I saw this Digital Photography School weekend challenge Saturday morning. I would have probably ignored it, as usual, but a quick look around the room revealed quite a number of subjects. I quickly set up the tripod, camera, opened shades and started shooting. My favorite were the star-shaped pillows, yellow of course, which I positioned so they were reaching hands to each other. With a closer crop, all you see are reaching hands. Kind of reminds of that famous Michaelangelo painting “Creation of Adam”.

I shot this very simple scene yesterday. We were visiting an old palace, beautifully kept, and very popular tourist attraction in the area. No wonder that on the palace inside court, there were several businesses, some offering rather expensive food options, but at the pleasant setting. This single orange roses in a glass drew my to the scene and I decided to take a photo right there.
What I like about this photograph is how the color of the rose matches its surrounding. It gives the table a very elegant, simple and inviting look.

Last week, I posted a magnificent overview of Mirow castle, one of the Eagle Nests in South-Central Poland. Today, again in HDR, a peek inside this castle. It is currently undergoing some renovation, after it was bought by a private party. You cannot enter inside, but you can take a look through the crate.

It is more glass on white then white on white, but still a simple, but pleasant shape image. I picked this vase in my mom’s place, and then spend far more time trying to find a “filling” for it. The wicker decorations provided interesting addition to the shape of the glass vase. There was hardly any color in the image, so I took it off altogether.

My parents place is full of stuff. Just general stuff, old objects, decorative items, flowers, you name it. It is a photographic paradise compared to my ascetic house. This old balance is their attic finding. My father renovated it, painted, and now it is perfectly positioned in the window for an easy photograph. The detail in the balance just asked for an HDR image, and then I wanted to check out my freshly downloaded CS5 trial. It worked just fine.

It was more then a months ago, when we went on weekend to photograph interior of Hacienda restaurant in Cedar Rapids. Walking around and photographing the rooms, we were drawn to all the objects and details in that place. One of them the cabinet with wine bottles. The metal gates were really interesting subject. We put some effort in lighting it just the right way. And finding the most interesting point of focus.

It seems to me that HDR was invented with indoor shoots in mind. Nowhere else it can improve photographs in two ways, not just one. It not only gives incredible detail in the interior, main part of the shoot, but also lets you pick out of the windows what is outside . In the image below, you can see through the glass door the deck, covered with blue tent and some sitting spots. At the same time, you can study all the objects on the fireplace. Nice.

I was thinking hard what to do special on the blog for the post 500. And it almost seems like yesterday, that there was a post 400 . Anyway, I figured another way to get the readers of this blog to interact, if they wish to See below.
This image is a bit special. I have not spend so much time on a blog image in a while. I love this image. But straight from the camera, it just was so flat. It was not what I saw on the scene. I remember the light on the organs, the detail in the ceiling, and spacious room. At the least the last thing was properly rendered in the photo, due to my favorite fisheye lens. For the detail I needed help of single-exposure HDR and processing in Photomatix. To reduce the red-color cast which is a weak-point of all HDRs, I moved just about every color-related slider in Lightroom. Then I went to help my husband in the garage for few minutes, and I liked what was on the screen when I came back . I am sure I didn’t like it before I went. Anyway, I decided to leave it that way.
But you may not agree with my vision of this image. If you would like to see how you can process it better/different, please download the dng file here, use your software of choice, and upload the finished image to the Flickr group pool I just created.

Photographing interiors with a fisheye lens is incredible easy and fun. You can get the whole large room into one frame. There is just one small problem, called lens distortion. With Nikon 10.5 mm fisheye, running the Photoshop CS4 lens distortion filter twice at maximum value was not enough to fix the curvy corners. Even if I payed attention how I placed the lens for the minimum distortion before pressing the shutter. Nope, it didn’t help much. Some, but not much.
Anyway, I thought I might look some other solution (and CS5 have not been announced yet when I was first working on the image ), so I did quick and dirty Google search for a better tool. PTLens showed up, and I downloaded the trial (I understand it will process only 10 images) and indeed, it seemed to make better job in just one pass. I also lost more of the original image in the corners, and decided against trying to clone it out. It only looks easy.

With all the time on my hands this moths, I am trying my creativity. Which means finding in the house objects worth photographing and spending some time with them in the “studio”. I got some mixed effects so far, and the subjects are not that numerous. However, the afternoon spend with four glasses of water were successful. I was trying high and low angle, from the side and from the front of the row. I tried Lensbaby. And ended up with this as my favorite shot of the day.