The steel cube is called Alamo, and you can find it in Astor Place in New York. I don’t think it is a widely photographed New York landmark, and the difficulty in finding an angle probably contributes . I actually found it only because I had too much time on my hands and wanted to discover just this part of town and on foot. I like the contrast between the simple shape of the cube and the complicated detail in the building behind it, as well the contrast of their colors.

The image was taken here.

I took this image with HDR in mind when I was walking around Greenwich Village in New York in December. I was exploring NYU campus, as my husband suggested few nice photographic opportunities. I found this shaded walkway in front of School of Law and stopped by to photograph. I love the detail the HDR provides for architectural photography. Just look at the texture of the ceiling.

The image was taken here.

Last time we were visiting New York, we took camera with us for two evening walks around Manhattan. We were taking series of images for HDR processing. It was our laziness, we did not use the tripod, so even with steady hands some of them did not turn out too well. Some I had problems getting around people moving all over the frame. But this one turned out just fine.

I have not processed any HDR image recently, and I figured the skills will rust . To find a good candidate, I had to go back to Iowa Wine Trail trip in November. I remember taking the image with HDR processing in mind in Winneshiek Wildberry Winery. They had very wooden interior, it was just asking for a fancy photograph. I decided on the radical treatment of colors on the image, as there seemed to be ubiquitous red and magenta casts, which I found rather distracting and couldn’t effectively get rid of them otherwise. This preset made it look far more interesting, in my opinion.

Tomasz suggested I look back at one of my very first HDR, image of the bridge over Looking Glass Creek somewhere on the way to see Looking Glass Falls in Pisgah National Forest, North Carolina. I took in during our Smoky Mountains vacation the fall before last, and posted it in November that year. He thought my HDR technique is far better to what it was then, so the image should turn differently. I took the challenge.
Basically, the difference between the previous one and this is not only that I have better understanding of sliders in Photomatix, but also that I need to go back to the tone mapped image, and boost contrast and things like that to make it more appealing.

Winter in Iowa. Temperature somewhere around 20F. Wind chill somewhere around 0F. You do not really want to do anything outside, but it is holiday and long weekend, and after day 4 you really cannot find anything to do inside anymore. At least snow came, finally, so we decided to move from the living room and try finding something to photograph close to home. What we ended up being successful was making miles, but there are few interesting keepers. This one happened when we drove through Iowa City, around the university campus, and the sun was getting ready to set, with already lower, orange light.

I cannot decide, if I am more in Christmas or New York mood, so I will be posting both for next few days . Just kidding. But there is another day time HDR from The City, this time in a surreal, almost an illustration-like type. I am just in the mood for a one like it.

I took yet another break of posting this year, as I took yet another break of work and boring life at home. This time, a tradition for us, Christmas pilgrimage to NYC. I am sorry, in a times of Political Correctness, we went for Holiday party.
I had a day to wonder around city and photograph, and I am planning of putting together a gallery of unusual images I took that morning. But for today, just to get me going, and organizing those photograph- an HDR of Grace Church. I took an HDR to compensate for the bright light of midday. I wanted the details of the sky and the church yard to be well distinguished. I wanted the vase to draw attention to the yard, and take it a bit off the spread of branches of the old tree.
I took this image on December 10th. Can you see the green of the grass?

The image was taken here.

We were taking a lot of images during last month’s Iowa Wine Trail, and I still did not work out all of them. But this one is special- we took an HDR image, with an intent of capturing on one image both people inside and outside the barn, tasting cider and having fun during the event. It proved to be more of the challenge than we anticipated, after all it was middle of really bright day. Although we took 9 (maximum) bracketed images, still some local adjusting was necessary for the effect. It looks great as 12×8 inch print.

We went to our favorite small airport to do some flying yesterday, but the weather was not exactly perfect for cross-country. Not risking getting stuck in middle-of-nowhere, Iowa for undetermined amount of time, we turned around and decided to spend the midday photographic planes rather then flying them. More fun for me, if anybody asks . We saw somewhere around the net the HDR gallery for planes, and wanted to give it a try. Again, we disagreed on the post-processing and artistic concept of the project . Tomasz liked more hard-core HDR, which are a bit too much for me. So I ended up processing resulting 12 Citabria and 19 Cherokee images in two ways, and then finishing them off with two different concepts in mind. But I have to admit, having a lot of time, a lot of point-of-views, made the project so much fun! And why not black-and-white or selective colors? Especially if the yellow plane is competing for attention with yellow grass (man, I really did not notice it until I had final processed images on the screen!). Check it out.