I’m not entirely sure what the purpose of this little shack used to be, but I’m guessing it may have been where the scorekeeper used to sit during the game. It took a bit of creative maneuvering to get my tripod and camera into a decent position to take this shot. The door to the shack was not being particularly helpful, and I kept getting smacked in the face by some unruly little trees, but in the end, I was relatively happy with this composition.
I decided to go with a pretty dark look when editing this image. I really wanted to emphasize the deep shadows and bright highlights, and make sure that the chair and lone paintball strike were the focal points. To achieve this, I selectively applied the ‘Midnight’ and ‘Tonal Contrast’ filters from Nik Color Efex Pro on top of my usual application of a number of filters in Phototools. My processing for this image was definitely inspired by urbex HDR master, Jacques Gudé (aka fotofreq). If you’re unfamiliar with his work, be sure to check it out!
I was having some difficulties getting the angle on my crop exactly right…it seems as though some of those tiles may not have been laid quite true. What do you guys think, could it use a bit of extra rotation in either direction?
After looking through the brackets from my shoot in Seebe last month, this was one of the shots I loved instantly, and I knew I wanted to save it for a while. I decided what better time to process and post it then when it’ll be sitting at the top of my blog for two weeks? I hope you all like it, and I look forward to catching up with everyone when I get back to the real world!
For this shot I opted to get nice and low and quite close to the end of this broken bench to really make the cracked board the focal point of the image. I also took advantage of the tilt functionality of the TS-E lens to further bring focus to the crack while throwing the rest of the bench out of focus.
This old baseball diamond was the first real abandoned location I have ever tried to shoot, and I’ll admit, it was kinda scary walking around this place on my own at first. Once I got over the feeling that zombies were going to jump out of every nook and cranny, I was able to have some fun and take my time with some of these shots. Now that I’ve got a bit of the urbex bug, I find myself searching everywhere I go for more locations to explore. It’s just so much fun to capture and process the images from locations like this.
I absolutely love the ability to isolate a portion of a scene with a tilt/shift lens. I think I probably went a bit overboard with that feature while I had the 17mm in my possession, but I’m pretty happy with most of the shots I was able to come up with.
Oh, and if you like images being referenced to movie titles, make sure you check out Movie Title Wednesdays from my good buddy Mike Olbinski. His running series is well worth checking out, and he’s already published his own take on ‘Field of Dreams’!
When thinking about the title for this post last night, I realized that a whole lot of my blog/image titles are questions…and I’m not really sure why. Maybe I like the idea of people visiting the image and coming up with their own interesting stories to answer the questions, or maybe it’s just a great gimmick to get people to click on my links 
Either way, I’m sure you’ll see plenty more question marks in my image titles.
I’ve been using onOne’s PhotoTools for a few weeks now, and I absolutely love it for processing HDR photos. I haven’t even come close to experimenting with all the amazing filters available, but I’ve already found a few that I call my favourites. The image below is a combination of about 5 or 6 effects stacked together at various opacities, the most important of which is the ‘Fallout’ filter that I used to give it a bit of that green, post-apocalyptic feel. If you’re looking for something to take your photos to the next level, I’d wholeheartedly recommend giving PhotoTools a try!
