Recent Work

Split Rock Lighting

A few weeks back I made my way to Split Rock Lighthouse for the annual lighting.  It takes place every year on November 10th at sunset.  This is the anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

I have made it over to this a few times, trying different spots along the shore each time.  This year, I tried to get closer to lighthouse and use some of the rocks in the water as my foreground.  The lake was higher than I anticipated, so I ended up further to the left of the lighthouse than I was hoping.

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Cathedral of St. Paul

While in the Twin Cities this weekend, my wife and I stopped into the Cathedral of St. Paul.  It is a magnificent building, both inside and out.  While the church does not mind photography, they do not allow tripods without a permit.  I decided against the tripod and went in handheld.

With the range of brightness in the room, I opted to shoot for HDR.  But being I was going handheld, I knew I could only pull 3 shots with faster shutter speeds, hoping to minimize my movement between exposures.  After using the spot meter on my camera, for the shadows and highlights, I found a 1.5 stop difference between the exposures would be sufficient to get the exposures needed in 3 shots.  I knew I would have to use these 3 to process for more exposures to get the results I wanted.  If I did use the tripod, I would have gone for a minimum of 5 exposures, but probably upwards of 9 to cover my bases.

I ended up with 5 processed images, and moved them to HDR Efex for HDR processing.  Below is the result:

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Twins Game

My wife had never been to see a Twins game live before.  So last weekend we spent a few days in the cities and took in the Friday night game.  This is a panorama image taken with my iPhone of the field once the sun set and the lights were completely on.

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Canal Park

My wife and I spent a few days in Duluth last week.  We did a few hikes and just took the time to get away from work for a while.  One of the mornings I went down to Canal Park to capture sunrise.  Originally I was planning on going over by Lester Park and shoot by the lake, but there was a lot of heavy equipment down there for some road construction they were doing.  That sent me to Canal Park, as I was short on time when I got to the park.  I had just enough time to mount the camera on the tripod, setup the filter before the sun broke the horizon, and lit the clouds up from below.

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Hosta

My wife has a bunch of hosta plants around the yard. Late last week, while walking around the yard, the lines on one particular plant caught my eye. I ended up putting a 12mm extension tube onto my 17-40 lens so that I could get close enough to focus, and accentuate the lines in the leaves. Something my macro lens wasn’t doing. The side lighting from the sun gave some life to the texture of the leaves.

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Sparklers

We had a family bbq on the 4th, and my wife gave all of our nieces and nephews sparklers to play with while we waited for the fireworks to begin.  This is one of my nieces looking towards me just as it was lit.
I spot metered her face, and upped the exposure a little.  I wanted to make sure I had a brighter exposure to work with since I was shooting at such a high ISO.

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