Canon Rebel xti – heath ofee dot com

The Path

Heath OFee — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:10:14 +0000

Well, I wasn’t expecting to post this image today. I was planning on making a few minor changes to this shot before posting, but a late night at the Calgary Flames game kept me from processing and uploading something else or making the edits to this shot. So, I hope you enjoy this shot as it is

I had a great time playing with textures and experimenting with onOne Software’s Mask Pro 4.1 when processing this shot. Mask Pro is an absolute joy to use when creating complex masks. Just choose which colours you want to keep and which ones you want to drop, and the magic brush does all the work for you. I was able to create the ridiculously complex mask around all those tree branches in a matter of minutes (you can see the mask here). Absolutely amazing.

Canon Rebel XTi, Tamron 28-80mm, 46mm, F 7.1, ISO 200, 1/100 sec

Millennium Bridge

Heath OFee — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 13:10:42 +0000

I decided to dive deep into the archives for my shot today. In 2007, I took a 12 day trip to London shortly after I had purchased my very first digital SLR. I took an obscene amount of photographs while I was there, but looking back, I didn’t come away with a whole bunch of what I would now consider ‘keepers’. Obviously, this is to be expected when on one’s first journey with a new piece of equipment…plus it gives me a great excuse to get back to London so I can shoot it properly

Of the good photos I did manage to take while I was there, this is hands down my favourite (even though it is quite a ‘touristy’ shot). The juxtaposition of the ultra modern with the extremely old is something that is present almost anywhere you walk in London, and this shot is no exception. Millennium Bridge set against St. Paul’s Cathedral. Awesomeness.

Canon Rebel XTi, Tamron 28-80mm, 51mm, F 8.0, ISO 100, 8 sec

Cedarbrae Bus Shelter from the Archives

Heath OFee — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 21:11:16 +0000

Since I’m heading to Las Vegas tomorrow morning and won’t be back until late next week, I thought I’d post another photo right now since I’ll probably be skipping my post next week.

This past weekend I took the time to watch the HDR presentation Trey Ratcliff gave at Google Headquarters in California. I’m not going to do a full review here, but I will say that it’s well worth checking out if you want to learn a bit about HDR photography and see plenty of pretty pictures. One tip that Trey gave to new HDR photographers is to go through your old photo collection and give a few the HDR treatment for practice. Even though you’d only be working with a single RAW file instead of a number of bracketed exposures, the algorithms in Photomatix can still produce a very good HDR image. I took this to heart and went through a few dozen old photos from a photo walk I took in Cedarbrae/Braeside two years ago. I thought this detail photo of a bus shelter bench turned out kinda cool after the HDR conversion. It’s kinda gritty and dirty and old but I like it!

Canon EOS 50D, Canon EF 24-105mm f/4.0L, 24mm, F 8.0, ISO 100

The details: single exposure HDR tonemapped in Photomatix, color correction, contrast, clarity, sharpening in Lightroom, noise reduction in Noiseware.