Archive for the ‘Sunset’ Category
Oh man, it’s been crazy. I think Tucker, Giacomo and myself have all been outrageously swamped with work and other obligations as school semesters and seasons have come to a close and it’s gotten to the point where new material is hard to come by shy of reaching into the past to rework old shots. I just completed a 2,270 mile journey from L.A. back to Atlanta and let me say I will not be doing that again anytime soon. The three of us will all be in town at the same time for the better part of two months so there is guaranteed to be some amazingly fun stuff to go around in the next few days and weeks. To get things rolling again I have a shot from the road trip, around the California/Arizona state line at a rest stop on the side of the highway. I love this picture but even still I don’t think I’ve done the scene justice. You just kind of had to be there I guess.
Highway rest stops never felt so gorgeous… Needles, CA
Posted in 24-105mm f/4L IS, 7D, Andrew, Handheld HDR, Landscape, Nature, Sunset | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
I have no real excuse for my lack of posts lately other than the fact that I have no new material… until now! I just got back from having Thanksgiving up in Maine, and I was able to take a little time to go exploring and get some HDRs. This was hard for a few reasons, beyond the fact that Thanksgiving is family time and I have a really cute new cousin. The biggest issue is that during the winter, the sun sets unnaturally early in the North, beginning around 3:30 and totally pitch black by 4:30. Waking up early is, of course, not an option, so I have about 3 hours of daylight to play with each day! I made good use of it on our last day, when some awesome clouds rolled in just as the sun began to set. After eating lunch, I went out to a favorite summertime-restaurant (closed for the winter) to use their deck to get some HDRs of the great clouds and colors. The sun also sets in an entirely different place in the winter, so my go-to spots to watch it during the summer are useless. That caused me to have to get creative, but that’s never a bad thing. The objects in the foreground here are floats from people’s docks; the ocean freezes around the edges during the winter, and many bays and coves (like ours) freeze over entirely, and if you were to leave your dock and float in the water it would simply break off because of the strain from the ice. All dock owners have their floats taken up on land as the seasons change, and some were stored on the shore by the Coveside restaurant. The boardwalk that stretches from the shore out across the water to the island doesn’t have a float, so the island remains accessible (albeit private…) during the winter.
There were many other floats around me but I wanted the focus to be as much on that great sky as on the foreground!
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 5D Mark II, Landscape, Maine, Nature, Outdoor, Sun in frame, Sunset, Tucker, Tucker's Favorites | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
I feel like there has been a severe lack of posts recently. The problem is that this is busy season for schoolwork and outside projects and as everyone winds their way towards a well deserved Thanksgiving break, any extra chunk of spare time you find often ends up turning into a nap. Nothing wrong with that of course, unless you’re supposed to be contributing to a photo blog on a regular basis. Regardless, on an afternoon not too long ago I decided that in my two hours before my last class before break I would steal up onto the roof of a building and see what I could see from there. It rained just a few days ago so I knew the sky would be uncharacteristically clear-ish… fortunately, the stars aligned and there were also some interesting clouds hanging in the background. This never happens. I was more than happy to record a copy for myself. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Downtown from the direction of campus, about 150 feet up: Los Angeles CA
Posted in 24-105mm f/4L IS, 7D, Andrew, Andrew's Favorites, Architecture, Handheld HDR, Landscape, Los Angeles, Outdoor, Sunset | 1 Comment »
This is quite possibly my favorite HDR I have processed, for a lot of reasons: it was one of the best sunsets I’ve witnessed on an incredibly still night; it is really cliche and I’m all about cliche; and the colors are just all there. The sky really looked like that, just a gradient of everything… it was also pouring rain, which doesn’t come through in the picture at all (except for the drops of water that were on my lens, requiring lots of love with photoshop to remove them…) I guess this shot just really encapsulates a lot of what Maine is to me, great sunsets, calm, open expanses of ocean, far-off islands, docks, lobster boats, buoys…. I’ve been sitting on it for a while and decided to reprocess it and was so pleased I just had to post it. It’s also available in the new desktops section for use as a wallpaper (as are a few new ones that I’ve added recently… check it out!) Anyway, here’s your daily dose of Maine sunset cliché.
The wooden structure in the foreground is a boat launching ramp, where you back your trailer up and unload your boat into the bay. At high tide, of course!
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 5D Mark II, Landscape, Maine, Nature, Sun in frame, Sunset, Tucker, Tucker's Favorites | 2 Comments »
In the spirit of tweaking things on the site, I decided to revamp the HDR overview that I’d written a while back. It’s mostly the same, giving readers who don’t know much about the process an idea of the theory behind what we are doing and why it works so well. The old image I had used for that was OK, but not great, and I decided to root through my photo library to find a bracket that really showed what HDR is for. It’s still not perfect, but way better than it was. Hopefully I will have the time to really lay out a tutorial on how to do HDR from start to finish, but that is a very time-consuming task. The image I used in the overview might look familiar as I posted one from that same night a few weeks ago. This beautiful sunset was in Rockland, Maine, and the dramatic clouds and train tracks complete the shot. This is one of those “the photo wouldn’t be remarkable at all if not for the sunset and the HDR process” images, but that doesn’t bother me as much any more because part of what makes HDR so great is that it can do just that, turn something that would otherwise not have been worth photographing into something worth looking at.
This was a great little spot and I wish I'd had more time to properly explore it with a tripod, instead of going hand-held. Still, you can always count on Maine for great sunsets.
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 5D Mark II, Handheld HDR, Landscape, Maine, Outdoor, Sunset, Tucker | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
So I’ve finally had time to sit down and begin work on the site (beyond the occasional blog post, of course) and have gotten a very early version of the “Desktops” page online. The purpose of this page is really simple: to provide some of our favorite images in the most popular desktop sizes, ready for you to download and use as wallpapers. Right now there are only 3 images up, one of them being the image in this post 
It takes a seriously long amount of time to make the crops of each image, mostly because the aspect ratios change from 16:10 to 16:9 and the worst is the 4:3, non-widescreen because it usually involves chopping off a significant portion of the image and ruining the composition. But, those of you with resolutions of 1280×1024 or 1024×768 will be able to use them, and that’s what counts. It takes me a long time to decide what to get rid of in the crops, and then I have to upload them and create all of the different links… Expect more images to show up there over time; I will probably put a note in my future blog posts when there are new ones to be had. As always, if you want the full-resolution image, just click on it on the main blog. I have no idea how much time or energy Giacomo or Andrew has for this, so it may just be my imagery for a while, but you never know.
Here’s yet another one of Maine, a place that has given me a wealth of material to work with in just the two short visits I’ve taken there recently. This is from the familiar location of my dock, but at a different time and in a different direction. The moon is rising on the left, but the sun has just barely set, so there’s still a lot of ambient light giving definition to the trees and clouds. I really like this one, and it is the second to last image from Maine that I had left to post. The last is my favorite! Anyway, here’s the moonrise, and be sure to check it out in desktop form as well.
Usually it is hard to capture the moon, as lack of light results in long exposures which show the moon's movement, but luckily there was enough light for fast exposures.
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 5D Mark II, Landscape, Maine, Nature, Night, Outdoor, Sunset, Tucker | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
So I was digging through old material since I don’t have a ton of new stuff and I came across a handheld bracket I did near the end of May. This is a footpath at a turnout about a mile further up the road from the main overlook that offers a view of Downtown from above the Hollywood Bowl. Later on this summer when my family came to visit me for a few days, we went up on this footpath again with them and were seconds away from being locked in. It would have been an interesting evening up there by ourselves… At any rate, this is a cool little spot that’s looking down on the foothills of Mulholland Drive’s twisted real estate towards Burbank to the north. I do plan on heading up here again for some shots of the city when the weather is clear… but that never happens.
Wouldn't have been a very comfy place to spend the night 
Los Angeles, CA
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 7D, Andrew, Landscape, Los Angeles, Nature, Outdoor, Sunset | 1 Comment »
Clouds, clouds, and more clouds! It has been brought to my attention that there are, in fact, other types of clouds in the world besides the cumulus variety, but I think it is clear from my photographs that it I prefer the fluffy, billowyness and resulting drama and contrast that cumulus clouds bring to HDR. While looking for an entirely different photograph in my library, I stumbled across a few RAW images I had taken of the Williams College campus sometime during second semester of my sophomore year. My good friend Sam and I decided to take a walk on that interesting night, and I brought my camera with me and grabbed a few pretty cool shots of the oncoming clouds scudding over Greylock Quad. Of course, these were not meant to be HDR’d; in fact, these were really not meant for much at all… but they were taken in RAW, and had just enough dynamic range in the single image for me to pull a +2 and -2 version out of the RAW converter and throw the 3 into Photomatix. The original shot was taken at ISO 800, as it was rather dark outside, so the resulting HDR was quite noisy, but nothing a little Topaz DeNoise couldn’t handle. It was also shot at f/2.8, which is really not ideal due to the heavy vignetting and loss of sharpness, but again, I was hand-holding in low light. At any rate, the final shot is kinda cool, and one of the few HDRs I have of that gorgeous campus. There were a few I took as actual brackets during my freshman year, but I don’t like any of them so they will not see the light of day on this site. Perhaps when I finish my year off, I will have the chance to really explore that campus and the surrounding landscape with my tripod and do some proper HDR!
My dorm was on the bottom right, a few buildings back. I love the patterns of the receding buildings, as well as of the lights in the rooms.
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 5D Mark II, Handheld HDR, Landscape, Massachusetts, Outdoor, Single-Shot, Sunset, Tucker | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
On the same night that I took this shot of the lighthouse on Pemaquid Point, I wandered down even further, out onto the point itself, and the small red house caught my eye. It wasn’t the greatest sunset in the world, but it made for a tranquil scene. One of the many things I love about Maine, and I’ll say it again, is that scenes like this are ubiquitous up and down the coast; if I were living in Maine full time you would probably not see me post shots like this! But as a city-boy it is places like this that get stuck in my head. I reprocessed this a few times trying to get the white balance right; straight out of the camera the rocks were really, really blue, but I may have overcompensated a bit in this edit? I like it nonetheless.
I have been working furiously on my room these past few weeks, and as of today I am putting the finishing touches on it, including a second coat of the dark red paint and window hardware, a ceiling fan, etc. Possibly as soon as tomorrow I will (finally) have a place to properly sit down and do some real work in the internet world. I plan to do a few things:
Short-term:
-process a bunch of HDRs that I have sitting around and post them; recently I have been posting things that I processed months ago and haven’t been working on new stuff as much as I should
-experiment more with the macro-HDR side of things (more elephants for sam! and I want to do things with water/droplets,etc)
-create a “Desktop Background” page that will link from the sidebar so that you can download your favorite images from the site in a variety of screen sizes
-finally finish off the long-time coming in-depth HDR tutorial, which has been put on the back burner since the inception of the site.
Long-term:
-completely re-theme/re-design the site. This is proving to be quite a challenge, and will require lots of time messing with back end code and things like that. I want to eventually have a landing page, with a rotating set of images in the center that we will update frequently with our favorite shots. Upgrading to a WordPress 3 compatible theme will allow us to have a menubar across the top, and have much better organization for what is currently on the sidebar. I want to also have a place at the bottom of the main landing page where three “random posts” from the past will come up every time you go to it, so that newcomers who may only look at the contents of the first page or so won’t miss out on what we’ve been done for the past few months. The site is quite functional as it is; I just want to make it a bit flashier, and more accessible. The blog will, of course, remain the main attraction of the site.
-depending on viewership trends I may consider adding a system to order prints. I have had several requests in person, and recently got a great photo printer that can do up to 13×19, but who knows. It really depends on how popular the site becomes over time, and if we can keep adding content like we have been able to do. Currently we are getting about 70 views a day and that has been rising drastically; it was only 50 a day a week ago! Yes, these numbers are literally nothing in the big wide world of the web, but to a few college kids with a website, it’s kinda cool to think that a few people around the world come here often to see what’s new.
The bottom line is, don’t be surprised if you see some changes in the coming weeks! Ok, enough of my rambling. Here is the photo!
The red house stands out at sunset on the rocky Maine coastline.
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 5D Mark II, Landscape, Maine, Nature, Night, Outdoor, Sunset, Tucker | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
This is another handheld from a few weeks ago when Giacomo and I wandered around downtown ended up in Centennial Olympic Park, which is essentially in the heart of Atlanta. I liked the way the Westin Hotel, one of the iconic buildings in the Atlanta skyline, is reflected in the pool of water. People have commented on this shot, telling me that it looks more surreal and processed than normal; perhaps it is because of the different vantage point on the skyline, or the reflection in the water, but I think most likely what people are reacting to is how blue it came out. This is mostly because of the time of day that we were there, right after sunset when there is no longer the warm sunlight , and that particular day was relatively cloud-free, so the remaining light was quite cool, and the blue of the water, the glass on the Westin building, and the sky all come together to be quite strong in the image. I considered reprocessing it to be more warm but honestly, I like the occasional image that screams, “ok, that is clearly not straight photography.”
I love the transition from blue to yellow on the glass on the Westin building, reflecting the sunset behind me.
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 5D Mark II, Architecture, Atlanta, Handheld HDR, Outdoor, Sunset, Tucker | 2 Comments »
This is the second of the two shots that I took a month ago in Maine, while waiting for the Northern Lights to appear (which they never did). I had no idea how they would turn out, and I was definitely pleased, especially after I processed the single file into three differently exposed ones, to simulate a ±2 stop, three shot bracket that is normally used for processing into an HDR. The 814 second exposure was long enough to capture the clouds receding, lit by the rising moon (directly behind me opposite the clouds, not in the shot) as the stars began to show. The result looks like something between a sunset and a sunrise, which is really just the clouds receding over time. The dock moves constantly with the water, and it is that movement that causes it to appear fuzzy in the shot.
The reddish orange light on the wooden posts of the dock is coming from our house, all the way back up the hill behind me.
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 5D Mark II, Landscape, Maine, Nature, Night, Outdoor, Single-Shot, Sunset, Tucker, Tucker's Favorites | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
Been a while but here are some more shots from the Yosemite trip. You know what these are each missing? Some really awesome clouds. Nonetheless, I approve of the scenery. The first shot is the same angle from Tunnel View as my earlier post and the second shot was from around the top of the Mist Trail leading up to Vernal Falls. More on this “mist” and the amazing rainbow shots later…
The same angle as the earlier shot but a few hours later: Yosemite CA
The Emerald Pool just above the edge of Vernal Falls. Nevada Falls can be seen poking through the trees in the background: Yosemite CA
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 7D, Andrew, Landscape, Nature, Outdoor, Sunset, Yosemite | 1 Comment »
I have been asked to do a few websites recently, and I had a shoot with one of these people tonight to get some portraits and usable banner shots, etc, for their site. He lives on top of one of the condos on 10th street and asked if I thought the roof would be a good place to get some shots. Roofs + night + cityline + a lucky awesome sunset = yes, I told him that would work well. After getting some shots with him (I ditched the flash/reflector setup in favor of the tripod/bracketing approach 
) I stayed up there for an extra 2 hours just taking HDRs of various angles of the cityline as the sun set, changing lenses every once in a while. I have been really exploring HDR with the 70-200mm, and this is one of those. It is admittedly at 70mm; the ones taken at 200mm weren’t as compelling but I do have some 200mm ones from Paul’s apartment the other night that will make it up here at some point. There were also some fun wide shots from tonight as well, but this one stuck out as the one that needed to be processed immidiately.
It's really fun to go in close on the windows and see the same cabinents, light, and pictures in room after room…
Posted in 70-200mm f/2.8L, Architecture, Atlanta, Outdoor, Sunset, Tucker | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
Rockland is a great little town in Maine, picturesque, on the coast, and defined by its harbor. There is an annual boat show that takes place there, drawing large crowds, but we went on a different night for dinner and I had an hour or so to walk around beforehand to take some photos. Not wishing to be held down by a tripod, I decided once again to go hand-held and the more I do it, the more I like it. If there is enough light to get all 3 of the exposures above 1/30th of a second or so, Photomatix will take care of the rest in terms of the slight adjustments that need to be done to align the shots. These boats are most likely seasonal, pulled out of the water during the time of the year when the owners are away… but for all I know they are ownerless, for sale, or in storage… I just liked the way they looked! Lobster boats and lighthouses are two things that are iconic of Maine, and it is hard to travel in the state without seeing them constantly, either along the coast, or references to them in merchandise, store names, etc in the inland cities. And of course some cooperative clouds don’t hurt!
Civilian pleasure boats, like the sailboat on the right, sit next to working lobster boats on land and in the water.
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 5D Mark II, Handheld HDR, Maine, Outdoor, Sunset, Tucker | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
When Giacomo and I set out to shoot some HDRs tonight, we quickly realized the location I had in mind was not going to work. I remembered it being a lot cooler a few years ago, but the area around Arizona field by Dekalb avenue is now relatively built up and modern. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it was all rather bland, fenced in, and boring. Still wanting to get some shooting in, we drove for a bit until I remembered my goal of getting on top of the bridge that goes across Ponce de Leon, the bridge that we must have driven under thousands of times. Now that it is part of the Beltline, I knew it was possible, but wasn’t sure if there was easy access. Turns out, all we had to do was park close by, walk down an alleyway, and we were behind Paris on Ponce and the other shops there with easy access to the bridge and the Beltline in general. The huge brick building is the now-defunct City Hall East, where some government stuff used to take place. It is ugly, and it is large, so it is in the picture, but it is also part of the landscape that defines this area. I do like how there are lights on in some of the windows, despite it being technically closed. As we are still in the middle of a string of storms, we also had a great sky… the part the picture does NOT convey is the nearly unbearable humidity. It was probably upper 80′s, which by Atlanta standards is rather cool, but we were literally soaking because of the awful air. Tolerating it for a few minutes, I was able to grab some brackets while Giacomo messed around with the 70-200 looking professional as always. For those of you from Atlanta who haven’t been up to this location, it’s worth a visit; it’s really cool to look down on an area that has been a part of my life in this city for as long as I can remember.
All in all, a really cool location to watch both the traffic and the oncoming storm.
Posted in 16-35mm f/2.8L, 5D Mark II, Architecture, Atlanta, Night, Sunset, Tucker | Like our work? Be the first to comment! »
Sunrise Panorama
Mueller Hut and Mt. Cook
Quiet, Unsaturated, and Empty