Park at Night

It Snowed A LOT this Year!

Here's a picture out my front window.  I should have put a black shirt on, instead of my white one, before taking this to cut back on the reflections.

1/320 sec, f/5.6, ISO ~100, hand-held, polarized filter, taken Feb 26, 2011.  This is a composite of five photos stitched together with Hugin.

Snow

1/320sec, f/5.6, ISO: 800, 18mm

1/800 sec, f/5.6, ISO: 800, 18mm

More Fall Colours

1/50 sec, f/4.6, ISO 400, 18mm, hand-held

1/20 sec, f/5.7, ISO 400, 55mm, hand-held

1/25 sec, f/5.7, ISO 400, 55mm, hand-held

Fall Colours

It's been a while.

1/25 sec, f/5.7, ISO 400, 20mm, hand-held

1/800 sec, f/5.7, ISO 400, 55mm, hand-held

1/30 sec, f/5.7, ISO 400, 35mm, hand-held

Old Houses Downtown

1/400 sec, f/9.1, ISO:200, 43mm (35mm eqv. 69mm), hand-held

Snowy Forest

1/200s, f/9.1, ISO 200, 18mm (29mm eqv.), polarizing filter

1/100s, f/9.1, ISO 200, 55mm (88mm eqv.), polarizing filter

1/100s, f/8, ISO 200, 18mm (29mm eqv.), polarizing filter

Geese and Cattails

Corn

This almost turned out to be the most expensive photo I've ever taken. On the way into this field I had to walk through some tall weeds and got burdocks stuck all over my clothes. When I picked them off they would stick to my hand so I shook my hand to get rid of them. I didn't even notice that my wedding ring flew off with them into the corn field until my friend Alain picked it up and handed it back to me.

Thanks Alain!

Barn in Full Moon

Barn at Night

More Fall

Fall Trees

Fall has Fallen

Fall is Here

(Click to Enlarge)

Photo Contest

My city is holding an amateur photography contest. I tried shooting the city from a hill at sunrise, but the hill was in the wrong spot. I couldn't really get the sunrise and the city in the same frame. Should have stayed in bed. Then I tried going downtown to shoot some of the landmarks. I think I'll submit the last one, it has two landmarks in one and good representation of the French and English, something that the city is known for.

Kings Landing

Visited Kings Landing Historical Settlement a while ago. It's like a living museum in the form of a town with about 70 buildings. My favorite was the fully functional, water powered saw mill.

Sunset

HDR Tests

I've been playing with some HDR (High Dynamic Range) techniques. Not really sure how I feel about the outcome, I think they look fake, but I think I'd rather look at them then the originals. There's a battle between "trying to represent reality accurately" and "making something that looks nice". Don't get me wrong, reality looks nice when I'm looking at it, but it's not the same through the camera (no matter how sophisticated/expensive).

My other HDR attempts
The link above will show other post with at least one HDR image, not every image is HDR.

Dynamic Range in photography refers to the ratio between the lightest and darkest amounts of light the camera can see at one time in a scene. It's nowhere close the dynamic range of the human eye. A camera has a hard time seeing details in clouds on a bright day and the shadows under a tree at the same time. One way to get around that problem is to take multiple photos at different exposures and then blend them together on a computer afterward. That's what I did here, using GIMP. But the problem with that is all it really does is darken the light areas and brighten the dark ones so the details can be seen. It looks un-natural because there could be areas in the sky that are darker then areas in shadow, that really shouldn't be.

I've also adjusted the colour saturation and contrast too.

Anyway, what do you think? Where do you lean, would you rather photograph/look at an accurate representation of reality or something that looks nice?


I thought a farmer's field was a strange place for this.

Fundy (Part 3)

One more low and high tide shot.


There was a nice cool breeze most of the time.

Most of the coast line is pretty rough.