The shot is a re-worked single RAW HDR image from 2008 and the British Open Car Show held annually at VanDusen Gardens in Vancouver. LOVE the red and chrome together. So slick…

Collector Jaguar

Jacob - Age 1.5yrs

is currently being featured on the super cool HDRSpotting website and was selected by the HDR editors as an example of great HDR work. [...]]]> I’ve re-worked a number of photographs from single RAW files into HDR images and have posted a few older images in my smugmug account for fun. This image:

Jacob - Age 1.5yrs

is currently being featured on the super cool HDRSpotting website and was selected by the HDR editors as an example of great HDR work. At least that’s what I’m telling myself and why it’s being featured. To view the HDRSpotting daily featured sheet, click here.

More HDR shots on their way… just waiting for a break in the weather (and my migraines) to get out there. PLUS I have a new 8mm fish-eye lens that I’m dying to test out and a 200mm f2 lens on its way. Yup, I’ve said it bef I’m a gear head LOL

Skagit Tulip Festival-14

Originally uploaded by studiowerx

We had a super fun day yesterday at the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival in La Conner Washington.

My friend Yvonne and I drove down for the day to La Conner and spent 3 hours shooting tulip fields in full bloom. There were acres and acres of flowers to shoot and while [...]]]>

Skagit Tulip Festival-14

Originally uploaded by studiowerx

We had a super fun day yesterday at the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival in La Conner Washington.

My friend Yvonne and I drove down for the day to La Conner and spent 3 hours shooting tulip fields in full bloom. There were acres and acres of flowers to shoot and while every tulips starts to look the same after a while, they were all beautiful and full of colour [and even some with frangrance!]

I always seem to miss this annual Festival and time it either too soon to take full advantage of the bloom calendar, or usually I’m too late and the majority of the tulips have past their prime. This year, with our exceedingly mild northwest winter, the bloom season was early and the tulips were ready to be viewed and photographed as early as two weeks ago. Timing for this festival is critical. A few days can make a huge difference when we’re talking about spring weather… A rain/wind storm can decimate the fragile tulip blooms with a blast of wind, leaving nothing but unsightly stem to shoot. Not what I had in mind…

This year I vowed I would be on time, I would catch at least a good percentage of the fields and I would do what it took to get there. I took a vacation day on Friday since the weather was expected to cooperate and going on the weekend would mean massive crowds and congestion in the fields. Yvonne joined me and also took the day off work and we drove down in the mid-late morning.

It was beautiful. Sunny with a bit of marine haze, breezy and warm. Picture perfect photography weather. I’m so glad I followed my gut and blasted through my workload at the office so that I could take the day off the shoot the fields in the sunshine… today, it’s miserable. Raining, cool and the fields would be a mucky wet mess. Timing is everything.

Anyways… I’ve posted a few of the 200+ shots I took at in La Conner yesterday to my Flickr account and SmugMug. You can view them here and here.

As a special treat for my regular blog stalkers, I’m posting a high resolution screen saver/desktop image for you here in the blog. Just click on the image below, and select the size you want for your desktop! Just click on the image with the size you want in the caption, then right click on the linked image and ’save as’ to your computer. Then depending on your system, either set the image on you desktop as ‘centered’ or ’stretch to fit’ and voila! Spring has sprung on your computer desktop =)

Enjoy the eyecandy and have a great weekend.

1024x768 Desktop

1280x850 Desktop

1920x1280 Desktop

2560x1705 Desktop

As featured on HDR Spotting today! Yay =)

Nitobe-10

Originally uploaded by studiowerx

Shot yesterday in the beautiful spring sunshine… Have lived in Vancouver my entire life and have never experienced the tranquil, lush beauty that is Nitobe Japanese Gardens. They are truly wonderful and a place of great reflection – both IN and out of the water LOL! I will be back again soon.

For [...]]]>

Nitobe-10

Originally uploaded by studiowerx

Shot yesterday in the beautiful spring sunshine… Have lived in Vancouver my entire life and have never experienced the tranquil, lush beauty that is Nitobe Japanese Gardens. They are truly wonderful and a place of great reflection – both IN and out of the water LOL! I will be back again soon.

For more of this spectacular garden and to see a few more pics from my walkabout yesterday, please visit me at Flickr

Comments and critiques are welcomed and appreciated.

I will be posting another shoot later this week from the La Conner Tulip Festival. I’m taking Friday off [to avoid the weekend crazy] and driving down to La Conner Washington for the day with a co-worker, who I’m sure plans to pick my brains about shooting in HDR – lol! It could make for either a very LOOOOOONG day, or fast one – we’ll see…

Have a good week everyone.

It’s great to work for the City sometimes, because I can get access to areas that are often closed to the public or under heavy supervision. The back deck of Britannia [...]]]> Yesterday, while the weather was nice and clear, I headed out for a quick shoot in Steveston. This time I went to Britannia Heritage Shipyards.

It’s great to work for the City sometimes, because I can get access to areas that are often closed to the public or under heavy supervision. The back deck of Britannia is like that because of the need to maintain the historic site and to ensure that no one falls into the water or injures themselves. Anyways, I popped in to the office at the site, and a co-worker was there from our department so she let me on to the back deck and I spent about 1 hour shooting the exterior and interior of the building. Here are the results… LOVE!

For more images from this shoot, please visit my SmugMug gallery here… Thanks and enjoy!

I’m heading out to shoot again later today… maybe ;^)

It’s an 8×10 landscape book and is available for purchase now! For a 30 page preview of this 58 page book, please click here.

To order, simply [...]]]> I’m obsessed with graffiti art, spray art and HDR photography… So, when the opportunity to combine these obsessions presented themselves this week, I had to make a book about it.

It’s an 8×10 landscape book and is available for purchase now! For a 30 page preview of this 58 page book, please click here.

To order, simply go to my online Blurb store to purchase, or contact me directly for an autographed copy. I will have these fresh-off-the-press books in hand in about 10 days.

For a sneak peek at some of the photos, visit my smugmug site by clicking here!

Thanks for looking…

containers 02

Originally uploaded by studiowerx

For more industrial landscapes featuring my favorite HDR photo technique, please click here…

Photoshoot includes images from industrial landscapes such as rail yards, container depots, piers, river fronts and demolition sites. I love graffiti and tonight I was able to find a fair amount of it… Enjoy the industrial eyecandy [...]]]>

containers 02

Originally uploaded by studiowerx

For more industrial landscapes featuring my favorite HDR photo technique, please click here…

Photoshoot includes images from industrial landscapes such as rail yards, container depots, piers, river fronts and demolition sites. I love graffiti and tonight I was able to find a fair amount of it… Enjoy the industrial eyecandy =)

Last night at West Coast Amusements roadside carnival in Richmond BC. Photo taken with Canon 7D at 7:30pm using HDR technique combined with long exposure and tripod.

For more HDR carnival shots, please visit my Flickr HDR set.

My original plan had me heading over to an industrial area to shoot some uber-cool, graffitied railcars. The wasn’t meant to be… The cargo [...]]]> Have had the pic-bug for a while and decided that tonight, even though storm clouds and a breezy evening were looming, I’d brave the crazy and dash out for a few shots.

My original plan had me heading over to an industrial area to shoot some uber-cool, graffitied railcars. The wasn’t meant to be… The cargo guys were in rail car loading mode, they gave me the stink eye [promptly killing ANY thoughts I may have had of trespassing to get my shots], and there were surprisingly not many graffitied cars in the yard. Crap. A twenty minute drive wasted.

Ah well, I needed to stop for some milk and yummy non-fat yogurt [really, it's good! tastes like lemon meringue pie!] so thought I would detour down along the river to the grocery store. I hopped out of the car for a quick couple of shots along the river and suddenly the weather got really weird/bad, really FAST! Rain started pour down in huge, very wet, very cold drops. So I jumped back into the car quickly to shoot from inside with the windows rolled down. Then, the wind kicked up and the most beautiful rainbow appeared. Very cool…

Once things settled down a bit weather-wise, I drove a little farther down the road until I hit this very interesting and very isolated section along the river called Finn Slough. It’s kind of a strange little community… set outside the legal City limits, separated by an old arm of the Fraser River, Finn Slough is home to fishermen, house boaters and an odd collection of derelict boats, fishnets, floats and who knows what else. BUT the cool thing about this little nook, on the fringes of Richmond, is how GREAT it is to photograph! Tons of charm and quirky goodness in that landscape.

Anyways, as quickly as the weather started, it stopped raining and the clouds started breaking up. The light was amazing! Knowing that the light wouldn’t last long, I hopped out of the truck and I decided to shoot with HDR prints in mind. HDR is the acronym for ‘high dynamic range’ photography and means the photographer [me] will take multiple shots of the same image, at different exposures. Basically, take the first shot at the perfect exposure, follow up with 1 to 2 frames up to 1.5 stops up and 1 to 2 frames down to 1.5 stops down, to achieve a wide dynamic colour range. Then, using a simple but oh so powerful program, combine the exposures, tweak the lighting and luminosity and voila, HDR prints!

Here are a few of my favorites from the evening shoot. Please note: the slight blurring is in a few of the images is due to the residual high wind and the grasses, trees and water moving within the shots. The structures are the same, just the wind affected objects in the landscape may appear to have some blurring.

For more of my HDR shots, please visit my Flickr site. Enjoy!