A little better all the time
Fri, Oct 18, 2013
Back on Oct 5 I participated in a photo walk over in St. Augustine. Thing is, the walk began at sunrise and offered lots of great opportunities for HDRable shots. Here's some of my favorites. These were mostly done in photomatix with some adjustment in lightroom.We started out at the Castillo de San Marcos Nat'l Monument on St. Augustine Bay (it was closed thanks to the gov't shutdown- thanks congress!). If you're a loyal reader of this blog, you may remember my very first HDR shots were taken at sunrise at the same location... it was the first time I'd ever even tried auto-bracketing my shots for HDR and I had no idea what I was doing. I still have no idea what I'm doing, but with experience comes luck and a better eye for good lighting conditions. In this case it was a combo sunrise/rain storm moving in. And yes, Virginia, those are cannons:
Next we wandered down to St. George Street where a rainbow appeared to the west. Unfortunately, it was a faint rainbow, so I had to really bring the colors up in the sky to see it in this shot... a little more processing to tone down the sky and bring up just the rainbow would benefit this shot, but hell there's the rainbow.
Next we went to the Flager College campus, which uses a posh 19th century hotel for rich people as its main building. Here's a shot from the SE corner of the campus:
Here's the front entrance which is guarded by a statue of Hank Flagler himself:
... and a couple of these lion heads just in case the statue of the rich guy didn't scare you off:
Once past the guards, there's a fancy courtyard with flowers and a fountain. Just off from that I found a bike rack where this nifty bike was parked. As it happened the bike was colorfully decorated with a fun floral motif and brightly backlit by the rising sun resulting in plenty of flare to go around. JJ Abrams approves this photo:
Once past the courtyard and into the main building there's a rather overwhelming rotunda with impressive woodwork and lots of gold paint:
It looks good in B&W portrait orientation too:
After Flagler College the walk veered over towards some local churches with fairly interesting architecture, but I'm getting tired of typing and linking... plus I didn't HDR all of them. Here's one for the road, it's the Catholic church on the way back towards the Bridge of Lions. The sun was still on its way up and popped through some clouds for some good-time drama:
Photo walks = good fun
sunrise + clouds + architecture = hot HDR action.
I've posted some more of my photos from the walk over on my smugmug page at photos.foximperial.com. Not all of them are HDRed (sad, I know, right!) Here's the specific gallery link.
As always I welcome feedback. Love 'em, hate 'em, whatever.
Cheers from the depths of the HDR Hole!