Photography – heath ofee dot com

Smoking Lightbulbs and Super Mushrooms

Heath OFee — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 19:53:34 +0000

While sifting through my Google Buzz updates this past weekend I stumbled across an extremely cool link from PetaPixel. It was a photo of the smoke from an exposed incandescent lightbulb that had been Photoshopped to look like a 1UP mushroom from Super Mario Bros…extremely cool! The ingenious photographer who produced this image is Jon Beard. You can find his website here, his 1UP Mushroom photo here, and here’s a link to an instructional video he posted on how he set up for the shot. I was so inspired by this photo that I stopped on the way home from work to pick up all the necessary ingredients to try this on my own. It was pretty easy to set up and shoot and it was a ton of fun to see the results as I went through the 8 lightbulbs I bought and destroyed. I decided to pay homage (well, maybe just play copycat) to the great image Jon Beard produced by creating one of the red Super Mushrooms from Super Mario Bros. Here’s the result:

Canon EOS 50D, Canon EF 24-105mm f/4.0L, 102mm, F 5.6, ISO 200, 1/640 sec

I’m super pleased with how it turned out! Let me know what you think. And again…many thanks to Jon Beard for the great image and the inspiration…YOU ROCK!

**UPDATE** As per a request, here’s the original before I did any editing:

The Fiery Gates of Elgin Village

Heath OFee — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:16:28 +0000

Last week while walking back to my place from the liquor store I looked to my left and saw a fantastic sunset painting the clouds all kinds of pinks and purples. I jogged the rest of the way home (as quickly as one can with a case of beer in tow) and immediately went to collect my camera gear to try and capture the amazing sunset. I had a hilltop spot in mind in the next community over (Elgin), but by the time I jumped in my car and drove the few blocks it took to get there the sunset was gone. SO disappointing! I was determined to get some shots of these arches on the hilltop so I made sure to keep my eye out for some dramatic clouds the following evening. Here’s what I came up with:

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

This is a 3 exposure HDR (-2,0,+2) tonemapped in Photomatix, original sky from the -2 exposure masked in using Photoshop, a bit of noise reduction in Photoshop, and some final tweaks in Lightroom. I left a bit of a blue cast because I liked the contrast between the blue stone and the fiery sunset. I’m still working on my HDR processing, so let me know what you think!

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??