Travel Theme: Round

I guess I had been holding onto these photos waiting for the travel theme at Where’s My Backpack? to be round. This is the week my friends!  The photo below I took at Laumeir Sculpture Park in St. Louis:

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/9 1/160

This edited version is an HDR image that has been processed in Photomatix.  Here is one of the original exposures:

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/9 1/160

It was a sunny day so it would have been hard to get a perfect exposure in just one photo, so I knew I was going to edit the image into an HDR image.  Also, the veins in the eye were just screaming for the over the top result that HDR can easily give you.

Laumeir Park is a nice place to walk around, you can bring a picnic if the weather is nice and enjoy looking at all the art.  The particular piece is called The Eye by Tony Tasset, and it is on permanent display in the park.  It almost always has folks standing around it, how could you not stop and stare at an eyeball that is 12 feet in diameter?

So, what do you think of my HDR treatment of this piece of art? do you think you could walk past it without stopping? Your thoughts and comments are welcome below!

Cheers!

Interacting with Art

How do you interact with art? Does it inspire your own work?  I was at Laumeier Sculpture Park and this sculpture caught my eye. It is called “The Palm at the End of the Parking Lot” by Robert Lobe.  It is metal wrapped around a dead walnut tree branch.  It is a big sculpture and I wasn’t really interested in photographing the whole sculpture because it was the detail of the metal contrasted with the wood that caught my attention.  Also, as it just so happened, the sun was shining brightly, but in a way that I could take a shot and the sculpture would be very dramatic against the sky.  This is my final image:

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/6.3 1/250

I will show you an original exposure later in this post but this version is three exposures bracketed together and edited in Photomatix Pro.  I chose the “Painterly” setting, because it was that combination of colors that I liked best.  Kind of funny that this ended up being a sculpture, photographed, and edited using a painting filter.

What do you think? Do you ever photograph art and then edit it? Is that an acceptable thing to do in your opinion, or is it unethical to modify another artists work in that way?  Feel free to leave your comments and thoughts below.

This post was also inspired by the weekly travel theme at Where’s My Backpack? The topic this week is sky.

Here is one of my original shots:

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/6.3 1/250

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Big

I visited the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden over the summer and like everyone else took a picture of the sculpture Spoonbridge and Cherry:

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/7.1 1/250

Given the size of the sculpture, there are many different ways you could shoot it.  When I was shooting, there were a lot of people milling around so that was a factor in the angle I decided to go with.

The other challenge in taking this picture was that it was bright and slightly hazy, which meant that the exposures I was getting were a bit flat.  Given that I had such a high shutter speed to cut down on some of the light, I was pretty confident that I could bracket the exposure and make an HDR image later.  The resulting image is what you see above.  I’ll put the original middle exposure photo below.  You will see that the two are not drastically different.  While HDR is also great for creative images, I think it also works well for standard shots such as this one.  To my way of thinking, it is a clarification of the original shot. The HDR editing software I prefer is Photomatix.  In this case I combined my images and then cropped and sharpened it is Photoshop.

Here is the original image:

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/7.1 1/250

What do you think? Would you have even bothered with the photo editing process on a photo like this?

This post was written in response to the travel theme big over at Where’s My Backpack?

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Sculpture

Sculpture is theme at Where’s My backpack? this week.  This is one of those themes that at first I was thinking that I didn’t have anything, but once I took a look through my archives I realized that I had more than I thought.  I decided to go with this photo in honor of the 4th of July:

The edited photo

This World War II memorial is on the grounds of Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis Missouri. This memorial is on St. Louis County Parks property.  There is a National Cemetery right near the county park.

This photo was a tough one to get and I have to say, if I was to do it again, I would go at a different time.  This photo was taken in the middle of the day, so harsh light and shadows were a problem.  Having said that though, the reality is that I was there when I could be there, so I did the best I could.

At the bottom of this post I will put the original photo, just so you can see what I was up against.  I was thinking that I would use HDR to get a better end result.  So, I tried bracketing my photos, but didn’t really get a great result.  What you see in the above photo is a bit of a false HDR.  It is made from one single image.  In Aperture I made two additional copies of the original.  Then I changed the exposure to -1 on one and -2 on another.  The original I left at 0. These three I merged into HDR using Photomatix.  I ended up liking the version you see above which is using a “painterly” setting.  Then in Photoshop I sharpened and cropped the image.  That’s a bit of fixing for just one image, but here is the original:

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/7.1 1/60

So, that was a bit of work for one photo, but I do like the HDR image better.  What do you think? Feel free to leave a comment below.

A very happy 4th of July to my American readers.

Cheers!