I’ve posted a few photos from this spot in the past.
This abandoned Russian early warning missile radar station is a pretty cool spot to visit. This one sits inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
41st Street Lifeguard Shack
Miami has very cool lifeguard stations along Miami Beach. I don’t know how many variations they have, but they are all a wonderful Art Deco style. This is the one at 41st Street during sunrise.
If someone watched me while I photographed this spot, I”m sure they wondered what was wrong with me. I didn’t have time during the sunrise to photograph multiple lifeguard shacks, they are too far apart. So, I probably took 500 photos of this one from different perspective, different light (before, during and after the sunrise), different cameras, etc.. I’m sure they thought I lost my mind….. Maybe I did, but I think the final product was worth it. Oh…and the homeless people sleeping under the lifeguard shack probably wondered about me as well.
Oculus World Trade Center Station
I enjoyed my last trip to NYC back in 2019. MJ and I explored Manhattan, per our normal process. This was the first time we explored the Oculus building. This unique building is a terminal station on the PATH subway system. It also has an underground mall within it. I loved the architecture of this building.
Oculus Shadows
During our last visit to Manhattan, we visited the Oculus. What an amazing spot! It is basically a subway station, but that description doesn’t do it justice. This is an architectural marvel on the inside and out. It is so modern and all white throughout. It’s big from the outside, but once you go inside…wow!! There are three floors under street level with all kinds of cool stores and access to the subway platforms. Just wonderful.
We explored the inside and the outside (I took a ton of photos of course). I captured some traditional perspectives, but also some unique angles/composition like this photo. I loved how the shadows fell across the sidewalk and street.
To view a larger version, click HERE
Bus Station
How is your Wednesday? I hope you had a wonderful time.
Chernobyl Bus Station: I took this photo during our trip to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine. This bus station in Pripyat is pretty cool. As you can tell, mother nature is taking over……
To view a larger version, click HERE
Abandoned Detroit
This is one of my favorite spots in Detroit. The Michigan Central Station in the background is a wonderful spot. The evening I took this photo, my group had 5 drones flying around at the same time (which was interesting)…. More importantly, the sky was magical that night to help make this photo special.
To view a larger version, click HERE
Detroit Window
I haven’t posted a Detroit photo in a while, so here we go. We had a hit list of Detroit Urbex locations to hit up, but we also explored some sites that we randomly found, just driving around. That’s the story of this spot. We went to the Michigan Central Station (the building outside the window) to photograph the area around it. During that time, we found this abandoned beauty with great views like this photo. I took a bunch of window photos like this one at this spot.
To view a larger version, click HERE
Michigan Central Station
While we were exploring Detroit, I captured this video of this church steeple with the Michigan Central Station in the background via my drone. Is this interesting or the most boring video of all time?
Pennsylvanian Ball Room
This building is usually very restrictive when it comes to photographers. But a few weeks back, the “Open Doors Pittsburgh” event allowed the public to have access to buildings that are normally off limits. So I took advantage of that situation and captured some great photos all over downtown Pittsburgh.
This building used to be the train and bus station back in the day. Today is has a number of executive apartments inside it and some of the larger common spaces are used as event locations. So this former bus/train terminal is now a wedding reception venue. I love it.
To purchase a print or view the entire gallery, click the photo above.
Fulton Street Subway Station
Tonight’s blog post is from the Fulton Street Subway Station in lower Manhattan. I’m not really which Manhattan neighborhood this is located within, since there are so many of them and I haven’t found a good source on where one neighborhood stops and another starts….
This subway station is amazing. The architecture of this structure is great inside and outside. Unfortunately, when I was there, photographing the outside wasn’t possible due to construction vehicles parked right in front of it.
To purchase a print or view the entire gallery, click the photo above.
Pioneer Square Station
MJ is out of town for very long business trip and I miss her dearly. I can’t wait for her to get home next week and in the mean time, I’ll just keep missing her.
Tonight’s photo is from the Pioneer Square Station in downtown Seattle. I took this last late last year when I was out there for work. I had a few days to photograph the city and I made good use of my time. I took this picture at around midnight. The only people in the station were the police, the homeless and I.
To purchase a print or view the entire gallery, click the photo above.
Grand Central Terminal
MJ and I had a great trip to New York City. The weather was nice, the people were polite and the attractions are always outstanding. Like normal, we packed a ton of activities into a short stay, but it was worth it. On the first night, I got really lucky while I was out photographing Grand Central Station.
I was lined up in the middle of the road shooting right down Park Avenue towards the terminal trying to get a photo without too much traffic or people….. And the City of New York decided to help me out. At that moment, they parked a construction vehicle in the middle of the road to block all traffic just for me (or to start some construction). Anyway, that meant I had full use of the street all to myself. I could take my time. Shoot from different angles. Not worry about being run over by a taxi. It was great. Plus I met a Russian (now a U.S. citizen) who was photographing the same area. Great first night in the big apple.
So I got this great photo and you get to see it.
To purchase a print or view the entire gallery, please click the photo above.
Pioneer Square Station
During my time in Seattle, I had a packed photography agenda covering lots of the city and the surrounding area. One of the planned locations was the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel station called Pioneer Square Station. I arrived at this location at around 11pm and the place was basically empty. The station is huge, so the 20 homeless people, 5 police and I had lots of room to avoid each other. Although, I’ll admit that 3 different police officers stopped me for taking photos. I thought that was interesting since the homeless can live in the station, but photographing the facility apparently isn’t allowed.
Anyway, this station handles the Sound Transit Central Link light rail trains, Sound Transit buses and King County Metro buses. It is completely underground with entrances at the corners. I don’t know about you, but I think there is beauty in the design of this station.
Gateway Center T Stop
This is a photo of the Gateway Center T stop for Pittsburgh’s Light Rail system, commonly known as the “T”. The Port Authority of Allegheny County operates the T. Trolley lines have been running in Pittsburgh since 1897. Today over 8.3 million riders use the T system annually. Maybe you should come to Pittsburgh and take a ride on the T.
To purchase a print or view the entire gallery, click the photo above.
Grand Central Station
The iconic must see spot
in midtown Manhattan. The
authorities don’t like the use of tripods within the terminal, so I had to be
quick. I also didn’t extend my
tripod legs completely. I setup my
tripod on the banister to get it elevated and avoid extending it. I hope you like the photo.
To purchase a print or view the entire gallery, click the photo above.
"The T" Gateway Center Station
I took this picture about a month ago while walking around downtown with Brad and Dave Truxell. This “T” station which is called the Gateway Center Station is fairly new and cool looking. I hope you enjoy the picture.
To purchase a print or view the entire gallery, click the photo above.
Grand Concourse
This restaurant is located in the restored Pittsburgh and
Lake Erie Railroad Station at Station Square in Pittsburgh. I took this picture in July 2012, while
on a photo walk with Brad and Dave Truxell. We didn’t plan to enter this building and the guys didn’t
think they would let us in to take photos. I usually don’t let the unknown stop me, so we just walked
into the business. Not only did
they not stop us, they welcomed us to take as many photos as we wanted.
I posted a few pictures of this place in the past, but they have all been of the outside of the building. Why didn’t I share this picture earlier? I don’t know. I just kind of forgot about it. I hope you enjoy this picture. It doesn’t do justice to how amazing this building is on the inside. The old train station architecture is very cool.
To purchase a print or view the entire picture gallery, please click the picture above.
Pittsburgh's West End Lights
Tonight, I present you a HDR panorama picture of Pittsburgh
taken from the West End Overlook where the three rivers come together. You can see the West End Bridge, Rivers
Casino, and Heinz Field (this is where the Steelers and the University of
Pittsburgh Panthers play football) along the river on the left. Of course, you can also see The Point with
the downtown behind it. On the right,
you can see Station Square and Mt. Washington.
I posted a similar picture in a previous blog post that you can see HERE.
http://brook-ward.com/blog/2012/12/1/lazy-saturday-night
This was taken about 30 minutes after the sunset with a long exposure to capture all the traffic lights streaking around the streets. This is a 5-bracket set (+2, +1, 0, -1, -2) merged in Photomatix Pro and edited in Photoshop CS6.
To purchase a print, please click the picture above.
Common HDR Photography Questions (Part 3) - Pennsylvanian Again (picture below)
Ok, here is the long awaited (by no one probably but me) final installment of the Common HDR Photography Questions Part 3 segment. I have already posted the answers to the first two questions:
* Why do I like HDR Photography?
* What is HDR Photography?
So it is now time for the last remaining question: How is an HDR Photograph created?
This is a difficult question only because it can get very technical quick and there are lots of HDR tutorials on line by about a thousand sources. My good friend Brad Truxell has a good one at his site http://www.somethinghdr.com/hdr-tutorial/. I don’t think you want me to repeat those and I really don’t want to do that either. That being the case, I think I’ll be fairly general and give you an overview of the process and not the technical steps (which would be boring). Let’s begin:
1. Find a subject you think will make a great photo (a person, subject, landscape, building, etc…). Whatever you like, but it should be a stable, non-moving object.
2. Set your camera up on a tripod (you can try getting HDR images without, but it won’t turn out very good).
3. Take your images (remember you’ll be taking multiple images of the same subject at different exposures) in Aperture mode at whatever f-stop is appropriate for your subject / environment. You can take the photos in manual mode, but there is no reason to do so.
4. If your camera has it, shoot a bracketed set of images. My camera allows me to pick brackets in sets of 3, 5, 7, or 9 images. This is important and I explained why in Part 2 earlier in my blog. If your camera doesn’t do bracketed photos, you can change the setting manually, but it won’t be as easy. I select fewer numbers of bracketed images in good lighting and more in harder (harsh) lighting environments.
5. Download all the RAW (JPG images don’t work as well) images onto your computer.
6. Open the bracketed image sets in Photomatix Pro to create your HDR Tonemapped photo. There are other software packages to make HDR images that you can also use. I just happen to use Photomatix Pro. In Photomatix Pro, there are all kinds of settings, presets, filters, etc…. Again there are a ton of tutorials you can read or watch on line if you want this level of detail. But that can be boring stuff, unless you are actually trying to do this. If you want that level of detail, we can talk specifics one on one.
7. Once the HDR Tonemapped image is done, I save it to my desktop.
8. You could stop here if you wanted, but I usually open the new image in Photoshop CS6 along with all the original RAW source pictures I got when I took the bracketed pictures.
9. I stack them all and pick portions of some to “Layer” into my HDR tonomapped picture. This just allows me to pick the best areas of these photos and merge them into my final product.
10. After the Layering process, I’ll sometimes adjust the color, contrast, crop, etc… just a little. I don’t go over board with the processing. My final step is to improve the image quality by reducing image noise and increasing sharpness.
11. Then re-save the image and enjoy it.
I’ve tried to keep this simple and short. There are a bunch of steps, keystrokes, and little tricks, but as I’ve mentioned you can get all that from YouTube.com and many other sites. I usually spend about 20 to 30 minutes processing each photo using the general process above. It is a major time commitment that isn’t for everyone. But I love how the pictures turn out at the end and am willing to spend my time doing it. I hope this is somewhat helpful in explaining How an HDR Photograph is created.
Remember to you can see Part 1 and Part 2 of this series by scrolling down the blog to those post.
Tonight’s Picture is of the Pennsylvania Building:
I posted another picture of this great building on December 18th. In that post, I covered the history of this building and what it is used for today. This is the vehicle drop off area at the front door. Can you imagine this being the front door to your home???? What can I say, they just don’t make buildings like they used to. Great facility with a great history.
Teaser (upcoming topics/photos):
I have a few great photos from that mini-trip to share with you.
