Thursday, November 11, 2010

Finally, a Great Sunset

Luck was on my side last night. During the day, I had driven into Boston with two girls from work for a corporate event. During the drive home, I noticed the clouds that had been hanging over Massachusetts for days were finally making their way off the coast from west to east. I could barely make out some blue sky on the horizon, and the sun was hanging below the cloud line just enough to blind me. The view was nice, but I didn't really anticipate anything special. But as I got out of my coworker's car and looked up, I noticed the clouds were starting to dip down and take on a pink hue. I couldn't see much of the sky from where I stood, so I quickly got into my car and started heading home. The timing couldn't have been better. The pictures in this post are what I saw. Though I took many of them in threes to get the HDR effect, it really wasn't necessary.

Here are three of HDR photos from last night:



And here are several unadulterated photos:







Finally, I can rest easy knowing I caught at least one amazing sunset this fall!

Saturday, November 6, 2010

Juneau how to tilt-shift?

It's been a while. I haven't stopped taking photos...there is a huge backlog of them, most of them hastily posted to Facebook and/or my overflow website. I've also been managing to post photos to the Boston.com RAW website, which has photo challenges and monthly contests. This leaves me with little time to play with my own photos for the benefit of this blog.

As I was looking through some old Alaska pictures, taken with the Fujifilm, I realized there were a couple from Juneau that may make good tilt-shift images. Turns out I was right:



I took these while we were riding up the tram to the top of a hill. Hence the bit of reflection in them. Even so, they turned out pretty nicely. I especially like the first one. The second I did two versions of; one to showcase the buildings of the city, and the other to showcase the mountains.

Considering it's autumn, and I have yet to post any fall-like photos, here are a couple I manipulated using Aperture. I like how the bright colors stand out against the muted background. There are plenty more autumn photos in my overflow album.


I know this is a bit of a lame post, so I'll try and play with some more recent photos and post them here. I'm looking forward to capturing some great sunsets in the coming weeks and months; this time of year tends to yield sunsets with those nice deep purples and oranges. Let's just hope the nice sunsets fall on weekends, since after we turn back our clocks tonight, I'll be driving home from work in the dark!