Water Trough

Many years ago when I stumbled on HDR I thought it was really cool, but didn't have the awesome tone mapping software. Then I found a tutorial of how to get that HDR look from a single RAW or even JPG file using Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop. I went looking through my photos for one to try and found this one. It's a water trough behind a building at our local Crystal Springs Rhododendron Gardens, a simply beautiful place not just to photograph but to walk around in, feed the ducks, geese, and squirrels.


I pulled it into Camera Raw, played with the settings I found in the tutorial, then tweaked them until I came up with this. While the colors are really blown out and everything, I really like how it turned out! It almost looks like something you found on an island in the Pacific in the 30's, 40's or 50's. Hopefully you like it too. :)


As always, clicking the photos will take you to my Flickr page where you can see the full sized versions.

Big Beach Panorama

I'm very proud of this photo. One thing I like about some multi-image-stitched-together photos is the photo looks nice but you can zoom in and see great detail. That's what I tried to accomplish with this. I zoomed in all the way then took 68 photos. I used Photoshop CS3 to stitch them together, and this was all done hand-held, no tripod. It required a lot of patience and framing of each photo, remembering where the last was AND the previous row was. But it was a lot of fun and I think turned out really well. There is one slight problem with doing these multi-shot photos: Look at the girl, then look to the left and you'll see her reflection again in the water. D'OH! I know I could have fixed that, but it made me laugh when I saw it and decided to keep it. :) This one you really need to click to see the larger size in Flickr and even look at the original for the full-sized version, I couldn't upload a larger version without part of it being cut off. I'd really like to get one of those Gigapan things and do more of these.

Sunflower

Last summer we went to the Bethany Nursery for a kids scavenger hunt. The kids had a great time and I took some photos. Marci told me to take a picture of this sunflower. The original was ok, but then I played around with it in Lightroom. I REALLY like how this one turned out! It looks extra cool viewed on black!

Driftwood

My Mom's sister owns a little condo at Neskowin in Oregon. We go there every year, it's a wonderful beach that doesn't have a ton of people. The kids just love it! Last year they had quite the storm that brought in this giant piece of driftwood - more like a drift-Tree! It was very cool. I thought this photo turned out really well, I like how I composed it and everything. :) No post processing done. This is from August 2009.

2009 Holiday Parade

Every year in Portland we have a Holiday Parade right after Thanksgiving. One year it rain big time and was cold, another it didn't rain but was freezing cold and cloudy. This year it was cold but really sunny too, when you were in the sun it was pretty nice. We turned a corner and I saw this view with the sky looking really nice and blue. I was supposed to be playing, but we had enough other trumpets playing so I could quickly take this pic. I think I over processed it, added back in too much color. Oops! Oh well, at least I'm still keeping up with my new photo post each day! :)

Zoo Lights

The Oregon Zoo does a fantastic job every Christmas season setting up tons of lights around the Zoo. It's really beautiful. These fish were on something spinning around. Since it was really dark I knew if I just stood there they would come out blurry, so I moved with them as I took the photo. Still came out a little blurry, but I was pretty happy with the result. :)

Morning Fog

I took this a few weeks ago when it was really foggy. It was taken through our upstairs window, which is really dirty, so it's not my lens. ;) I put the camera in B&W mode and cropped it in Lightroom. Photo #2, I'm on a roll! haha