Cold-Glory, originally uploaded by TimDD.

A good friend and former colleague recommended that I submit this photo to a boston.com photo contest. The theme is “Cold,” and the voting is open this week. Please help me win! Here’s the link: you vote for three of your favorites, out of 50 finalists.

Vote now!

Totally Cool On Black
The recent storm left these smooth and cool undulations on the snow in our back yard. So as the sun set, the shadows became deeper and deeper blue. This got a kitchen sink full of processing:
1) seven frame HDR to start
2) photomatix with white point, black point, luminosity jacked pretty high
3) one original exposure blended to restore sense to the sky
4) Topaz Adjust to trick out the moguls
5) Surface blur to mellow out the distraction of the tree line at the edge of the property
6) slight (yes… slight) saturation boost to reds and yellows to make that sun just weep with sadness as it leaves this beautiful setting.

As for the Kinkade reference: my landscaper’s wife commented on some processed photos I made for his sight: “These look like a Thomas Kinkade painting.” I’m just listening to my customers…

What a fine morning walk we had with the new Gitzo tripod. This final image is the result of four vertical five-frame exposures, stitched together in photoshop. Cropped. A channel selection used to create a mask, and a couple of blending layers used to, well, undo some of the magic that Photomatix sometimes gets carried away with. Topaz helped provide some nice crunchy detail to the tree line, and a nice gradient vignetted the foreground.  Orig post on flickr.

Ann Beha Architects executed a magnificent and respectful renovation of this Andover, MA landmark.

Some Phillips Alumni have requested prints, so I have partnered with Imagekind to help them get a high quality printout.  Let’s see if they meant it!

Testing image widths for PhoBlo posts…

Trying to sort out the best image size for the postings… just a test.

Ah Flickr. I started out with a far smaller Great Blue Heron when I originally posted this photo… but the beauty of the Flickr Gallery is that there are critiques galore to help you refine your technique. Here I was able to tighten up considerably by layering the bird, using LucisArt Exposure to bring out the under-wing detail without too terribly generating digital artifacts, add the vignette… and here you have it.

Here is the near-final result.  I used the eraser tool to "erase" the layer from LucisArt which had lots of noice in the sky — I wanted the original, smooth sky around that single cloud.  I softeved the trees a bit to keep them from distracting (thanks Trey at www.stuckincustoms.com for that tip), and used levels and curves to get just the right color balance.

There is one mistake in here — but you’d probably need to know the neighbor’s house pretty well to catch it.  Post a comment if you think you can see it!

The house is starting to emerge from the shadows.

This is already looking better, but there is still much work to be done.  I have traded an overall shadowed image for one which fails to highlight the house itself, much less that fabulous roof line.  So I get to work in Photoshop… first cropping the image down, then establishing layers: one for the house itself, one for the remainder of the shot — both the lawn / foreground and the trees and sky.