This image was from a bucket list trip to Boston. I was born there, but left when I was young. I have already posted some images from this dream trip to Fenway, but I wanted to welcome back baseball season with a great sunset Red Sox image. Hello Fenway, lets get it started.
Tags: baseball fenway sunset clouds
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Ok, maybe the title is a bit misleading. Yes, the factory is no longer there, you could even say its abandoned, but they now have condos surrounding it. In fact, the windows on the right are now condos in a historic building. The stack you ask? Thats just eye candy. I wanted to shoot this in a unique way. When I was on site, I thought a fisheye was in order. The effect was a bit too much, so this is a 15mm, almost a fish. I also used a tripod with an ND filter to make the clouds streak. Ended up bending it with several different shutter speeds to get the right effect. I wanted the tree to be frozen.
This is part (I think) of the Lowell National Historical Park. If not part of it, it is certainly right next door.
Oh, and naturally, I had no big tripod, so pocket tripod to the rescue, again.
Let me know what you think.
Tags: history factory boston brick america smoke stack abandoned sky cloud ND filter canon tripod
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This is another image from Midway, the Ice Castles attraction they have there. Like I said in other posts, we made a special trip out there just to visit this attraction. There are several across the US, I picked this one because it was closest to an airport. The one in Upstate New York is probably the best, but harder to get to from Oregon. It was warmer than it was supposed to be so some parts of the attraction were closed, to prevent the ceilings from collapsing on people. One of the more interesting parts of this was the ground. I was wondering how they would approach this, because you don't want hard-packed slippery snow or ice, so they have people walking the grounds with pitchforks stabbing the snow to make this odd crystal-like material. Its ice, to be sure, but broken into fine particles. Not snow. Its odd, and it actually did fun things with the light at night. So in this image I tried to capture the rainbow kids slide, one of the lit ice sculpture-blobs, a single person for scale, and the ground all in one image. Had to shoot about 45 frames and do some difference blending in photoshop (it was crowded), and then some bracketed exposure blending as well to tame the crazy highlights from the internally lit ice. The fun part was that the lights inside the ice keep changing colors, so on a long exposure, it gets hard to nail down one color without them just blending to white. From a processing perspective this was a tough image.
Anyway, let me know what you think. :)
Tags: ice snow winter cold utah color colors attraction canon tripod
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Thinking about heading back out to the Palouse this Spring. This made me go back and look through the images I shot there in the past. I stumbled across this nugget and for the life of me I could not see why I did not post it here. So here you go. An older image, but still a good one. Get lost in the colors and folds of contrast. I know I do.
Tags: hills palouse green rolling hill farm washington zoom color colors sky
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We went to Utah just to shoot this event, my brother and me. A quick flight in and out. I am not sure if it was worth a flight and all that went with it, but I have been wanting to shoot an event like this for a long time and got tired of saying 'someday.' From that perspective I am glad I did it. Were the images worth it? Meh. Maybe, but at least I did it.
What is an 'event like this?' They take a bunch of manmade PVC structures, put LED lights in them, them take harvested icicles and attached them in a very cold place, like Utah. Then it gets fun. They start making tunnels, and crawl through areas, and slides. At night, when the LED lights turn on, you get a crazy explosion of color through ice. That is cool (pun intended). Ice Castles is the name of the company that kind of started it all, others have copied the idea since. Like I said in the last post, the toughest part was the crowds; well, and the weather. With a place like this you are a slave to a the weather. When its warmer you need to shut down any areas that might melt on guests. It had been a little warmer that weekend in Utah and a lot of those cool maze areas had to be shut down. The company had to fully shut down a similar event on the east coast after it was open for only a few weeks. That meant I was way overdressed. Could have gone in jeans honestly but there I am in full winter regalia. I was warm.
So how do I address the crowds? Classic photographer tricks. This includes long exposures (no, I did not use a tripod which is not allowed, wink, wink), and taking several images over a long period of time and then difference blending in photoshop. Or just shoot up over their heads. Yeah, I could go clonestamp crazy or use the remove tool, but if you can do any other way, you are better off.
It also did not help that I got stuck at the airport flying out and had to sleep in the airport Never done that before. It was no fun and I had to miss a day of work. Grrr.
Anyway, hope you like the winter image, let me know what you think.
Tags: cold ice winter cave utah canon color cat
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