Vancouver: Van Dusen Botanical Gardens Festival of Lights 21/52

F-16, 30 sec exposure, ISO100

F-16, 20 sec exposure, ISO100

F-14, 20 sec exposure, ISO200

F-16, 30 sec exposure, ISO100

F-16, 10 sec exposure, ISO100

Vancouver: Olympic Cauldron HDR 20/52

I will be starting a series of Vancouver, Canada over the next several weeks starting with the Olympic Cauldron which has now become a permanent landmark on the Vancouver waterfront. If you don't know already, Vancouver was the host city of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. With the Winter Games now complete, the chain-linked fence (source of controversy during the games) has now been removed and visitors are now able to take a closer look at the cauldron. Despised by some and loved by others, it's five flame concept was considered unique.

Happy Holidays!

I wanted to wish everyone a Happy Holiday and also an awesome 2011. This is our mini Christmas tree. I recently picked up the Yonguo Remote Flash trigger (~$30). The flash is behind the tree reflecting against the blinds. It is probably a bit too strong, but I realized later that you can dial down the power of your flash. Most external flashes in Manual mode have the ability to change the strength of your flashes (Eg. 1/2 to 1/64th)

Tree (F-13, 5 sec. exposure, ISO 400)
Ornament (F-5, 1/5 sec exposure, ISO1600)

Christian Science Church Corridor 18/52

I was on my way home from Prudential Mall after spending the afternoon at Barnes and Noble reading about photography. In particular, an article in the Digital Photographer magazine talked about how to compose a photo. They outlined 5 categories: Shapes, Angles, Movement, Lines and Space. This photo was taken with 3 exposures so the lights would not be overexposed and meant to demonstrate Lines. A good architectural photo will have columns and lines parallell to the side of the photo. This can be accomplished with the Skew function in Photoshop and will aid in correcting some lens distortion.

Sandy Beaches and Creating a Vignette Effect 17/52

To create a vignette around a photo is pretty simple in Photoshop. This one might be a tad exaggerated. First, you select the Elliptical Marquee tool and draw an oval as big as you want. Next, you don't want what you selected inside the circle, so you need to "Invert" your selection which you can find in the pulldown menu. After that, right-click your oval, and select Feather...and choose about 200 pixels. This will ensure there is a gradient after you darken the corners instead of an abrupt change. Finally, you can go to Image--> Adjustments--> Levels or Curves...to darken the area outside of the oval.

Acadia National Park: Thunder Hole HDR 16/52

Last one from Acadia National Park (I promise Sandy). Thunder Hole, an area carved out by water, is supposed to make a loud thundering sound at mid-tide.

I just installed Photomatix and I've been fiddling around with some of it's settings for making HDR images. This image was made from 3 images -2EV, 0EV and +2EV using Automatic Exposure Bracketing (AEB) which can be set on most DSLR cameras. There are some halo areas that I'd like to avoid and I've read that you can blend the HDR image with one of the original images, but I haven't tried that yet.

Thunder Hole (F-10, ISO100, 1/100, 1/25, 1/6 second exposure in order below)

Acadia National Park: Jordan Pond 15/52

I took a quick trip up to Acadia National Park during Columbus Day long weekend to catch some fall foliage. Jordan Pond is a small lake inside the park with a trail that runs around it, parts of it where you can see the Bubble Mountains in the background. A storm had passed through the area couple days before, so there was a large amount of leaf drop in the area.