september – heath ofee dot com

Easter Seals Drop Zone 2012

Heath OFee — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 13:55:15 +0000

Last Thursday I was part of a team of volunteer photographers covering the Easter Seals Drop Zone here in Calgary. Over 100 participants (mostly dressed as superheroes) who raised a minimum of $1500 each rappelled 30 stories down the side of the Sun Life Tower in support of Easter Seals. The goal this year was to raise $200,000 and they absolutely blew that out of the water reaching a total of over $300,000!

I was lucky enough to be placed on the roof all day to shoot the participants as they were getting clipped in and made the first few terrifying steps down the building. It was pretty amazing to watch some of the superheroes conquer their fears and I can’t say enough positive things about the climbing support team from RAT and Crux Climbing and Bouldering. The entire team was so fun and supportive and made me feel completely safe while I was clipped in to the roof all day.

Big thanks to Jason over at Crush Photography who organized all of us photographers for the day – you did a great job, buddy!

And for last, here’s a screenshot taken from the GoPro helmet cam from one of the participants who works for a local news station. I’m in full power pose photographing this dude

Harvest Moon

Heath OFee — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 12:41:03 +0000

In my previous post I alluded to taking some shots of the super harvest moon that we got last week, so I thought I’d better share one of my images before everyone forgets about the occasion. I’ll be honest, and tell you that I wasn’t terribly impressed with the whole harvest moon thing. I guess I was expecting to see a giant moon rising over the horizon, and although the moon was full, and appeared quite large and bright, it wasn’t quite as epic as I was expecting. Despite the bit of disappointment I was feeling, I still convinced myself to rattle off a few brackets to see what I could come up with.

Unfortunately, the disappointment didn’t end with the harvest moon itself. After unloading my images and sifting through them, I found that I wasn’t particularly impressed with any of the shots I got of the harvest moon. I ran a couple sets of brackets through Photomatix and was still not very happy with the results…so, what to do? I knew I wanted to post a harvest moon shot, and now it was almost like a challenge to make at least one of them work. Maybe not the best exercise, but it forced me to get the creative juices flowing a little bit. I decided to throw a texture onto a single exposure (-2 ev) to add a bit of extra interest. After a few other local adjustments and a global saturation shift, I ended up with what you see below…and I’m actually quite pleased with how it all turned out in the end. Moral of the story? Not really sure…be persistent? Stubbornness sometimes pays off? You be the judge

Canon EOS 50D, Canon EF 24-105mm f/4.0L, 102mm, F 11, ISO 100, 1/30sec

New Blog, New Eyes, and The Eye of a Monster

Heath OFee — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 02:17:29 +0000

As I type this blog post I am still marveling at the miracle that is laser vision correction. I’ve worn glasses or contact lenses since I was 11 years old, and the fact that I can now wake up and go about my daily activities without needing either is really nothing short of a miracle. I’ll publish a full summary of my experiences in a week or so, but for now…on to the more exciting news: I’ve launched my new blog today!! For a long time now I’ve thought about shedding the yycofee.wordpress.com URL and moving on to a more professional photographer’s name here . com style hosting platform, but only made the plunge into getting my own domain name and hosting a couple of months ago. Since then, I’ve been working off and on trying to sift through the infinite customization options offered by my WordPress theme trying to get things looking *mostly* the way I like. The hardest part by far was trying to create a logo/header…so any feedback you have on that would be appreciated. I’m sure over the course of the coming months I’ll notice things that I want to change/add/remove, so bear with me, I just really wanted to get this thing live! On the off chance that you’re a current subscriber to my old RSS feed, you can re-subscribe to the new feed here. And if anyone still uses bookmarks and happened to have my old blog marked, don’t forget to add heathofee.com to your list!

Yesterday, I went for my first short photowalk after my eye surgery, and since my car is still parked across the city, I was limited to wherever my feet could carry me. I’ve said this before, but I live in a relatively new development, so there are still a number of large construction vehicles around almost all the time. I had walked the dog earlier in the day and saw a couple of these construction giants that I wanted to capture when I went back out with the camera…unfortunately, two of the three I wanted to shoot were in use by the time I returned. So…with only one of my locations still available, I tried to make the best of it and ended up with a few usable brackets from the one construction vehicle….the first is below:

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