SDuffyPhotography.blog

From a snowy Easter weekend

March 25th, 2008 | 2 Comments | Posted in Featured, My Photos

Last weekend, my girlfriend and I traveled to northwest PA and northeast Ohio to visit some family over Easter weekend. Within an hour of our arrival Friday night, it began to snow. Since I hadn’t really taken any snow photos this year, I eagerly got up around 5AM Saturday morning to photograph the freshly-fallen six inches. Major thanks to both my girlfriend and her stepmother for volunteering to accompany me, even though it was extremely windy and cold.

The first image was taken at about 6AM of Buhl Lake in Sharon, PA. It’s mostly composed of one image (shot at ISO100, f/8, and 25sec exposure) though I did overlay a darker version in order to turn down the blown-out lamps and darken the edges of the photo. There was very little color in the scenery but, if you click the photo and view the larger version, you’ll see I was able to preserve some of the color behind and slightly above the trees.

The second image is a high dynamic range photo I took across the border in Ohio. I did the HDR conversion because I really wanted to bring out the red barn door and contrast it with the white snow in the background:

I have quite a few more photos from the weekend that I am still processing.

In the meantime, though, both of the photos above are available for purchase in my photo gallery.

Tags: barn, bridge, hdr, ohio, pennsylvania

One of my photos reviewed by PopPhoto

January 30th, 2008 | 1 Comment | Posted in My Photos, Published

A little while back I submitted a couple photos to the PopPhoto Flash blog for their Your Photo: Our Critique column. The photo I submitted was one I took about two weeks after I got my XTi back in December 2006 of the Sixth Street Bridge in Pittsburgh, PA:

Melissa Macatee, a contributing blogger for PopPhoto Flash gave it 3 out of 5 stars saying:

“The positives here are Shawn’s use of a smaller aperture allowing the lights on the top of the bridge to have a starburst effect and the leading line of the bridge. To improve on this shot a shorter exposure should be used to prevent the highlights from blowing out. The LCD can be misleading so next time take a few shots with different exposure times or try bracketing your exposures giving you an option to merge them.” (link)

Not bad. I would say that was a fair critique. I was actually quite concerned about the overexposure at the top of the bridge myself. Perhaps next time, I’ll play around more with the light metering.