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Cook Park, originally uploaded by Geoff Thomsen.

So glad to dust the camera off and get some snaps in!

The moon was CRAZY orange last night, in case you didn’t notice IMO, this was much more spectacular than the Lunar Eclipse we had not too long ago.

update - found some info on the FOX12 Weather Blog about the moon last night:

Many of our viewers have been writing, wondering about the freakishly red full Harvest Moon.  It’s due to smoke from the Rattle Fire, near Diamond Lake in S.W. Oregon.  The flow in the upper atmosphere has turned southeasterly, sending a surge of smoke north.  The flow stays generally the same way through Wednesday, so I think we have a smoky/hazy day on the way again for tomorrow.

Snapped a few shots of the Tualatin River while visiting Cooke Park in Tigard.  Lots of smoke from a BBQ, and some drab lighting.  HDR to the rescue!!

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.

Wow; it’s been a long time since I’ve been around here.  Time flies when you’re havin’ fun   Here’s two little ditties from my Father’s Day outing to the Tigard Festival of Balloons.

The (almost?) full moon and partly cloudy skies teamed up last night for some pretty sweet landscapes.  The fisheye lens added a nice “bendy” effect too