Hey all, in honor of it being Friday I thought I would share some recent stuff. As always you can find larger versions of these by clicking, and even larger sizes are available on my flickr stream linked in my sig. Feel free to use any of my images for a desktop.
Hey Two Sheds, what happened to the Creative mash-up idea?
Anyways, way back in the day we had an urban theme on O.O.P.S. and I finally managed to bring a camera on a business trip to Denver this past week.
1. North Denver Night Steam (dig on the gases coming out of the stacks acting as a lens here)
2. Rosita's On Federal
3. Denver's Skyline: More Impressive Than You Might Think
Changing gears, on a recent Friday I got half the day off and drove up Storm King Mountain Road to a great overlook of the Front Range cities of NE Colorado. I have always been fascinated by atmospheric optical effects and thoroughly and got to enjoy a strange sunset phenomena I see once in awhile. The rays such as these here are actually not in the west but are in the east as the sun goes down. And thanks to the hive mind of flickr I now know that these sort of rays are properly called
anti-crepuscular rays. Who says the internet makes you stupid?
4. A Parallel Sunset in the East
![Image](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2234/2238441904_c3f0057865.jpg)
On a previous Friday night I went out in severe wind and below freezing temps and went for a fools errand of trying some long-time star trail exposures. Remarkably, I got away with it and got a few keepers as a reward for freezing my butt off. I used a handheld strobe manually fired multiple times on full power to light up the foreground a bit.
5. Trails in the Laramie Foothills
Some image notes:
1. Is not hdr and looked very close to this straight out of RAW. I've only added a slight contrast curve adjustment. I am danged impressed with the D300's unprocessed files, even from long-time exposures at night. They are so clean that it's saving me lots of time in post. I don't think I even ran any noise reduction on this besides the in-camera stuff on low.
2. This one is not an HDR, but is DRI. Meaning that I manually blended various exposures together rather than use HDR/tone-mapping. At times it can yield a much more realistic looking result than an HDR and I thought the technique would work well here.
3. This is an HDR comprised of 7 exposures, and then the resultant HDR image was blended down into a non-HDR middle exposure at around 40%. I often find with HDR it's best to take your HDR tone-mapped result and then blend that into a non-HDR image to retain better details and realism. I then added a full moon shot from a previous outing, because I can.
4. This is a blend of HDR and DRI techniques. I didn't add any of the rays, but certainly chose a processing method to make sure they showed up well in the final result here.
5. Not much to this one in post, basically curves and a bit of noise reduction.