Travel Theme: Metal

Cahokia Mounds, ever heard of it? It a UNESCO World Heritage site that is just outside of St. Louis Missouri.  Here is Monk’s Mound the largest remaining part of the site:

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Cahokia Mounds are the remains of a society that was living in the area in A.D. 700-1400.  At its peak there may have been as many as 20,000 people living in the area.  The modern stairs in the photo are on the site of stairs that would have been used when this older culture was flourishing.  When you climb to the top, you get a view of modern day St. Louis:

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The metallic glow of St. Louis is quite jarring in comparison.  Archeologists have found relatively little metal at the Cohokia site, just a few bits of copper.  Tools of bone and stone are much more common.  The site has a very nice interpretive center and if you go for a visit, that is where I would recommend you start.  It is interesting to look through what is known about the site and then think about all the things that aren’t known.

On the day we visited, I wasn’t really thrilled with the photos I was getting as I was looking on the back of my camera.  I decided to shoot bracketed exposures and edit them in Photomatix.  Once I was in Photomatix I decided to use a surreal setting for my final photos.  I wanted the stairs to pop in the first photo and the metallic glow and odd sky in the second photo.  I would say I was looking for a bit of drama to illustrate my story.  Below are two of the original photos, both the middle exposure I shot:

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I felt that the HDR and surreal settings help to illustrate between these two cultures.  What do you think? Does it make that point? Does it do it well, or is it too overdone for your liking?  Your comments are welcome below.

Cheers!

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:

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

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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!

Imposter Art Lover

Sure, I like art, I’ve even taken a few classes and been to a few museums.  But perhaps that is not enough.  It was suggested to me the other day when I couldn’t name a certain photographer by looking at just one photo, that I maybe wasn’t really cultured enough.  It was a comment made to make me feel smaller than the person who was leading the discussion, and it did work, temporarily.

Here’s the thing, art is pretty hard to define, so deciding who is cultured enough to understand it is hard as well.  After thinking about this exchange I decided that while maybe I do not have a broad or deep enough understanding of art, I will continue to enjoy it in my own way, because I feel it adds a lot to my life.

The International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum recently relocated to St. Louis, so I went to check it out.  Their feature exhibit right now is called: Decisive Moments: 20th Century Street Photography. Street photography is not something I do all that much myself, but I do enjoy looking at photographers who do it well.

They also have many types of cameras on display.  Here is one that caught my eye:

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This museum is modest in size but impressive in what it has to offer on display, so worth a visit for the art lover or imposter.

Cheers!

I believe I will stay inside and watch the Robots

There was a time when I would have laughed if you had told me that I would stay inside on a beautiful spring day to watch a robotics competition.  Then I had kids, one of which is a self-proclaimed robot nerd, so there I was this weekend, watching the action from the sidelines.  My robot child is involved with FIRST Robotics FRC which is high school aged teams.  It’s my job to 1. Take pictures.  2. Sometimes provides snacks.  3. Nod like I know what my robot child is talking about when she is explaining stuff to me. So this weekend I took pictures, here is a look inside a competition; first a bird’s eye view from the stands:

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Second, some of the bots on the field:

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Third, one bot ready to launch a ball:

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Lastly, a partial view of the pits where the robots are worked on in between matches:

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Three things that going to a FIRST Robotics competition will teach you are false: 1. Kids these days are slackers. Wrong, I’m sure some are but then so are some adults. 2. If your robots is broken, too bad so sad.  Wrong, request a part and another team will help you out, even if they are competing against you. 3. Robot children can’t dance. Wrong, they can just as well or badly as the general population.

So, need an indoor activity in April and happen to be in St. Louis?  Stop by the Championship and check out all the fun and be amazed by the brain power kids today have to offer.

This post was written in response to the Weekly Photo Challenge: Inside and the Daily Post: I Believe.

Cheers!

 

 

 

Travel Theme: Ancient

This week’s travel theme at Where’s My Backpack? is ancient. I was at the St. Louis Art Museum this past week for a special exhibit where I saw this painting and a floral interpretation of it:

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The painting is Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion by John Martin, painted in 1812.  The floral arrangement is by Ivy Baebler of the Federated Garden Clubs of MO.  To be honest, I wasn’t sure what I was going to think of this exhibit before I went.  It turns out, I really liked it.  Of course, because the flowers fade quickly, it is an exhibit that lasts only a few days and is very crowded.  The difficulty in shooting something like this starts with those crowds.  I was also kind of surprised at the number of people who were touching the flowers.  I guess to me it just seemed like the floral arrangements were created works of art and touching them would potentially mess up the composition.  That aside, it was hard for my point and shoot to capture all the detail of both the floral work and the painting.  I tried though, just to give the feel of the exhibit.

Have you ever been to an exhibit like this? I’ll admit I hadn’t.

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Possibility

We have a tradition in this family of going out for a meal to celebrate birthdays.  This year, for one special birthday, we went to breakfast.  Here is what was ordered:

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We went to the Courtesy Diner here in St. Louis home of Dr. Dan the pancake man, who is also on Facebook.  Actually, we just ordered the pancakes and said it was for a 16th birthday and this is what Dr. Dan created.  The Courtesy Diner is pretty much what you would expect, basic, filling, and tasty.  I had called in advance to make sure that Dr. Dan was on the schedule, because pancakes is what the birthday child had requested.

As for the photo, it was taken with my Canon Powershot, which for moments like this is perfect.  As for this post, it was written in response to the travel theme possibility over at Where’s My Backpack? because at sixteen there are a lot of possibilities for the year and for your life.

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:

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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:

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Cheers!

Travel Theme: Short

This post is about two types of travel, on-line and in person.  The photo I am posting today is from a short local trip I took to Jefferson Barracks.  Jefferson Barracks has a National Cemetery and a separate but connected park that is part of the St. Louis County Park system.  I was visiting the County Park section that has displays about the history of the site as an Army post from 1826-1946.  That is where I took this photo:

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This was a tough shot to get.  First it was windy and I had no tripod, so I knew if there was any chance that I might catch this bee, I would have to have a quick shutter speed.  Secondly, I thought about my f-stop setting.  I knew that the background was busy, but I thought if I blurred it enough, you would be able to tell I was in a garden without getting too distracted about many of the details.  I settled on f/8.  That made the bee and flower clear but the background blurred.  The third issue was lighting.  It was very bright out, but the bee and the shadow of the petals of the flower it was on were quite dark.  I tried using an ISO of 100 and my flash.  While sometimes the flash can help add light in dark areas that are close but the background is bright, in this case it just really looked artificial, and to me it was important for this image to look as natural as possible.  So I put my ISO up a bit to 320.  I’ll show you the original photograph below and tell you that I was pretty happy with it.  This photo has been sitting in my photo library not thought of much until I took another trip.

This trip was on-line.  I love looking through other people’s blogs.  I also really appreciate it when people visit my blog and leave comments.  Sometimes, folks leave a comment regarding editing and leave a tip for me to try.  This was the case last week when I posted about a Snowy Owl.  A photographer named Liz who writes Nature on the Edge left me a tip about how she uses levels to make adjustments.  It was a way of using levels that I had never tried.  I thought that was interesting, so I went to check out her blog and see what type of work she does.  The link that I left above was the post that I looked at and then thought again of my bee photo.  Her nature shots were beautiful and very simple.  A simple image was what I was trying to do with my bee.  My last remaining issue with that photo was that it was still too dark in the stalk of the flower and the bee.  So I used her suggestion to make a very subtle edit, on that you might not even notice unless you were looking very closely.  Here is the original:

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What I did was this.  In Photoshop, copied the original photo.  The used a levels adjustment layer and adjusted for the bee.  The cmd-control-i to invert and make a mask.  On the mask I took a black paint brush and painted over the background which was now really too bright.  Once I was satisfied with the bee and the background, I cropped and sharpened the image.

What do you think?  it is a pretty small adjustment don’t you think? Feel free to leave a comment below.

The travel theme at Where’s My Backpack? this week is short.  It actually took me longer to write this post than to do the editing, so the editing process was short.  I thought that both my in person and on-line trips were short, but what fun, I’m glad I went.

Cheers!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Layers

Sometimes there is more to a photograph than meets the eye.  In this case, the photo I am posting is actually three photos.  I shot this Bald Eagle using a bracketed exposure so that I could create an HDR image to show as much detail in the bird as possible:

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I shot this photo as part of a series of ten images, this particular one is also in my Picfair portfolio.  In order to create these images I rented this 70-300mm lens.  Because I knew I was going to want to get a bracketed exposure I made sure to take along my tripod to help me get as still of an image as possible.  I have written about other birds in this series, most recently about a Peregrine Falcon.  For this photo, I wanted to blur out the background almost completely.  I wanted to use the green to contrast with and bring out the color of the beak and eye.

I took this photo at World Bird Sanctuary at a Camera Day that they were hosting.  This was a great opportunity for me to get a photo like this without any of the bird’s enclosure in the background.  The Bald Eagle is also the national bird of the United States, yet has faced a difficult time here in recent history.  While population numbers for this bird are moving in a positive way, there is still the need for some of them to live in sanctuaries.  While I love to see these birds in the wild, sometimes they are injured, brought to sanctuaries, and then unable to live again in the wild.  Eagles like this one I photographed, work to bring awareness to people of how they can help make sure that this birds thrive in the wild.

The theme this week is layers for the photo challenge at WordPress.  So this is my layered post: 1bird, 3 exposures; 1 post, 6 links.  One photograph, but many things to think about about, what do you think? Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

Weekly Photo Challenge: (Scanning the) Horizon

This is a female Peregrine Falcon:

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The peregrine falcon scans the horizon looking for prey while it is in flight.  When it  spots a potential meal it can dive at speeds up to 200 miles per hour.  You can tell this is a female by it colored breast feathers.  The link I have included shows a photo of a male.

This photo I took at World Bird Sanctuary, at one of their Camera Day events.  If you live or are visiting the St. Louis area on November 3rd, they will be hosting another event and it is a great opportunity to take photos of various birds of prey in a natural setting.  That was how I managed to get close enough to get this profile shot.

To get this photo I used a tripod.  I was working on a project that is a series of birds of prey in HDR.  In order to make the HDR image I used a series of three images with different exposures.  Combining them later into one image to bring out more detail in the bird.  I used my bracketing setting on my camera and also a very high shutter speed.  For this photo I wanted to have the background very blurred, in part because I wanted to have the viewer focus on the bird, and in part to honor the fact that these birds seem to be able to live with any sort of backdrop as their home.  They can be found nesting in vast open spaces and also very crowded cities.

This particular photo is a 5×7 card and a print, along with the rest of the series which is available for viewing here on my website.  I have also blogged about a few of the other photos.  Here are links for the Eastern Screech Owl, Long-Crested Eagle, Eurasian Eagle Owl, and the Barn Owl.

This post was written in response to the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge which has horizon as a theme for this week.

What do you think of my peregrine falcon? Have you ever seen one of these beautiful birds in flight or diving?  Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!