Tarrant County Courthouse, Part 1: The Planning and Capture Phase

Example photo - Tarrant County Courthouse, Ft. Worth, Texas

Usually, I am just a guy wandering around with a camera. I don’t know if I am going to end up with a great picture or not. Therefore, while I have wanted to show an example of creating a photo from start to finish, I have never figured out how to do it (other than, I suppose, having a film crew follow me around). In the case of this picture of the Tarrant County Courthouse in Ft. Worth, Texas, however, I actually knew what I was going to create before I started. Therefore, it provided me the opportunity to walk you through the entire process of making a photograph.

Example photo - Tarrant County Courthouse, Ft. Worth, Texas

I made a video of the entire process of creating it, starting when this was nothing more than an idea and proceeding through the final product. The video below shows you the brief planning for capturing the photo and how I went about getting it:

This video covers the “capture phase” of the photograph. It starts in my house as I explain what I’m going to do and then walk through some of the tools I use to plan out my photography. From there, I show you where I went and how I went about capturing it.

I hope you find this video useful and it helps you see how someone else goes about capturing photos. As you can see, it is not always a tidy process and is full of unexpected problem solving. I had hoped to explain more about what I was doing as I captured the picture, but the process was made much more difficult by the lack of a median in the middle of the street. You will see that I explain more about the process once I found a spot off to the side behind a concrete barrier, but I ended up not using any of those shots.

In the next video, I will cover the selection and editing process. It will show you why I chose this shot and walk you through exactly how I edited this photo. I think it will be even more helpful than this one, so be sure to check it out.

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