Winter – heath ofee dot com

bobby+steve

Heath OFee — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 15:30:02 +0000

Winter love on a beautiful day.

Nothing better.

Prairie Winter

Heath OFee — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 18:42:11 +0000

Today is another shot from the archives…this one from a very cold February day last year. This was the very first time I went out shooting with the intention of capturing brackets for HDR processing. Is it ironic that I decided to process this as a single black and white frame with a bunch of extra film grain added for a retro feel? You be the judge

Canon EOS 50D, Sigma 10-20mm f/3.5, 15mm, F 11, ISO 100, 1/40 sec

Ropes and Rails

Heath OFee — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 14:59:19 +0000

Today I’m sharing another shot from my trip to the Ogden industrial area here in Calgary. This is right in front of the ADM Milling shop just off Ogden road. I was drawn to this yellow box overflowing with ropes because it provided a great splash of warm colour in an otherwise very cool scene. Looking for contrast like this is something that I’ve started to pay a bit more attention to, and I’ve found it can make images much more compelling.

It was kind of a gloomy day, and there wasn’t much interest in the background, so I applied some blur in onOne’s Focalpoint 2 to really draw attention to the box. I also selectively boosted the yellow a bit really make the box the focal point of the image.

Canon EOS 50D, Sigma 10-20mm f/3.5, 12mm, F 16, ISO 100, 5 Exposures

Winter Road

Heath OFee — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 16:12:00 +0000

We’ve been getting some pretty dismal weather here in Calgary for the past couple of weeks. Temperatures have been well below normal and it’s been grey skies and rain almost all day, every day…not a very nice September. However, one of the great (or awful) things about living in Calgary is that the weather can change at the drop of a hat…we’re supposed to be seeing highs back up into the 20’s (celsius) by the weekend! If you ever make it to Calgary I’m sure at some point during your visit someone will comment on the weather…it’s always a valid topic of conversation since you never know what’s going to happen. “Don’t like the weather? Wait ten minutes”

In the spirit of the looming winter, here’s a photo from February of this year:

Benched

Heath OFee — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 16:10:39 +0000

I kinda feel like I’ve been benched lately. We’ve been getting an unbelievable amount of rain here in Calgary this month, and it’s been putting a serious damper on my planned photography excursions. It’s almost been two weeks since I’ve been out shooting brackets for HDR and I’m suffering from a bit of withdrawal…this has also forced me to go back through my relatively small archive of brackets to find some images worth posting. Although this is a valuable exercise, I’d much rather be shooting and processing new images.

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

Winter Decay

Heath OFee — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 22:47:23 +0000

Over the past couple of months I’ve had the pleasure of making some fantastic photographer friends over Twitter, and a number of them are masters of grunge and urbex photography (you know who you are). I’ve been trying to find some suitable locations in and around the Calgary area but I haven’t been having too much luck…but don’t worry, I’m not giving up! Earlier this year I did find an old abandoned semi-trailer sitting in a field on the side of the road. You can find that image here. There also happened to be a couple of old, nasty broken down shacks next to it and I did rattle off a few brackets of those. I haven’t shared any of those images yet because, to be honest, they’re a little bit gross, but today I’m going to share one just ’cause. Enjoy some winter decay.

Canon EOS 50D, Sigma 10-20mm f/3.5, 13mm, F 8.0, ISO 100, 3 Exposures

Calgary Skyline from Prince’s Island Park

Heath OFee — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:08:31 +0000

While on my downtown photowalk a couple weekends ago I made my way over to Prince’s Island Park and took a few shots there. It was a relatively cold morning at about -8 celsius and I wasn’t wearing the ideal footwear for tromping though the snow (slip on loafers were not a good choice) but I couldn’t resist this frost covered bench with the city skyline punctuated by a sunburst. The original crop of this image included a tree in the background on the far right of the frame but I was forced to crop it out when masking in the sky from one of the original images. I’m still working on the whole Photoshop masking process, and this one didn’t turn out exactly how I wanted…but I gotta keep trying if I’m gonna learn, right?

Canon EOS 50D, Sigma 10-20mm f/3.5, 10mm, F 16, ISO 100, 3 Exposures

This is a 3 exposure HDR image (-2,0,+2) tonemapped in Photomatix, original sky masked in from the -2 exposure with some final tweaks in Lightroom. Any critiques are more than welcome!

An Aging Semi and Layer Masks

Heath OFee — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 23:00:20 +0000

I live in the far southeast quadrant of Calgary in a relatively new community called New Brighton. One of the major arteries that runs through the southeast is 52nd Avenue and I find myself on this stretch of road at least a couple times a week. Two weeks ago on my way to play a round of disc golf I spotted this really cool looking wrecked and abandoned semi-truck/trailer and thought it would make a fantastic HDR photo. I took a day off work this past Tuesday and took this photo:

Canon EOS 50D, Sigma 10-20mm f/3.5, 12mm, F 16, ISO 100, 3 Exposures

It’s nice being a little further north during the winter because the sun stays relatively low in the sky for most of the day. This photo was taken around 11am and the sun was still low enough for me to get it well into the frame. I’ve always been a fan of sunbursts, so I made sure to stop the aperture down (this is f/16) to make sure I got that effect.

This photo is my first attempt at using a layer mask in Photoshop…I should probably have already known how to do that, but I try to do most of my post-processing in Lightroom exclusively. Anyway…after running my three exposures (-2,0,+2) through Photomatix, I found that the sky looked a little dirty and was a bit noisier than I would have liked, so I masked in the sky from the original 0ev RAW file. Turned out pretty well I think, and I learned a valuable new skill! As always, critique and comments are more than welcome.