Sunset at Hibernia Park

September 5, 2013

Every now and then, and I never know where or when, I happen to be in a great place at a great time. Last week I had one of those evenings. I was close to Hibernia Park in Chester County, Pennsylvania and realized it was quickly approaching sunset. With a mad dash to get into position and set up my gear, I was able to capture a few beautiful images of the Sun’s descent. The way the rays of light tickled the shoreline on the right was unexpected but wonderful, and the soft reflections in the lake brought out the wispy clouds high above.

Nikon D800 Tamron 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm f/16 ISO 100 9 image HDR

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Click here to see the Sumer 2013 gallery

#WildlifeWednesday Great Egret

September 4, 2013

As luck would have it, while I was driving last evening I passed a pond in which a Great Egret was stalking its prey. I couldn’t have missed his glowing white feathers against the dark green reeds and algae covered water around him. He was preoccupied with his quest for food so he barely gave me a second glance as I approached. After he noticed me he flew to the adjacent side of the pond which yielded him a catch quickly.

He got what he came for (you can see it in his mouth if you look closely) and waded back out to pose for his picture.

When he felt his portrait work was complete he flew off.

He alit on a branch overlooking the pond, surveying the area.

After a few moments (realizing I wasn’t leaving until he did) he set off into the sky.

All these shots were taken with the Nikon D800 set in DX crop mode, with the Tamron 70-200mm f/2.8 lens at various settings.

Tired!

September 3, 2013

My wife and I returned from Acadia National Park late last night. Our flight from Portland, Maine was canceled due to inclimate weather, so we had to drive most of the night to get home for work the today. Here's a quick pic of us hiking in the park. Obviously, more to follow.

September Calendar, free download

August 30, 2013

Here’s your new free desktop calendar. Click the link below the picture to go to a site that you can right click and download the image. This picture was taken at sunrise from the recent trip to Ocean City, Maryland. Have a great September and a fabulous Labor Day Weekend!

Click here to download the September 2013 desktop calendar

The Art of the Sunrise Part Two

August 29, 2013

Last week I wrote about the difficulty of capturing the enormous dynamic range of a sunrise. In case you missed it click here. At the end of the article I mentioned another way to recreate this daily celestial event through photography, H.D.R. or High Dynamic Range photography. If you’re going to process images through a program that uses this technology, you have to do a little planning before you take the picture with your camera. The key to the whole process is that multiple pictures are taken of the same scene at different exposure settings. The darkest image needs to be dark enough so that the brightest part of the picture is not pure white. When a sunrise is the focus of the picture this spot is normally the Sun. The brightest image needs to be light enough so that the darkest part of the picture is not pure black. This is so that during post processing there is color information throughout the picture. Effectively the dynamic range of the picture is compressed to accurately reproduce what the eye perceived but the camera was incapable of recording. This photograph was processed using Nik (Google’s) HDX Efex Pro 2. I took nine images. Here are the darkest and lightest:

After the magic of the HDR program we have this:

And here’s the finished image after a few touch ups in Photoshop.