Construction – heath ofee dot com

Reflected Abstract

Heath OFee — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 12:28:47 +0000

This shot is 100% inspired by Dave Wilson. He has some absolutely amazing abstract reflection shots on his blog and his Flickr page…make sure you check him out!

For those of you living in Calgary, you may be able to recognize this as the reflection of The Bow currently under construction here in town. As soon as I looked up to this window above me and saw the slightly garbled reflection, I knew I had to get the shot. Incidentally, this was the last set of brackets I got before my meeting with the security guard this weekend…definitely glad I was able to finish up this set!

I had to crop this shot significantly to isolate just the reflection, as the original frame contained almost the entire window and some of the surrounding wall. Given more time, I would have thrown on a longer lens to get closer to the action, but I’m quite satisfied with how it turned out. I left it in a tall, odd crop to add to the abstract feel.

Canon EOS 50D, Canon EF 50mm f/1.4, 50mm, F 16, ISO 100, 4 Exposures

New Blog, New Eyes, and The Eye of a Monster

Heath OFee — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 02:17:29 +0000

As I type this blog post I am still marveling at the miracle that is laser vision correction. I’ve worn glasses or contact lenses since I was 11 years old, and the fact that I can now wake up and go about my daily activities without needing either is really nothing short of a miracle. I’ll publish a full summary of my experiences in a week or so, but for now…on to the more exciting news: I’ve launched my new blog today!! For a long time now I’ve thought about shedding the yycofee.wordpress.com URL and moving on to a more professional photographer’s name here . com style hosting platform, but only made the plunge into getting my own domain name and hosting a couple of months ago. Since then, I’ve been working off and on trying to sift through the infinite customization options offered by my WordPress theme trying to get things looking *mostly* the way I like. The hardest part by far was trying to create a logo/header…so any feedback you have on that would be appreciated. I’m sure over the course of the coming months I’ll notice things that I want to change/add/remove, so bear with me, I just really wanted to get this thing live! On the off chance that you’re a current subscriber to my old RSS feed, you can re-subscribe to the new feed here. And if anyone still uses bookmarks and happened to have my old blog marked, don’t forget to add heathofee.com to your list!

Yesterday, I went for my first short photowalk after my eye surgery, and since my car is still parked across the city, I was limited to wherever my feet could carry me. I’ve said this before, but I live in a relatively new development, so there are still a number of large construction vehicles around almost all the time. I had walked the dog earlier in the day and saw a couple of these construction giants that I wanted to capture when I went back out with the camera…unfortunately, two of the three I wanted to shoot were in use by the time I returned. So…with only one of my locations still available, I tried to make the best of it and ended up with a few usable brackets from the one construction vehicle….the first is below:

Canon EOS 50D, Sigma 10-20mm f/3.5, 10mm, F 16, ISO 100, 5 Exposures

Building Blocks

Heath OFee — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 22:11:34 +0000

On the way back into town from our company golf tournament this past Thursday, I saw what is probably the coolest and largest piece of construction equipment I have ever seen. This giant contraption is currently being used to build the elevated track structure for the west LRT extension that will see our public train system make it’s way out to 69th St West.

I knew as soon as I saw this monster that I would have to come back to capture it, so on Friday night Brei and I made our way downtown to get a few brackets. Although I don’t think there’s anything outta-this-world about the shot, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. Mostly I just wanted to get a shot of this thing while it was right over 9th Ave!

Canon EOS 50D, Sigma 10-20mm f/3.5, 12mm, F 7.1, ISO 100, 5 Exposures

Jamieson Place – Downtown Calgary

Heath OFee — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 15:37:50 +0000

This weekend I’ve been on call for work which means I have to come into the office for a few hours each day. Since I was already going to be downtown I figured I might as well pack along my camera gear and go out for a morning photowalk each day to practice my HDR photography. Yesterday I got out for just over an hour before I had to head back to the office to finish up, but managed to walk from my office (the Suncor Energy Centre) to Prince’s Island Park and back taking photos all along the way. My travels took me past the new Jamieson Place building which is still under construction. The hanging sculptures just outside the entrance and in the lobby are pretty amazing so I stopped to take a few shots. I processed a few of the images from my walk last night and this one of Jamieson Place was one of my favorites.

This is a 3 shot HDR (-2, 0, +2) processed in Photomatix with some small adjustments in Lightroom.

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

Let me know what you think of the processing…it might be a bit heavy but I think I like the effect. Also, this photo has a bit too much noise for my liking but the noise reduction algorithms in Lightroom don’t seem to be very powerful. Does anyone know if Photoshop is better for this?? Or should I just suck it up and get myself a copy of NoiseWare??