Wedding number Two….

Congrats to Kim and Sheldon on their recent nuptials this past Saturday.  The second of the 3 week gauntlet of weddings for friends was another beautiful one.  A wonderful ceremony was held at La Gondola banquet centre for family and friends followed by a reception with delicious food.  Of course I took the opportunity to take a few photos during the course of the night.  Event director Rebecca Chan did a fantastic job pulling this one off and from my perspective it went forth flawlessly.  Once she has her website up and running, I’ll be sure to link to her as she will be using some images in her portfolio.  Since I already started blogging about the first one, I may follow through and blog about all 6 this summer! Here are some images from the evening:

Next up, Matt and Dorothy this Saturday....

Vegas!....

I recently had the opportunity to travel to Las Vegas for a friend’s bachelor party (yes I know how typical—but still very fun!).  There is just soo much going on that one trip there does not do it justice.  Unfortunately for photo-me I was unable to take too many images with the “big” camera during the evening when everything is just so eye-popping. Reason being that when heading out at night you never really know when and where you’ll be headed, so I opted for the safer keep-in-hotel-room-safe option during the evenings. I must say the hotels must spend a fortune lighting and highlighting various aspects of these mammoth buildings.  Everything is bigger in Vegas!  The night was a bust for photo-ops due to my self-imposed limitation, however, during the day I was able to take a few nice shots while walking the strip. I’ll definitely want to go again to check out some more natural sights in the area such as the Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon.  Ideally not during a bachelor party since every minute was packed with some event or party-type theme.

I’ve finally gotten around to posting some of the images in my (almost)-daily-photo blog, so some of these will show up there in the upcoming days, but here are a couple of my fav’s. 

CTRL-ALT-DEL....

Being the big nerd I am, I just had to post this picture of a set of bowls/containers I received from a friend. It was given to me by a friend who brought it over from Japan.  I just love it! I also used it as an opportunity to blend multiple images with different points of focus to create a composite image with an extended depth of field.  I created the composite image from just 3 images, each focusing on one of the containers or “keys” in the set.  I suppose I could’ve taken more points of focus but as said, it was a simple example. 

Three images with different points of focus:     Here is the final blended image:

Wedding number One….

This summer is the summer of weddings! Mind you, next summer is already quickly filling up so the record may be surpassed…until then, this summer is the summer of weddings.  I count 6 in total that I’m aware of thus far that I will be attending.  I’m no where near polished enough to be considered a wedding photographer, but I do enjoy taking photos at a friends wedding just to capture moments and often they appreciate this effort.  The season kicked off with my coworker’s (Martin) wedding.  It was one of the smaller ones I’ve been to, but this allowed for it to be very intimate.  Everyone had a blast and I was able to come away with several images I was proud of.  Apparently others also liked the images as the floral designer for his wedding wanted to use some to showcase what they did at the wedding.  Dahlia Floral Design based out of Toronto approached Martin to use a few of my shots in their Wedding section of their Portfolio page.  After getting my okay he told them yes and now they’re up in their wedding section of their portfolio page under “Heidi and Martin”.  It’s always nice to see your images up on another site, at least it is for me still. 

     

With 5 more weddings to go, I’m sure it’ll be a busy summer. Next one up, Kim and Sheldon this Sunday

When bored...HDR....

It was another rainy and blustery day in Toronto today, the second in so many days.  Often I find myself very listless and just bored on these stay-in-door days, these feelings were further enhanced by the fact I have to go into work later tonight for my least favorite corporate conglomerate.  This little bit of extra time did allow me to experiment some more with HDR and do a comparison between that work and just normal adjustment layers work in photoshop, which is most typically what I use.  I still prefer the adjustment layers method but the HDR method does produce some interesting eye catching results.  I’m generally a moderate HDR person, that is, someone who doesn’t try to make it too painterly.  Occasionally I will produce the odd image that is very ‘painted” but that is pretty rare and usually only when I’m trying to make a point.  I tried to blend the painted look with the normal enhanced look that I try to achieve with HDR image processing, so with respect to that it really doesn’t look as “HDR” as it could be. 

The HDR image on the right was made using 4 variably exposed images brought together and tone mapped in the photomatix standalone software. . The regular photoshop’d image was made with a single flat image with “perfect” exposure and various adjustment layers to help achieve the desired results. 

On a personal level, I like the results of the regular photoshop method more, but that’s just my preference and I’m sure others will have different viewpoints.  I thought I’d just blog about it and show the differences in styles that I often invoke.

And yes i know...they are not the same image sequence. i moved just a tiny bit when composing the HDR sequence.