HDR

Photo: Looking out at a frozen winter wonderland of snow and icy water.

I shot this during the same early morning session as the image from yesterday. After freezing my tail off – and forgetting my gloves in the car – I headed inside to call it a morning. While in the stairway back up to our room, I saw this view out of the window and played around with how to give it an interesting look.

Photo: One of the waterfront facing buildings of the Stone Harbor Resort, overlooking the frozen waters of Sturgeon Bay.

This was shot from the first early morning session I did over the weekend up in Wisconsin. I shot it as an HDR image, and at the time, I was a little unsure how it would turn out because of the overcast skies that early in the day left me no shadows to play with.

Photomatix took it close to halfway of what you see here, but Topaz Adjust brought out even more detail, and gave the building a nice two tone look from the brick and the other paneling.

Hockey Alert!

For those that were following along on my new Facebook page late last week, might have caught that I picked up on a hockey game one of my former players was playing in down in Green Bay. It’s been a longer delay than I had anticipated, but I’m going through all the shots now and getting ready to post them.

So, if you liked the recent hockey shots from a few weeks ago, time for another skate.

– Kris

Photo: A pickup truck parked out on a frozen Europe Lake in Northern Door County, WI.

I captured this image while standing in the middle of a frozen lake up in Door County over the weekend. There were a few vehicles out there with adventurous ice fisherman braving the elements and enjoying a popular winter pastime in this part of the country.

Even though there were entire pickup trucks and minivans driving around on this ice, we were still a little leery about trekking out ourselves. Seeing as I grew up playing hockey my whole life, you’d think being out on a frozen lake would come natural, but playing it safe seemed to be the order of the day. Looking back, I almost wish I had brought my skates like I did the previous winter trip up north.

Photo: A look at the Stone Harbor Resort in Sturgeon Bay, WI from the Bayview Park located just on the other side of the water.

Let the darkroom work commence! Now that we’re back home from our latest road trip up north, it’s time to get cranking on processing and uploading all the photos I took.

This first shot is from a series I did on Saturday afternoon, about an hour before sunset. We’re looking East here towards the resort we were staying at this time. The park where this was taken is visible from the resort via my telephoto lens, so I had to scope it out on Google Maps and make the drive over there.

Can’t wait to come back to this spot during the warm summer months.

– Kris

Photo: An HDR image of the scoreboard at the Allstate Arena, in Rosemont, IL

Not exactly another hockey image from last week, but something I felt like sharing today. I captured the source images for this at a game in November in between periods. Seeing that there’s not a lot of opportunities to shoot HDR at a sporting event while the action is going on, I looked elsewhere.

Now, some HDR images can be taken handheld, but wasn’t taking any chances with the indoor lighting I was in. Since tripods are frowned upon in sports arenas, I was lucky enough to have seats right between the railing separating our section from the one in front of us. That, and my friend the 2-second delay timer, and I had an instant tripod.

I shot this with my Canon 20D, which its tiny LCD viewer (when compared to my Rebel XSi) didn’t give me too good of an indication whether the frames I took would work. In the end, I think it came out okay.

What do you think?