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I’ve had my eye on this old barn right off Scholls Ferry Rd, and finally pulled over to snag a few shots ..

Started off an early Saturday morning with a drive in the vette, in search of a new playground.  Not so coincidentally, we chose the one on the other side of some curvey country roads   Just south of River Road in Hillsboro, OR, is Rood Bridge Park.  There are currently MANY improvements being made, with small streams flowing around, a frog pond, a nice play structure, nature trails, etc.

I’ve been messing around with creating HDR (high dynamic range) photos for quite some time. In the past, I did this with the “increase dynamic range” setting for Fred Miranda’s Velia Vision Plugin for Photoshop (not really HDR, I know). In the past few months, I’ve realized that there are MUCH better ways to accomplish this, which include shooting multiple exposures of the same scene, and then combining them into a single shot.

Here are some of my first “successful” attempts at getting the correct exposures. These were created by exposure bracketing on the Canon Digital Rebel XTi, and then combining / toning the exposures with Photomatix. My main goal here was to work on the correct exposure bracketing settings, as well as the correct toning in Photomatix. There are some big flaws with the image alignment of the three exposures (these were all shot hand-held – tripod highly recommended). The result is some funny looking halos around the clouds (and other stuff), but I was too lazy to go back in to Photoshop and fix all the issues.

Maybe I’ll find a really good “subject” for my shoot, and I’ll go through a full Photoshop treatment.

Surprise, surprise .. another sunset .

Here’s one of MANY bees that happened to be buzzing around a patch of flowers outside.  This shot was complicated a little by the fact that I had to be about 3 inches away to get the proper zoom, and there were a BUNCH of bees buzzing around me at the time (no injuries sustained ).