TopazAdjust

Photo: The near empty deck aboard our cruise ship out at sea, back in February ‘07.

Another one from the archives on the same cruise I brought us back to Miami for the sunrise. It was almost hard to imagine that was had become a peaceful place for a late night stroll out on the open water was previously crammed with kids and families one on top of the other mere hours before.

Seeing as this picture image is coming up on it’s 3rd birthday, it obviously wasn’t an HDR capture. While I did touch it up with Topaz Adjust a little, it would have been great to shoot a scene like this as an HDR image. Seeing as this maiden voyage of our was a company sponsored trip, and we haven’t been aboard a cruise ship since, I can’t say I’ll get around to framing a similar shot ever again, but never say never.

Hidden Gnome?!?

That red cone in the background sure is a focal point, ain’t it? Yet, I can’t help but visualize a hidden resemblance to the Travelocity Gnome in this image.  Do you see it, too?

Work with me here, or at least verify I’m not going crazy at this computer all day.  The red cone in the background is his hat (duh), and the tent at the top of the waterslide is his beard. The blue slide itself is a sorta like his jacket, and let’s just say the aqua pool at the bottom are his slacks. Now you see it, right?

Anyway, feel free to leave your vote as to whether I’m overtired and imagining things, or if you see something, too.  Oh, and you can always comment about the image, too.

– Kris

Photo: The Wolves’ Brett Sterling and Rockford’s Mike Brennan exchange holiday well wishes during a match-up on Sunday. Can’t you just feel the love?

Just a quick post today, and yup, you guessed it, another action shot from Sunday’s Wolves game keeping this week’s theme moving along.

You can only imagine the things that professional athletes say to one another when emotions escalate and the intensity gets too overwhelming.  In the spirit of the season, let’s pretend that Sterling and Brennen are merely exchanging holiday wishes and leave it at that.

Have a safe and happy New Year’s celebration everyone!

– Kris

Photo: Two Chicago Wolves attack the front of the Rockford net while a shot comes in from the point.

Here’s the second image I’ve processed from my photo shoot at the Wolves game on Sunday. I always liked the action in front of the net, even from my days as a defenseman way back when. There were a few neat things with this action shot that I really get a kick out of.

• Where’s the puck?  See if you can find it.
• The forward in front, #27 Johnny Pohl, is leaping in the air out of the way, and in the process, it almost looks like he’s trying to balance on the blade of his hockey stick.
• Again, not to pick on Johnny, but if you view the larger view on Flickr (click on the photo to go there) and look at his face, he appears to have his eyes closed.

As I mentioned yesterday, there was a fair amount of noise in these shots, so I tried to clean it up a little bit here. I also took the image through a little spin in Topaz Adjust like I did with this one, but not as dramatically.

Just Warming Up

There still are a few shots coming this week from Sunday’s game, so hang in there if you’d like to see more. I’m also still riding this excitement from the results of this shoot to the point where I’m trying to make plans for reprocessing photos from my original Flickr account and adding them here to the Hockey Portfolio.

If there was only more time in the day.

One of the other works I put together this week while I was off from work (which went by way too fast by the way). It’s a more artistic version of this original shot of the pools at the Oheo Gulch in East Maui.

The new look is courtesy of a few tweaks to the Spicify effect in Topaz Adjust.

Thoughts?

Let me know what you think of this version versus the original one.

– Kris

I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving on Thursday. My wife and I did our annual pleasantries with her family, and found ourselves back at the Public Landing Restaurant with everyone, marking the third family get together there. It’s a nice place in a 100 year old building in the historic district of the town of Lockport, Il.

I took this photo back in April when we were there for Easter and I was testing out my (then new) Canon SX110 IS as a “carry everywhere” camera. On Thursday, I was hoping to do at least a half hour of HDR shooting prior to the big meal, but the forecast was calling for rain and we ended up getting a later start to the morning than I had hoped.

What Was Old Is New Again

So, instead I decided to take this old shot (which I originally posted back in April) and reprocess it from scratch using ACR and Topaz Adjust seeing that my skills in both of those tools are much improved since the original post. It didn’t help too much that the SX110 doesn’t shoot RAW and there’s more noise called out in post than I would have liked, but it’s still a nice improvement.

Here’s the original shot from last April reposted (and un-cropped).

It wasn’t a terrible image in the first place, but the newly processed version certainly adds a little something.

Thoughts?