Lighthouse

Photo: The very top of the Cana Island lighthouse looking over trees as seen from across a nearby bay.

Another, more closer to Earth view of the Cana Island lighthouse that was featured last week in the Before and After series. I grabbed this shot with my point and shoot after seeing the view from the road on the way back to our hotel.  Didn’t even get out of the car, just opened the window and snap.

I brought out more of the trees and surface of the water with Topaz Detail and the Feature Enhancement preset.

Follow-up to Yesterday

In yesterday’s post I posed the question of which whether the use of Topaz Adjust or Topaz Detail worked better with that particular image. I had a few comments on Flickr with some good feedback, and if you’d like to weigh in, please do.

– Kris

Photo: An aerial image of Cana Island near Baileys Harbor in Door County, Wisconsin and the lighthouse that shares its name.

Preparing to be overloaded with hockey imagery soon, I thought I’d bring back a few older photos to add a little variety.  This image is from the aerial photo shoot I did back in October over the coastline of the Door County peninsula in northern Wisconsin. You can read the post behind the photo shoot there to relive some of the challenges I encountered with this particular aerial shoot, but I gave this image another go now that I’m trying out Topaz Detail from TopazLabs.

I’m still getting the hang of some of the options and when to use Topaz Detail instead of some of the presets in Topaz Adjust, so we’ll see how this works its way into my workflow in some scenarios.

Drop the Puck

Time to get ready. First of two hockey games at ice level starts on Sunday, following up with a rendezvous in almost the exact same seats the following Sunday.  Getting excited!

Let’s see how the Canon f/2.8 70-200mm lens I’m renting for these games steps up to the challenge that my existing lens have struggled with.  Here’s to hoping for the best.

– Kris

I put this image together late last night while working on the final photos for the calendar gift we’re putting together. The version isn’t included in the calendar, but I liked it enough to post it to my secondary Flickr account.

I wasn’t shooting HDR yet last April when I captured the source image for this, so what you see here is all done in post mostly with Topaz Adjust.  Since I’ve been only using the plug-in for less than two months, I’m still getting the hang of it, but last night I finally discovered the Boost slider on the Details tab.  Had sort of a “ah ha” moment at that point, and now I have another technique I can start using more intelligently.

Ultimately, I’d like to go back and shoot scenes like this with AEB for doing HDR, and given that this is up in northern Wisconsin and not Maui, I’ll probably have a good chance of doing that more often than not.

Feel free to let me know what you like about this image, and maybe some ideas for things you would have done differently.

Thanks,
– Kris

Here’s the first photo I’ve edited and uploaded from my aerial shoot over Door County, WI this passed weekend. There are still more to come, but I wanted to get at least one online first.