The Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, Reunion Tower, and the Hyatt Regency!

I shot this several months ago but I am heading to the same location on Monday and Tuesday nights. A full moon will be rising in line with these two Dallas icons and I hope to get some interesting images including it. Wish me luck.

Some of my favorite images from 2010!

For my final blog post of 2010 I decided to look through the images I took during the year and pick out some of my favorites. Sometimes at art shows people ask me what is my favorite image. Usually I mention  one of the better images that has been taken on my most recent trip. I've looked at the older images quite a bit and the initial thrill has worn off. My choices here were probably influenced in much the same fashion. The first three are from my recent trip to California. I photographed Lake Tahoe, Mono Lake, the Alabama Hills and Death Valley. The weather was a little questionable at times but I did get a few nice ones.

Dusk at the Tufas

Mono Lake Sunset

 Tahoe Fog

 Badwater Salt Flats

The next three images were created while spending some time in Alabama and Florida between my two November shows. The Little River Canyon is definitely worth another visit because better timing would have given me a lot more good shots. It wasn't really a good year for the fall color and I was also about a week late. Because of this I decided to spend several days at Pensacola Beach. It is a great area to photograph and I could have chosen more images from my time there.

 Sea Oat Sunset

Fence and Dunes

 Little River Falls

The next two images were created while I was in the Lincoln, Nebraska area while participating in several art shows. Did mention that I love Google Earth. That's how I found the "Old Nebraska Church".

 Barn and Storm Clouds

 Old Nebraska Church

For the first time in several years there was a great display of wildflowers in the Texas hill country. I was able to spend several days there and had good conditions to shoot in. I could have chosen more than I did from that trip.

 Fish Hatchery Fence

 Hill Country Spring

Reunion Tower is a favorite area in downtown Dallas to shoot. The NBA banners put on the buildings for the all-star game made a great image. The reflections of the tower is an angle I have never seen in any other photos.

 Reunion Tower and NBA All-Star Banners

 Reunion Tower Reflections

 A record 12 inches of snow! Turtle Creek and the Dallas area may never look this way again. Almost had a tree limb break and fall on my truck while shooting at this location.

 Snow at Turtle Creek

 Gary, Dan, and myself drove up to the Tishomingo Wildlife Refuge near Lake Texoma in Oklahoma for this last shot. I had several variations of this which were also nice. Special thanks to Dan who was running around in the dark structure firing off different flashes with colored gels attached.

 Tishomingo Deserted Building

Everyone Have a Great 2011!

A few more from Downtown Dallas!

The other day my photos of downtown were all shot from the roof of the parking lot at the courthouse. I still wanted to get some photos that would include all the NBA Banners in one shot so yesterday evening I was back downtown. I took the Reunion Tower image while just 15 feet away from me freeway traffic was zipping past. I would have liked to have backed up a little more. My 24mm tilt-shift lens was given the job of recording this. The shift still could not take all the lean out of the buildings so I had to straighten them up the rest of the way with a perspective fix in Photoshop. The problem with that version was with the Tower. You  obviously were looking almost straight up at it because you can see so much of the underside of the ball. The buildings were straight but the tower still looked strange.  For this version I decided to put a little more of the lean and convergence back in the image, much the way my normal lens would have rendered it.

Reunion Tower and the Hyatt

I still wanted a shot which included the whole skyline but showed all the banners. After looking at the results I think I may have found my new favorite spot to photograph the skyline from. I can see shooting this again at dusk and hopefully having some nice sky to go with it.

Downtown Dallas

New way of converting to black and white!

Last week I went to a one day Photoshop seminar in Arlington that was put on by NAPP. One of the things I learned was a different way of converting to black and white. Usually I do this with a black and white adjustment layer in Photoshop. It was suggested at the seminar that I do it in my camera raw conversion instead. While in raw go to the hue saturation luminosity adjustment and convert to grayscale. Then you go back and adjust exposure, recovery, fill light, clarity, and blacks with the sliders. Adjust the contrast with the curves adjustment. I like the results I got here.

Getting ready for the NBA All-Stars!

 Dallas Skyline

The Dallas Skyline has had a few things added to it in preparation for the NBA All-Star game which will be played on Feb 14. Several very large banners with pictures of NBA players are hanging from several Downtown buildings. The one in the top image is close to thirty stories high. The Hyatt Regency actually has two on the side of the building but only one is visible in my photo. In the bottom image the banner doesn't appear to be quite finished. After zooming in on it I realized that a scaffold was working on it and the bottom right side of the banner was not all there. I hadn't even noticed it until then.

The Hyatt and Reunion Tower

Unfinished Banner

Reunion Tower and the Hyatt Regency!

Today I decided I would head back downtown around sunset and photograph Reunion Tower and the Hyatt Regency. Some great clouds were in the sky earlier in the day and I was hoping they would create some nice sunset color that would reflect in the buildings. However, about the time I headed downtown the clouds were gone. The first shot was taken right after sunset and as you can see, nothing but blue sky. According to The Photographer's Ephemeris sunset was at 5:35. TPE is a great tool for figuring out when the sun and moon will rise and set at any location. The second image was taken at 6:02. The sky would soon be totally black so I hurried around to the other side of the hotel and took the last picture near the entrance to Reunion Tower. I got that accomplished just in time to still have a little blue left in the sky. Cool!

The weather guys say we may have freezing drizzle tomorrow evening and high temps in the 20's on Thursday and Friday. I better get out my long johns.