SDuffyPhotography.blog

Christmas 2008

December 31st, 2008 | 2 Comments | Posted in My Photos, Site News

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas! As I mentioned in my last post, I spent all of last week celebrating the holiday between my family in Pittsburgh and my girlfriend’s family in NW PA and Ohio. Santa Claus was very good to me in terms of photography… I got a 5-in-1 reflector kit, a Bogen/Manfrotto tripod, two Pocket Wizards, some neutral density filters, a new photographers’ vest, and a 1TB external hard drive. Not bad! I know my girlfriend is terribly excited about all the new equipment I have for portraits now.

Throughout the week, I actually didn’t take as many photos as I thought I would. Between the extremely cold weather early in the week and a slight cold later in the week, my camera got a little bit of a break. There are a few photos, however, that I wanted to share with you…

On Sunday, December 21st, my girlfriend took me to visit the A Christmas Story house in Cleveland, Ohio. If you didn’t know already A Christmas Story is probably my all-time favorite movie. I probably watch it at least five times every Christmas season. So, needless to say, I was pretty excited to see it in person. A few photos below…

Tags: christmas, cleveland, grandma, ohio, pennsylvania, pittsburgh

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: