A few shots from last year

[Jwbaker13]

Thought I would share a few:












Here's a weird one:

It was closing time and we were going over the big bridge out of the park. ; Either the lighting there was down or my eyes hadn't adjusted; at any rate, it was very dark. ; As we passed over the bridge I caught some movement out of the corner of my eye. ; As my vision adjusted, I could see that there were a bunch of white things in the trees: ; Roosting birds. ; I put the camera on the bridge and took a couple of long exposures. ; I had no idea there were so many of them there until I checked the image later. ; While I'm not completely happy with the HDR, the standard image was really boring.

 

[PolynesianMedic]

There are a ton of birds that roost there at night. ; Nice shots.

 

[Scottwdw]

Awesome processing, care to share your workflow for them?

 

[Tim]

fantastic colors on the duck shot (#2).

 

[MJHurley]

Beautiful series of shots. I really like the detail on the teal. It looks like a painting.

 

[jbwolffiv]

Very nice work! ; I really like the third one, the temple, best!

 

[zackiedawg]

I like the 1st and 3rd - nice detail shots and the first an unusual study of the architecture that I never really thought of, since I'm always paying more attention to the tigers!

It is amazing how many birds roost there, isn't it?! ; Florida is like that - my local wetlands areas where I go birding have at least that many birds every night.

 

[Jwbaker13]

Awesome processing, care to share your workflow for them?

Sure.
If I'm going to play with HDR, I normally start with 3 bracketed raw images. ; But, if I'm shooting stuff that moves (like the duck) I'll go with a single image. ; I just realized that the temple shots were done in '09 before I really started doing HDR, so I only had a single image available.

Anyway, here's one of the originals:

I'll took that into Photomatix Pro and processed it there to my liking. ; This is where I got the saturated colors I wanted. ;

Once I was happy with the image, I opened it in Photoshop. I didn't like the look of the sky, so I brought in the original image and used a Layer Mask to bring the original sky back. ; Then I flattened the image and used the Viveza 2 tools to finish tweaking colors (including the sky), sharpening, exposure, etc.

 

[Jwbaker13]

the first an unusual study of the architecture that I never really thought of, since I'm always paying more attention to the tigers!

Heh... I really wanted a tiger in that shot but they just weren't cooperating. ; I think this is the only image of I tiger I got that was decent: