Downtown Austin Skyline at Dusk, originally uploaded by DaveWilsonPhotography.

Here’s the first image I’ve posted from the photowalk last night. This was one of the ones I was looking for when I organised the trek and I’m very happy with the result. I’m putting together a collection of local images for a show at the beginning of June and wanted a large canvas as the centrepiece so set out to capture something local and impressive.

This image uses a mixture of two techniques I’ve been using a lot lately. It is constructed from 4 separate HDR images each built from 3 exposures (12 frames in all). After processing each HDR into one section of the final image, I stitched them together into a wide panorama using Photoshop CS4.

I hope to be able to print this 4′x2′ on canvas for the show but I guess that will depend upon the price of said canvas print!

After a last minute call on the Austin Photography Group message board a couple of days ago, a group of about a dozen photographers gathered at the Stevie Ray Vaughan statue on Lady Bird Lake for a photowalk in downtown Austin yesterday evening. We spent a very enjoyable 3 hours wandering up Congress Avenue to the Capitol then back down to the lake in time to shoot some dusk skylines.

I spent more time chatting than shooting though I did manage to take both the shots I was looking for – panoramas of the Capitol rotunda interior and the downtown skyline with reflections in the lake.

One of the best aspect of the evening for me was a chance to meet three photographers I’ve known from various online groups but never actually met in person. Evan Gearing is an Austin photographer whose HDR images are among the best around. Brian Matiash is another well known HDR photographer based in Boston but, coincidentally, was in Austin for the weekend. Brian was shooting with Jack Hollingsworth, known to most photographers who use Twitter as @photojack. It was great to meet these guys and I’m very interested to see what they post as a result of the evening.

Given the success of the jaunt, I suspect there will be more of these gatherings in future. Would anyone like to suggest possible routes?