February – heath ofee dot com

Downtown Calgary Reflections

Heath OFee — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 21:56:59 +0000

I’ve always thought one of the coolest things about the downtown core of any city are all the reflections that play in the mirrored glass windows of office buildings. I really like the idea of being able to see a building within a building and there are a couple of these in this shot.

This was taken in February of this year and was on one of my very first photowalks with my (at the time) brand new Sigma 10-20mm lens and was also among the first batch of bracketed images I took with the intent of processing in HDR. I had kinda given up on this image after the original processing was done but recently went back to it. I converted it to black & white, masked in the original sky and I’m now much happier with the final product. So, don’t be afraid to go back through some of your old brackets…you never know what you’ll find!

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

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.

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??