I learned long ago that regardless of what I’m aiming my camera at, I always need to look behind me. Sometimes the best shot is the opposite direction in spite of my pro-shoot plans. This perspective is looking back towards the rear of the First Presbyterian Church. I posted a photo of the front of this church back on November 29th.
1st Presbyterian Christmas Tree
This beautiful old church is in downtown Pittsburgh…. They do a great job of decorating for the holidays.
To view a larger version, click HERE
Presby Again
Keeping with the season, here is another holiday photo from within First Presbyterian Church in downtown Pittsburgh. It’s a great facility and they do a nice job decorating it for the Christmas season. I took this one from the balcony.
To view a larger version, click HERE
First Presbyterian
Here is a holiday photo from years ago. This was taken many years ago now…. Brad, David and I got access to this church at something like 7am in the morning on a weekday before work. They had the church open for homeless to come in to get out of the winter weather. Good times.
Anyway, I reprocessed it using today’s technology and software. It’s amazing how much better it looks.
To view a larger version, click HERE
First United Methodist
I don’t know what it is about doors, but I’m always drawn towards photographing them. These doors are from the First United Methodist Church in Washington PA. The church started in 1784 and moved to this building in 1876. Presidents Andrew Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant both attended services with this church during their time when traveling through the area. Regardless, I like this photo and I hope you do as well.
To view a larger version, click here: https://500px.com/photo/201113437/first-united-methodist-by-brook-ward?ctx_page=1&from=user&user_id=3695440
Christmas In May ----- HDR Stages
Let’s start with the “Christmas in May”. So thinking about what to post tonight, I decided to go back to my photos from December 2011 and use a picture I took of the First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh. I’ve had three people in the last week mention the picture I originally posted of this church back when I took it. It occurred to me that I never really used any other pictures from that photo walk. Therefore we have Christmas In May. When I look at these pictures all I can think about is Christmas.
Here is the link of the original I posted over a year ago:
Click Here
Don’t forget to look at the rest of the post below the picture.
To purchase a print or view the entire gallery, please click the photo above.
HDR Stages:
So you’ve probably seen me comment in past blog posts about how many exposures I’ve taken and whether they were auto-brackets. So of you might be wondering what the heck I am talking about. I thought I would show you what it takes (in stages) to create my HDR photographs.
First, I take three photos or more of the same subject either manually or with an auto-bracket function on my camera. Here is what they look like for tonight’s photo right out of the camera. Notice, none of them look great, but the EV (Exposure Value 0 is what the camera thinks is the best picture and is what most camera will produce)
EV 0 - this is the exposure the camera thinks is perfect.
EV -2 This is the under exposed picture.
EV +2 This is the over exposed picture.
Then I merge them using Photomatix Pro to create the HDR image. If you are wondering what HDR is, see this earlier post that covers this topic by clicking
HERE
As you can see, the HDR picture doesn’t look great at this point and they normally don’t look good at this stage.
This is the HDR image right out of Photomatix Pro. Ugly right!!
Finally, I take the HDR image and all the original images into Photoshop CS6 to do some blending, cropping, color correction, etc…. some of which is my secret sauce. But in the end, you get the final product. On average, it takes me between 20 minutes to an hour per picture to get a final product I am happy with. Which gets us back to the final image that I posted tonight.
Final Photograph
Start Up
This is my first attempt at creating and using a blog. I thought I would give this a shot to share my thoughts, photos, and perspective on the world around me. Feel free to add comments, help me out, provide feedback, etc... I look forward to the interaction and sharing my photos with you.