Ancient – heath ofee dot com

St. Mark’s Square by Night

Heath OFee — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 16:07:49 +0000

When I first stumbled upon HDR early this year, I didn’t jump straight on the Photomatix train, I actually tried out a Lightroom plugin called Enblend/Enfuse. I spent quite a bit of time going through some of my old RAW files, splitting them into 3 pseudo-brackets and running them through this plugin. Some of the results I achieved were actually quite good considering I was working with single RAW files. I rarely use this plugin anymore as Photomatix is my go-to HDR creation/tonemapping software, but today I’m going to share one of the images I processed using this plugin.

This is a shot from the brief time I spent in Venice during my visit to Italy last year. I was in absolute wonderment the entire time I was there…I couldn’t even believe a city like Venice could exist and there were unbelievable photo opportunities around every corner and along every tiny, cobbled street. Getting lost in Venice was probably the most fun I had on my Italy trip. Weaving through the shaded streets and then stumbling out into one of the countless squares was a joy. I’d love to go back one day.

Canon EOS 50D, Canon EF 24-105mm f/4.0L, 24mm, F 11, ISO 100, 10sec

Details, Details, Details

Heath OFee — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 22:09:50 +0000

I just finished reading Brian Matiash’s great post from this morning and I couldn’t help but chuckle a bit. It turns out that both of us were working on photos from our Italy archive last night! Mine are from a trip I took with my whole family last May which was absolutely fantastic. We had a great time and I came home with a ridiculous amount of photos (and at that point I wasn’t even shooting brackets for HDR!).

Although I already processed the keepers from that trip last year, I’ve been having some fun going back through them and running a few of the single RAW files through Photomatix to see what kind of results I can get. I’m hoping that this exercise is fruitful enough for me to keep posting some of my re-processed Italy shots over the coming months. Last night I worked on a couple and I’m quite happy with the details I was able to pull out in this shot of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

Canon EOS 50D, Canon EF 24-105mm f/4.0L, 24mm, F 7.1, ISO 100, 1/640 sec

St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Midnapore

Heath OFee — Mon, 31 May 2010 14:55:48 +0000

We’ve been having some pretty depressing weather here in Calgary for the past couple of weeks…lots of rain, a bit of snow and plenty of cold. Not the kind of weather you’d like to see at the end of May. However, this kind of weather produces some really cool looking cloud formations that make for absolutely great photos. I had been telling myself that I should go take advantage of the opportunity all week, but never mustered up the motivation until yesterday afternoon (thanks for the extra push sweetie!). I knew exactly where I wanted to go…St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Midnapore. This historical church was built in 1885 and is in fantastic shape thanks to the Midnapore Church of England Society who have worked hard to maintain the church since the 1990’s. I was inspired to photograph this church by Steph over at MzDeitz who posted a really cool photo of the dilapidated St. Patrick’s Catholic Church which is just a stones throw north of St. Paul’s.

The clouds couldn’t have been more perfect when I arrived…this was the first shot I took when I got to the scene and the only one I’ve processed so far. I think I should have a few more good ones to make a neat little series of the church and cemetary. Let me know what you think:

Canon EOS 50D, Sigma 10-20mm f/3.5, 13mm, F 11, ISO 100, 3 Exposures

The details: 3 exposure HDR tonemapped in Photomatix, white balance, contrast, clarity, sharpening in Lightroom, noise reduction in Noiseware.