Dirty – heath ofee dot com

In Your Face

Heath OFee — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 14:57:39 +0000

Interesting foreground elements and leading lines can turn a ho-hum scene into something more compelling. Although there were a number of great individual elements in this abandoned warehouse to shoot, creating an interesting composition that included a large chunk of them required a bit of thinking. Nobody wants to look at a pile of discarded junk without any sort of focal point or direction, so finding that key element that leads the viewer through the frame is key.

When I saw this overturned table and rusted piping, I knew how I wanted to frame this shot. Getting close to the end of the pipe with my wide angle lens allowed me to make the opening of the pipe the focal point, and the distortion provided by this same lens really leads the eye through the frame.

Canon EOS 50D, Sigma 10-20mm f/3.5, 12mm, F 11, ISO 100

If You Build It? – Cold Storage

Heath OFee — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 14:00:00 +0000

Today, another in the ‘If You Build It?’ series from the abandoned baseball diamond in Seebe, Alberta. I initially saw this fridge/freezer from the back while I was taking a few shots inside the old snack shack, but when I walked outside and looked back in through this window, I knew I had a winner. The yellow paintball splatters make this shot for me

Canon EOS 50D, Canon TS-E 17mm f/4.0L, 17mm, F 4.0, ISO 100

Smoke Break?

Heath OFee — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 12:50:01 +0000

I’ve said this before, but one of the coolest things about this whole social networking thing is meeting so many other like-minded people who share the same passion for HDR photography that I do. Twitter has been a gold-mine for finding and connecting with these wonderful people, and I feel very lucky to be a part of the community as I’m able to draw daily inspiration from my tweeps.

I would never have thought to take this photo if I hadn’t connected with some great urbex photographers recently. Although I don’t think I can really classify this shot as urbex since this spot is far from abandoned, it definitely has a nice grungy, dirty feel. As soon as I saw this scene I immediately thought of the work of Brian Matiash, Bob Lussier and Jacques Gudé. The grungy barrels and brick, and especially that single old chair, reminded me of the great work all three of these photogs produce on a daily basis. So, this shot is my homage to them…thanks for the inspiration, fellas!

Oh, and as for the title of the post…while in the process of taking a set of closeup brackets of the chair and barrels, I was almost hit by that door being opened by two cooks coming out for a smoke break in the alley. I conceded the chair to them after my last exposure was done

Canon EOS 50D, Canon TS-E 17mm f/4.0L, 17mm, F 16, ISO 100, 5 Exposures

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.