Tag Archives: Landscapes

Cruise 2013 – Galveston before we left

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We went on a cruise a couple weeks ago.  Prior to departing, you sit on the boat and wait. While waiting, I did get a couple of interesting shots.  Then, when we did sail away, I was able to get a couple more really good ones.

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This is another HDR shot.  I shot it from the deck of the ship and did my best to get a straight shot along 25th St.  The deck I was on ended a little short of where I really wanted to be, but this worked pretty well.  You can see from the harbor all the way to the Pleasure Pier.

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As we were sailing away, I was able to get this HDR image of The Elissa.

Galveston Historic Houses

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Galveston has a huge number of large historic houses.  I have wanted to get HDR images of many of them to add to my Galveston images.  A few months ago, I got some of the Bishop’s Palace and a house across from it on Broadway, but didn’t have time to get more of other places.  I started today with the ones that the Galveston Historic Foundation lists on their web site.

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This was the Samuel May Williams house.

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This was the Michael B. Menard House.  Note the bird on the porch.  Those looked like herons. They were walking around the front lawn.  I don’t know if they were in some way domesticated, but they didn’t seem very concerned with me taking pictures.

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This was Ashton Villa.

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This was Moody Mansion.

Landscape Contest

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I am not sure where I found out about ViewBug, but it is a site that has photo contests.  You can join for free, but that limits you to 10 uploads per week.  Some of the contests are free to enter.  Others cost.  You can also have a paid membership.  With that, you can upload as many photos as you want, and you do not have to pay for any of the contests.

I was looking at their contests, and one was a free contest for landscapes.  It was sponsored by a weekly photography news web site. So, I entered two of my HDR photos. The idea is that anyone on the site can view the pictures and vote on them, and after the submission deadline, judges will decide the winner.

This is kind of like American Idol.  I could have gone on Facebook and told everyone to go to the site and vote for my picture, but then it is no longer about photographic quality, it is about how many people you can get to vote for you.

The deadline for the contest was June 1.  I was just notified that this picture was “ranked in the top 20 most voted percentile.”  I am not exactly sure what that means.  There were 8900 pictures entered in the contest.  If mine received enough votes to be in the top 20%, then it was one of the 1800 best.  So, it is kind of hard to get all that worked up, but all in all, I still think that was pretty good.

Galveston – The Elissa

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I have been doing quite a bit of HDR imagery using Galveston locations.  We were down there the weekend of the 8th.  I didn’t really feel in the mood on Saturday morning but then remembered we joined the Galveston Historical Society. That meant we could get into The Elissa for free.  So, I decided to go down to the harbor and shoot a little and go on The Elissa and shoot.

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In looking at one of the magazines, I saw a picture take roughly in the same place as this.  Only, it was a night photograph, and all the winds glowed brightly.  It was an effective picture, and I would like to try a similar thing at some point, but this was just take from behind Willie G’s looking back at it.

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While we were in the harbor, this fishing boat came in.  It made an interesting subject for an HDR image. Then I noticed that a woman on the boat was quite busy dealing with the catch and got a nice picture of her.

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We then went over to The Elissa and walked around the ship.

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Hico

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I had a free afternoon, and I had been told that there were lots of really interesting places in Hico.  Hico is a small town on Hwy 6.  It is apparently the home of Billy the Kid because there is a statue of him in the middle of town, and apparently a museum as well.  I drove around the town and saw lots of interesting locations.

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There were alleys behind buildings that had back doors like this.  It was really cool.

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I can imagine these as great places for a bridal shoot.

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This shell of an old building had tons of character.

HDR Landscapes – Hwy 36

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The TMCA Spring Workshop was in Abilene.  So, we took Hwy 36 up through Hamilton.  Along the way, we stopped a couple places and got some nice images.

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I am getting a little more comfortable with doing these HDR images, but I would really like a better understanding of the various adjustments in Photomatix. These had very mild HDR effects applied to them.

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Galveston HDR Images

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We went to GalI decided it might be good to take a series of HDR image around Galveston.  So, over the weekend, I went to a variety of places.

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For some of them, I used a very light HDR application, but for other, much more intense.

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This made me really start to consider these kinds of images in a different way.  I am wondering if there would be any commercial value to these either as individual images or as a book.

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HDR Images

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High Dynamic Range photography is a process that combines elements from several images and produces a single picture that has increased detail in both the shadows and highlights.  I was impressed by a picture that someone else took, and asked him about it.  He told me how he did it, and I have been investigating the process.

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In some cases, the resulting picture is not too different from a regular one, it just has more detail.  The picture above was generated from a picture I took of Galveston Bay a couple weeks ago. It looks pretty much like a normal picture, only a little more detail and more vibrant.

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By modifying some of the parameters of the photograph, the resulting image has a somewhat more abstract or artistic characteristic. This picture has some characteristics that make it look more like a painting.

Belton Junk Yard

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There is a junk yard in Belton that specializes in Classic Cars.  The Temple Photography Meetup Group held a group shoot there last Saturday.

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To me, these represent the certainty of decay.  All of these were once bright, shiny, and new.  Now they are in various stages of decay.

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There were far too many cars there that brought back memories – cars I owned, cars owned by someone I knew, cars I wanted.

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