Vancouver's iconic Burrard Street Bridge caught in the low light of a mid-winter sunrise. Made all the more fantastic thanks to High Dynamic Range post processing and my ever-fun Diana lens.
The fun you can have as a photographer, thanks to digital photography, never ceases to amaze me. Recently, while playing around with a series of photos of London England, I found a rather cool High Dynamic Range (HDR) treatment that punches up any warm tones and shuffles off everything else into the realm of black and white.
Here's a mid winter sunset over Kitsilano Vancouver looking quite vintage.
The mid section of Shanon Falls in British Columbia Canada. Located roughly an hour or so north of Vancouver Shanon Falls is perfect for slow exposure shots of roaring water. This photo was taken using a 40 year old twin reflex Yashicamat 120mm mid-format camera using Fuji Velivia film. The positive was then scanned at 1200 dpi (25 Megapixels) and post-processed in Nikon's Capture NX/2.
Doug and Diane in Werl West Germany - June 1963. What I find totally cute about this photo, apart from my always in-style tartan Lederhosen, is my beseeching pose and my sister's grin. Hey! So do I get an apple too or what?
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. Albert Camus
And a whole bunch of seagulls. :)
Vancouver during winter has two states - It's raining, warm and calm or it's sunny, cold and blustery. Both pretty much rock once you embrace both states 'o being.
Here's Jericho Beach during a sunny, cold and blustery day. I really like this shot in that it (a) I got a freebee circular flair thanks to the spray reflecting off the setting sun (b) it nicely shows the shallow to deep water divide that separates English Bay and the Straight of Georgia and (c) the color of the leaf free deciduous trees contrasted against the pines (left side of the shot) is pretty much winter for us.
Nothing but soft pastelles in this dreamy midwinter sunset looking out over Kitsilano - Vancouver's south end urban-burb.
The start of every new year is more often than not the height of winter for Vancouver. After months of wind storms the trees are nearly free of last seasons leaves, the shadows, even at 'high' noon are long and wispy, the nights are cool (sub-zero) and the days are short with the sun rising near 8 am and setting around 4 pm. As such, a vew like this from English Bay of the famous Sylvia Hotel shot through the winter bare trees along Beach Avenue is of a magic and fleeting moment.
I'm onto my third major revision of Photomatix which is the software I've used since nearly day one to generate HDR images. This version I'd consider the most evolutionary yet and adds much needed noise reduction as well as the ability to fix 'HDR ghosts'. Ghosts in the HDR world occur when part of scene moves while you are taking a sequence of shots that will be merged, via programs such as Photomatix, into a single HDR composite image.
Ever one to push things into the insane I took a sequence of slow natural light exposures with my spiffy new Diana lens of my cat Sirrus and then used the anti-ghosting tool in Photomatix 4 to pick just Sirrus in just one of the 9 shots in the sequence to be included in the final composite. It worked out rather well expect for the missing top of her head. Sorry about that sweetheart. :)
Here in Vancouver the first sunset of 2011 proved to be one that was a few levels past totally awesome. Two or three times each year the conditions are just perfect enough to make the sky literally explode with fire. Jan 01 2011 was such a sunset. The killer band of purple right in the middle was an unexpected and here-to-for not seen bonus.
God does indeed paint with light. :)
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