This was taken back in April of 2009 while on vacation out west.  We were on the road with Marika’s Uncle and Great Aunt out to Coquitlam. Her Uncle David was talking about these locomotives just sitting here and how he took a picture of them all.  It was great to hear and I appreciated the creative juice that was moving through his mind as he replayed his experience in his head and described it to me.  We passed them and he said lets go in and you can get a picture if you want.  We pulled in and I got out to snap a few pictures.  This is one of them! I have posted one or two in the past I think.  One of the other HDR photos is on Flickr.

I am in need of getting away again really bad.  Just to see somewhere different.  A vacation for HDR photography would be really fun.  Who’s with me?

I grabbed this HDR image in Vancouver at the newer convention centre.  I love the architecture and landscape architecture you get here.  I felt special within this space – like anything was possible for me.  I try and tap into that feeling daily and lately, as returning to my call centre job, it’s been tough.  I just remind myself that I’ve made my decision.  I am trying to break in 2 months.  So I am trying to push hard during my free time.  It’s very hard but no one said it was easy.  I keep trying! My work on this subject is over on Nuwomb Creative – My main hub of a website.  It’s about renaissance living (a life of passions, ideas, creativity and the 21st century) and starting a photography business is mixed within that subject.  So, if you’re having trouble starting your own creative lifestyle and breaking free, check it out.

See this image also on Flickr

The trip to Vancouver was great and allowed for awesome HDR Photography Opportunities!  Here are 4 HDR Photographs from my travels.  I really love the colours I got out of the marina shots. Hope you like them as well. This HDR image of Vancouver’s Marina and the Skyline in the distance is what got me interested in HDR Photography in the first place.  I saw images like this and became insanely inspired.  It’s amazing how we can see something, be inspired and work towards creating images on our own.  I created this HDR with Photomatix software and it was done with 6 raw images that were bracketed accordingly.  I used Photoshop curves layer adjustments to finalize the photograph. Curves Adjustment layers are something that I totally didn’t understand forever! That was until I found my photo editing pimp – Chromasia aka David Nightengale’s Chromasia Photoshop Tutorials and I won’t ever look back.  I feel that my HDR photoblog has truly benefitted!

What’s happening right now, is that I am trying to get some of the old photographs re-established on this photoblog.  This is a photograph from April when I was in Vancouver! I ended up shooting a bunch of HDR photographs of the new Convention Centre.  I loved the architectural feature on the roof.  There were 2 features.  In this image you can see the wood feature below the roof.   The one you cannot see is the rooftop garden.  My shots in Vancouver were Handheld HDR photos.

If you’ve never seen the new Convention Centre in Vancouver, let me introduce you.  It’s a beautiful piece of architecture and we were very fortunate to find it on our visit.  The awesomeness that is HDRsoft Photomatix, merged my 5 handheld Tif images into this HDR image.  Browsing these photographs, I could tell that they were  not aligned that great.  Photomatix took care of that though and makes me feel very confident shooting handheld HDR photos.   I love the wood on the roof.  It adds a visual texture and pattern that I adore!   I promised on my last post here, before things went out of control, about an HDR processing tip for skies.  I said it was simple and it really can’t be easier than this one.  In photomatix, you can change the size of the live view when editing.  I love editing large, and the tone mapped image looks awesome.  Test that awesomeness at a smaller scale though.  Drop the preview window down to 1/8th the size and check out the outlines around buildings and edges.  You’ll see the dreaded HDR Halos at that point.  You can either accept the way it is and attack the HDR halos in photoshop later or try and combat them with the strength or micro-smoothing settings in the tone mapping. That’s it! Hopefully that simple tip with help fix HDR halos in most of your work.  This image is Creative Commons and can be found in high resolution on Flickr.  Also, If you follow the link to purchase HDRsoft Photomatix, you can save 15% on the price. Just enter a coupon code: “nuwomb15″