Blue hour at Big Ben

Guess where I took this photo?  :-)

Every time I visit London, I make sure and stop by this spot looking at Big Ben across the River Thames.  It’s the classic London shot, and I take a lot of them.  I know every one else does too, so it’s not special, but it’s a great spot and why not take a boat load of shots from here?  It’s a great view.

There’s a reason this is one of the “famous” spots to shoot in London - it kicks ass.  Wouldn’t you take a million shots of it too?  It’s lovely!

Bay Bridge blues

I generally shoot 7 frames for my HDR’s, and depending on the outcome generally use all of them.  However, I find that sometimes I get all I need out of a single exposure.  This was just what happened with this shot.

It was blue hour early one morning in San Francisco, and I had my Nikon pointed at the Bay Bridge, which is pretty common for me when I visit that town.  I fired all 7 like normal, but when it came time to process, I really just liked this single exposure all by itself.  In this case, HDR didn’t really help me any.

That doesn’t happen a lot, and it depends on what look you are trying to achieve with the shot, but when it does happen it sure makes the processing a little quicker!

Blue hour in Copenhagen

I shared a “behind the keyboard” screenshot of this scene last week on my Facebook page.  It was a screenshot taken while editing this photo in Color Efex Pro, and I shared it because I thought the difference between the original “flat” HDR and the “almost” end result were quite dramatic.  It’s amazing what software can do to help you bring a dramatic scene back to life.  The straight from camera RAW files were flat as they normally are, and the HDR straight from Photomatix was rather flat too.  That’s ok though, because it’s the filters in Color Efex Pro that help me recreate the scene as I remember it.  Ok, maybe I boosted the colors a little.  :-)

By the way, this was taken at Nyhavn in Copenhagen, Denmark during a wonderful blue hour (my favorite time to shoot).  It’s a very photogenic area of a very photogenic city.  I hope I can return some day.

Here's the screenshot, while I am at it:

The lobby at The Grand Wailea

When I travel, I try to make a habit of getting up for sunrise at least once.  It’s just better.  You get great light most of the time, and everyone else is asleep.  But I admit, it’s hard to do, especially when traveling east.  It’s hard enough losing time due to time zone changes.

But when I travel west it gets much easier of course.  In this case, I was in Hawaii a few weeks back and getting up there was easy.  In fact, I got up at 3am the first morning!  That’s a little too early, but my body thought it was 8am.  Oh well, the challenges of time zone changes.

Anyways, since I was up before sunrise I figured I should get out and shoot some, and the hotel lobby at the Grand Wailea in Maui is just gorgeous.  Anytime there is water running, I get pretty fired up.  During the daytime the sun is just too bright to make this shot work, but before dawn it looks pretty awesome!

Blue hour on the Austin skyline

I may be a little biased, but I think the Austin skyline is pretty awesome.  Anytime I can get a skyline with a river in front of it (hello, Nashville!) then I am pretty happy, especially during sunset or blue hour.  Everything just seems so calm and peaceful...but in reality, I am firing brackets like a madman!

I grabbed this one a few weeks back when I was out with my friends Andy and Kay (and Kay’s wife - they were in town from Germany).  Glad we were able to show them a nice view of Austin!