Seville shadows

One of the challenges of shooting in Seville is the very strong contrast between hard sunlight and strong shadows. Here I took advantage of that to make the shadows the center of interest in this image.

HDR: Plaza de Espana, Seville

I spent several hours shooting at Plaza de Espana one morning. I knew there would be strong light and deep shadow, so I planned to shoot HDR brackets and brought my tripod. For this image I shot 7 bracketed exposures with a 10-20 zoom lens at about 15mm, aperture set to f13. From Lightroom, the 7 exposures were exported to HDR Expose 3, merged to HDR & tonemapped. Then the resulting HDR image was taken back into Photoshop. I used Tony Kuyper’s luminance-mask-based Triple Play actions to further balance the tonal range. Finishing touches were applied with Nik Color Efex Pro and Lightroom.


BTW: this location served as the backdrop for a scene in one of the Star Wars movies:

Breathtaking time lapse from Space Station

Crazy Horst’s aerial extravaganza

Crazy Horst attaches a helmet cam to an RC aircraft and captures some breathtaking video. He shoots beautiful locations, executes daring aerial maneuvers, and has a good sense of humor. Here are a couple of my favs:

Flash photo seminar at B&H

Neil van Niekerk is a guru on the subject of flash photography. Neil has a very extensive website with lots of tips & tricks.

This is a two-hour seminar Neil gave at B&H Photo in NYC.

Slow Synch flash

Steve Tavelaris of the Agean Duo was kind enough to let me shoot some photos of him playing at the St. Sophias Greek Festival in Syracuse. I was using slow synch flash (2nd curtain) to try to capture the speed of his playing. I think this one turned out best. 1/8th second at f/11.

last man in Alcatraz

 An old photo of a cell block at Alcatraz (taken March, 2008).

I decided to play with the light and add a semi-transparent silhouette in Photoshop. I like the result.