiger Woods in the making? I think he’s heading in the right direction.

I’ve been playing around with Lightroom and Photoshop to help give my photos a little different look. Its really incredible how powerful these tools are to completely change the feel and look of a photo. Below are examples of the same photo after running it through Lightroom and Photoshop.

Original Photo Straight Out of the Camera.

Photo after making exposure, contrast and saturation adjustments in Lightroom.

The final image after running some actions in Photoshop.