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Of the 208 photos I posted on my photoblog in 2008, here are some of my favorites:

Nymph Lake

Morning Sunlight at Macky Auditorium

Let’s Go Spend Some Money Yay!

Ring of Fire

Another Red Train Engine

Hungry for Waffles?

Up the Steps

Alone in the Water

Follow the Trail

Dueling Signs

Empty Seats

Portrait of a Prakeet

Cold Water

After some questions asking how I process my hdr photos, particularly the bus photos, I decided to put together this small tutorial.

The software used to complete this tutorial is Photomatix 3.0 and Photoshop CS.

Step 1: Shooting the photos

When shooting photos for an hdr process I set my camera (Canon 30D) to the fastest frame rate possible (5 FPS) and set the Auto Exposure Bracketing to the maximum amount of stops (2). I find that the fast frame rate will allow me to shoot handheld and then Photomatix can align the photos. I like using a wide angle lens and I my favorite lens for HDR is my Sigma 10-20mm.

I expose the photos so the darkest of the shots has the scene outside of the bus exposed correctly, since it’s darker inside the bus. I suppose I could shoot more exposures, but since I didn’t have a tripod, I just shot 3.

Here’s the 3 photos I ended up with:

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The WebUrbanist recently named me an “Inspiring HDR Photographer” in their article, 7 Inspiring Infrared and HDR Photographers. I’m not sure how to respond to that, except thank you and I’m happy to hear someone is inspired by my work.

This week I reached 1000 photos on my photoblog.  I’m not sure that when I started it in the spring of 2005 that I would have stayed with it, but photography really turned into a new creative outlet for me.  Hopefully I can stay inspired to do another thousand.

Yesterday I got to take part in a lighting workshop from photographer Dave Black. We spent the day learning about off camera strobes for portraits and light painting.  Dave is a phenomenal photographer and a great instructor.  

If you don’t know what light painting is, you set your camera up on a tripod in the dark and set it for a long exposure and then you reveal parts of the scene with a variety of flash lights.

But sometimes after spending the day with a photographer of his caliber, I am both inspired to go try and learn new things with photography and to just pack all the gear away.

Right now I’m leaning more towards the inspired side.

On a related note, I noticed I don’t have a lot of dark areas in the house where I can try this light painting technique I learned yesterday. Too many windows and too many outside lights.