Backyard Pano Painting

Okay, so I took another panorama of our backyard but this time I used my wide angle lens and added an painterly look to it.  I’m thinking I need to get out of the house soon for more subject matter!

Backyard Pano 2

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Business Park Sculpture

I’ve driven past this business park sculpture for many years.  Originally, I wanted to shoot the sculpture back lit to obtain a silhouette with maybe a starburst, but the composition didn’t float my boat.  Sometimes what we think we’re going to do isn’t what works best, so I moved to the other side and composed the shot you see here.

Since we’re having such beautiful “summer” weather here (oy!), the flowers were looking very colorful.  During Christmas, the structure is decorated with lights to look like two wreaths.  I’ll have to remember to get a picture of that next Christmas.

The image is High Dynamic Range (HDR) created from three bracketed raw photos and combined in Photomatix with some additional processing in Nik Efex Color Pro.  Even business parks can be beautiful if one only “sees”.

Umbrellas

Occasionally I see umbrellas placed on the lawn in front of a local church we frequently drive by and I never have my camera when I see them, or if I do it’s not the right time of day.   (I know it’s a cardinal sin for a photographer not to always have their camera on hand, so I’ve been making a concerted effort to bring it along “just in case”.)

A few weeks ago, there they were!  It was perfect timing because it was late afternoon when the sun was dipping in the sky, and I managed to get a few shots.  They were so colorful!

I’ve tried figuring out why the umbrellas magically appear.  It’s not holiday driven…at least not the typical holidays the states observe, but it may be Catholic-driven.  Even though I went through the Catholic school system, I’m not catholic and don’t remember all the holidays.  One of these days I’ll figure it out.  Perhaps I need to stop in sometime and ask!  There was no one available to ask when I was there taking the pictures.