I took a quick trip to the North Shore for some winter shooting. I expected more snow, which was pretty scarce. The first night was spent shooting sunset on the Blatnik Bridge, and then some random shooting around Canal Park. The next morning was spent at Split Rock Lighthouse, hoping for a good sunrise.
Both times out were pretty cold, double digit below zero, and 10-15mph winds.
The bowling alley in town moved into a new building about a year ago or so now. During winters, some friends and I will use the golf simulator that is located in their bar area. The last few times, the liquor bottles have caught my attention. They all sit on a shelf which is lit from the bottom, allowing the light to shine through the bottles. Yesterday, while using the simulator, I asked the bartender if I could photograph the bar. She got the owner’s approval, so this morning I ran over right at opening.
Due to the lighting on the bottles, the only way I knew I could get the results I was looking for was to do an HDR. I ended up with 11 shots in one stop increments to make this HDR image. I used Nik HDR Efex Pro to merge the images and process it, then used Photoshop for some minor cleanup, sharpening and adding a vignette to darken the edges. The final touch was to use Nik Color Efex Pro’s Glamor Glow to add a slight amount of glow to the bottles.
My wife has started a small collection of old camera’s for me. I have wanted to photograph them for a while now, but never really tried. A few weeks ago we found an old Kodak Junior Six-16 Series II w/original case at a local antique store. The front of this camera really caught my attention, so this evening I decided to set a small table and take a few shots. It took me more time than I thought it would to find a composition I liked, but finally was able to lock in on it. Once I had the composition I was looking for, I locked the camera down on the tripod and shot away.
I knew when I was shooting, that I wanted to process the image to give it an old look. After some basic processing in Lightroom, I pulled the image Photoshop and Nik Silver Efex Pro to finish it up. I added some grain, the border and a tad bit of over sharpening in Photoshop, and then use Nik for the B&W conversion. The results are below:
I have worked through almost all of my images from the workshop, and this is one of my favorites from the whole trip. It was a calm morning with a comfortable temperature. I waited a while for the fog to burn completely off of the lake, but it didn’t, well, not as along I was sitting there.
Nonetheless, I found the composition I liked, and used a Graduated Neutral Density filter to get more pop out of the colorful trees. The sky was perfectly clear, and really looked boring, so I eliminated as much of it out of the image as I could, using the rocks in the foreground more than the sky.
I have been really busy again of late, but thought I should post a few more from the workshop I attended in October. This image was made at a small creek which feeds into the Au Train River. It was a nice overcast day with pretty much no wind. This helped things sit still and the the shutter speed get long enough to accentuate the motion of the water.
Here are 2 more images from the workshop I attended a couple of weeks ago. These were taken while doing a boat tour along the Pictured Rocks National Shoreline. I found the colors and shapes of the rocks made for some interesting abstract images.
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