3:00PM came, and I’m a little antsy from staying inside and cleaning. I decide that I should go out while the sun is up and test the new fisheye lens again. I brought a few of my other lenses as well, but didn’t end up using them.
I get out of my apartment and have no clue where to go. The cemetery was interesting with my old camera near sun-down, and I head there.
An HDR is always a requirement.
Ooh where does that road lead to that goes down the hill? Over the bridge and to Concord street. I took a few pictures, but subject wise aren’t all that interesting. I’m a far ways away now, since I’ve been going down hill all this time. Time to make my way back.
I follow Concord back to a State street and take a few more pictures.
There is this big mural on State and Cesar that I haven’t taken a picture of yet, so I snap a few.
And the brick house on the corner, all stately and strong watching over me progress up the hill.
I hope you found my walk today most interesting and from a new perspective. A lot more long excursions are in my future as I train for some planned hiking and biking trips occurring this summer.
This reindeer scene was was an interesting setup with the lighted fence and tree around them. I made this into a high dynamic range image, since I couldn’t get the fence, tree, and grass exposed as I wanted without having the reindeer being blown out. This was taken with 9 differently exposed images and then merged together.
The snowman is chill’n out hang’n on the tree.
I helped the parents hang the lights on two of the large pine trees in the yard after Thanksgiving. It is a little early for Santa to be present with presents, but hey if we don’t set him out now then photos can’t be taken of him. I’m sure the whole light setup would look empty also.
People have already put up a bunch of Christmas lights around me. Thanksgiving must signal that it is time. I captured this image of a small house down the street from me sporting a basic, but well done light setup:
Edit: This image was made from 9 separately exposed images and processed in Photomatix to make an HDR. The house number and some light flare were removed.
I spent a bunch of time at the U of M Aquatics Center today watching my cousin dive in the State preliminaries. She did a great job. It is amazing how they can get their bodies to flip and twist like they do.
The diving well:
Took a bunch of flower shots over the weekend, and thought some of them needed a little bit of something to match what I was seeing out there. I decided to mess around in Photomatix a bit and ended up with the below. With the shallow depth of field the Photomatix logo really sticks out! Because of the resizing the image has become softer, so click on the image for a larger view; I’m considering sharpening the smaller images in the future.
Blue Flower
White Cone Flowers
Went out for a walk to the Minnesota State Capitol during lunch. It was nice since there were actually clouds in the sky today. I really should be out there right now as the sun is going down! I ended up masking out the fuchsia colored flowers in Gimp to keep them as originally taken, since they were already blurred they looked way out of wack after processing in Photomatix.
MN State Capitol, by Adam Bavier
After eating lunch by the stream in Mears Park, I captured this image. I post processed it in Photomatix. I’m trying to decide if I’d like to purchase this program, so for now we will all live with the Photomatix watermarks. I hand held the three images it took to make this, so there were artifacts in the full-size image, but they all sort of disappeared when I re-sized it down. I think these will mostly go away if I use a tripod. Click the image for a larger view.
Mears Park in Saint Paul, MN
Flower in Mears Park, Saint Paul MN
Was taking pictures in the park and looked up, and I thought this would be a nice picture of the bank and the clouds:
Bank building.
I bike past these big toys everyday and think they would be great fun to take for a spin.
- Big toys that would be cool to drive.
