Butte, Old Town Signs

I love the  painted signs on building walls of Old Town, Butte, Montana.  
I shot these August 13 and 14, 2010, while there for the An Ri Ra Festival  

Paris, Quai St. Michel

May 25, 2010

A near-midnight walk along the Seine It's a pretty simple shot, with minimal doctoring in iPhoto. Its couple clusters and soft light capture a bit of that romance associated with Paris nights. I like the bike, alone. One of the stories in there.

Canon 40D with a fixed 50 mm f/1.4 Canon lens

Monopod

Shutter: 1/15

Aperture: f/1.4

ISO: 320

Luxembourg Gardens

(This is an edit of an earlier post. I decided to use a 2-exposure HDR, rather than the 3-exposure posted earlier. I think it gives richer colors and better focus--without inhibiting the artificiality of the scene)

I have been playing with High Dynamic Range imaging (HDR) to capture the luminescence in both the bright and shadowy part of a scene. Sometimes the results can look "painterly," as some commenters have noted. Sometimes it can look otherworldly--unreal. This picture, the product of two bracketed shots, was taken of a grassy area in front of a sunny area--all in the Luxembourg Gardens. I think I like the way the picnickers seem to have been dropped into a scene they really don't belong in.

Barcelona

What luck to be in Barcelona the evening (May 16, 2010) their soccer team won the league championship. Canon 40D; Shutter: 1/40; Aperture, f/7.1; ISO, 1600.

Magic (La Palma, Canary Islands)

I had maybe three seconds prep time for this picture. Walking up a Sunday street in La Palm, Canary Islands, I saw this lady approach the "magic window." Poorly framed and lighted, it still seems a worthwhile image of belief in more than we see as we hurry along. Canon 40D; shutter speed: 1/80; aperture, f/7.1; ISO, 100.

Sunset, Mid Atlantic

This is an HDR image, taken pretty literally in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, on a cruise ship from San Juan, PR to the Canary Islands. Three separate bracketed shots combined to make the image.

Sunrise/Moonrise, Zabriskie Point

The titled image is an HDR image I worked on while watching soccer. I usually combine three images for HDR, but this time I just used two--one properly exposed and one under-exposed (I was trying to get the moon to show up better. The HDR software I used is called Photomatix.