Here is something new. I have started a new collaboration with my daughter. I will provide the images and she the words. Here is our first offering.
As I walk through this maze
I perceive its mystery
The main not touch, but smell
I smell the old mystery embedded in these walls
I see the imprint of its creator
I hear the wind whispering
And I know now that my five must lead me.
– Photo: Antonio
– Words: Mira Sophia
The Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum is located very near the University of Glasgow buildings, where I was in April for the UK National Astronomy Meeting. I found it to be a very good gallery with lots of nice works. For me the best piece in there is the original Christ of Saint John of the Cross, by Salvador Dali. A truly stunning piece of artwork.
An interior of the altar at Ely Catherdral in Cambridgeshire, England. Very diverse lighting conditions so I took three images 2EV apart and HDR’d them in Photomatix, punched up in Nik’s Color Efex and tidied up in Lightroom.
I enjoyed a sunny weekend in Puna and Hilo this weekend with my daughter. Mum was away having fun with her girlfriends so it was just me and Mira. We went down to Puna on a beautiful Saturday to collect some water samples, for Mira’s science project, from the hot ponds at Ahalanui Park and from the tide pools at Pohoiki. These are great places and we always enjoy them when we go, but for me the highlight is always driving through the countryside and especially the tree tunneled road.
The images here have been hdr processed (4 images, each 1-stop apart). I used LR/Enfuse for the top one and Photomatix for the one below. But the soft and glowing look I gave to the images comes from filters within the Nik Software Suite (Color Efex Pro). That’s some cool software!
Well I’ve been pretty quiet with the blog recently, and will be even quieter over the next couple of weeks as I will be back in England for some meetings. So, I’ll just post this picture which I took the last time I was in England. I was out walking with my father in the fields behind his house, taking pictures and showing him how to take HDR images – a new adventure for him (bought him Photomatix for his birthday – hope he’s making use of it!). We found this old abandoned caravan and trailer which were just begging to be photographed – so we did!
The image above is my HDR interpretation of the scene and I think it gets into the shadows (especially as you look inside the old caravan) and holds on to the highlights well (we’ll ignore the halo around the tree in the top left of the image, shall we?). Just for a bit of fun, I double processed the image through Photomatix to get this surreal look – make your own mind up which you prefer!
..oh my, oh my… look what I learned to do with Photomatix Pro!
(You can see the original at this post.)
P.S: just a disclaimer. It’s not that I like what I’ve done to my image, it just that I’ve always wondered how these effects are made – and now I know…..
So I said two posts ago that I would look at presenting a comparison between creating HDR images with LR2/Enfuse and Photomatix Pro. So here are a series of images, all taken on the same day when we visited Punalu’u Black Sand Beach back in January. All images come from 3 bracketted images taken 2 EV apart.
Images on the left are HDR composites using Enfuse, and those on the right are using Photomatix Pro.
I’ve posted in the past about using the LR2 plugin for Enfuse-ing images together to give that hdr look. Since then, I’ve been playing and experimenting with the trial version of Photomatix Pro (which appears to be the ‘industry favourite’) and I finally paid for it this weekend when I discovered that I could get a 60% educational discount! The image above is one of my first serious plays with it.
adventures in a lightroom 