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Capitol Extension Staircase, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

Here’s another of Friday’s shots. This was taken in the “new” extension at the Texas State Capitol. I have a hard time getting decent images in there since there is a strange mixture of artificial tungsten/halogen lighting and daylight from the large skylights. This shot, however, takes advantage of the mix by using the daylight to provide the strange blue glow around the top level of the staircase.

I’m rather happy with the composition here even though Nikki tells me it looks like a giant toilet.

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Texas State Senate Dais, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

Yesterday was my annual birthday photography day but the weather once again failed to cooperate. I had planned to get together with Mike Broadway to shoot architecture around the West 6th Street area but with overcast skies and drizzle we decided to put this off. Instead, I headed downtown and took some more interior HDRs at the State Capitol. Driskill Hotel and a wonderfully interesting old antique shop. Expect to see more of these later but here’s the first one from the Senate Chamber in the Capitol.

This was generated from within Lightroom using the new Photomatix Export Plug-In. Using this, the raw files are processed by Lightroom and exported to Photomatix as 16 bit TIFFs and I’m pretty convinced that this yields significantly sharper results than using Photomatix own raw parser.

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Lamar Footbridge, Austin, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

A pleasantly soothing photo for today. Unlike most of the HDR shots I’ve been playing with recently, I processed this one to look pretty normal and merely bring out the shadow detail that would otherwise be clipped in a single exposure. This is the new(ish) pedestrian footbridge over Lady Bird Lake in Austin at Lamar Boulevard. It was taken using my Canon Powershot G9 on a Gorillapod about 15 minutes or so after the Hyatt Hotel interior I posted last week.

Nikki frequently stumbles upon some hilarious web sites. Given that tomorrow is all about stuffing yourself senseless, here are a couple that will likely reduce your appetite, either because the foods they show are rather unappetising or because you are laughing so hard you are unable to eat.

Weight Watchers recipe cards from 1974. A wonderful blend of horrendous sounding meals with some of the worst food photography I have ever seen.

Knudsen Recipes from 1959. Brought to you by the Gallery of Regrettable Foods, this site showcases the “very best” that could be produced using products from the Knudsen dairy company. I hate to imagine what got rejected before publication.

Enjoy!

I don’t think I blogged this before but I’ve set up a second Flickr account to let me post family snapshots for friends and relative to look at without mixing these up with my “arty” stuff. If you are interested in the latest images of whatever we are up to, you can find them here.

As if two wasn’t enough, I also post all my photos taken on Cub Scout activities to another account which I just paid the Pro fee for. This seemed to make sense since it allows me to upload high resolution images for parents to download and print without me having to email them multiple times.

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Harris’ Hawk, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

I’m thoroughly enjoying Adobe Lightroom 2.1 and after only a month or so using it am having a hard time imagining how I handled my image library before. I suppose, to be honest, I didn’t really have an “image library” – I had a collection of helpfully named directories on my hard disk containing large numbers of JPG, PSD, TIFF and HDR files. All that’s changed with Lightroom though – I can now search, categorise and flag my whole collection with usable response times (yes, Bridge can do some of this but have you used it to do keyword searches?)

One of the pleasant unintended benefits of the switch to using Lightroom has been the fact that it has given me an opportunity to look through my old images as I am keywording the ones that slipped through the net earlier. In this review, I’ve come across a few gems like this one. This image of a Harris’ Hawk was taken this summer at the Texas State Aquarium in Corpus Christ. The G9 I was carrying around that day steamed up when I got it out to take a few shots of the hawk and the first two were completely blurred. The last two, however, were clear and unexpectedly sharp.

This image has been mucked with in Lightroom and exported directly to Flickr with no Photoshop involvement at all. It’s been cropped down to about 20% of the original image area (most of which was boring background since I was about 5 feet from the subject), vignetted, saturation and clarity tweaked and selectively sharpened and I’m rather happy with the result.

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Hyatt Hotel, Austin, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

Most of the time, I try to post pictures that I am really happy with to the blog but this one falls into the “near miss” category. It’s a 3 exposure HDR taken using my Canon G9 on a Gorillapod and falls into a category I call “Hail Mary Photography”. Typically, this type of picture is taken in a rush with the though that there is an outside chance that the result will work and yield something worthwhile. In this case, I had about 2 minutes to set things up, get the shot then follow Nikki out to the Hike and Bike Trail.

While the Gorillapod is a wonderful tool, it’s not as forgiving as a tripod when it comes to expecting no movement while fiddling with camera settings partway through a multi-exposure bracket. As a result, I’m pretty much limited to the 3 shot bracket the G9 allows me with no more than 2 stops either side of nominal. This particular shot, however, required at least one more exposure (-4 stops probably, maybe even -6) to get some definition in the skylight but, given the time constraints and the camera movement risk, I didn’t try to take this and ended up with a burned out triangle at the top of the shot.

Thank goodness for Lightroom 2.0′s nice graduated filter that allowed me to burn this in such that it almost looks like I intended the picture to look that way

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Old Filling Station, Driftwood, Texas, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

One of my pictures has made it to the final panel of this year’s PCPhoto Magazine competition. If you have time, and like the image, I would be very grateful if you could vote for it by clicking here and pressing the relevant button.

Voting extends until December 1st. Thanks in advance for your support!

On Tuesday, I had some time free between shooting at the Caswell House and a meeting I was going to so decided to put the D90′s high ISO performance and my VR lenses to the test while wandering around the parking lot at Central Market. It was about 6:30pm and totally dark aside from the street lighting around the lot and store. Here are a couple of shots, both taken hand-held with the 80-300mm VR lens. The first was taken at ISO3200 and the second at ISO6400 (HI+1). I’m extremely impressed by how usable both images are and, given that the shutter speed for the 6400 one was 1/30th, I’m also impressed at the operation of the VR – that’s about 3 stops better than I would have expected given that the lens was set to 300mm at the time.

Click on each image for a larger version. In each case, all I’ve done is crop and resave the image – no noise reduction, sharpening or any other adjustments. I did compress the images so I’ve introduced some JPEG artifacts but hopefully not too many to get the point across. Originals were in NEF format, exported to JPEG in Lightroom and cropped in Photoshop (yes, I could have done this in Lightroom too).

3200ISO, VR lens at 220mm, handheld
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Detail:
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6400ISO, VR lens at 300mm, handheld
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Detail:
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Decorated Doorway, Caswell House, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

Nikki and I spent last Satuday evening at an annual fundraiser dinner for Austin Junior Forum at their historic, downtown headquarters, the Caswell House. Each year, they decorate the house and hold a (rather early) sale of Christmas ornaments and gifts.

I didn’t have a camera with me on Saturday but headed back down, D90, super-wide lens and tripod in hand, on Tuesday evening and took a few shots of the decorations. I had sized up two particular shots I wanted to take on Saturday but discovered that they had rearranged the house somewhat by Tuesday and the staircase was now a fully equipped photo studio for “Portraits with Santa” and the fireplace was now occupied by a guitar player, his music stand and guitar case. Maybe next year I’ll be able to find an uncluttered time and take these shots. For the meantime, though, here’s one of the resulting images. If you click through it you can find some more on my Flickr photostream.