This time-lapse compiled from about 200 images. Taken January 13, 2010 just outside of Lethbridge, Alberta.

This time-lapse is composed of 378 shots, at 30 FPS. Taken February 1, 2010 at Lee Lake, Alberta.

I was sifting through some old photos and I came across an image of the river I had taken. It is a fairly plain and uninteresting shot, but I decided to play around with it anyways. I boosted the contrast a bit and did a couple other minor adjustments to give it a bit more “pop”. I like it much better with the exaggerated highlights and shadows.

This next one is a macro shot taken through a bottle of green aloe vera gel. I set the bottle on a coffee table in my living room and positioned a very bright LED flash light on the other side to create some intense and dramatic lighting.

I wanted to see what it would look like as a high-contrast, black and white image. It almost looks like a cartoon drawing.

Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish the new shots from the old ones, so I am going to continue to post new and recently updated shots on my blog page.

Here is some of my most recent work:

This one I actually took last summer while I was out watching the Perseid Meteor Shower. I was going through old, lost and long forgotten photos on my external hard drives, when I joyously stumbled upon this picture. The reason I was so excited is because I don’t even remember taking it.

Many times after a long photo shoot, I will quickly glance over all of the photos, pick one or two I like and sweep the rest under the carpet of my abandoned back-up devices. Here they will remain for months until one curious day when I browse through the treasures and old remains of times I can barely recall.

This photo was taken at Nicholas Sheran Lake at around midnight on a brisk night in November. I liked how the still water gave a crystal clear reflection and how the surrounding ice, projecting a gentle glow from the street lights, contrasted it nicely.

2009 marked the Centennial of the High Level Bridge in Lethbridge, Alberta. The Bridge itself is an awe-inspiring structure, with it’s vast height and a towering overtone. When the city allowed a local electric company to light up the bridge with giant flood lights, it added an electrifying presence that gave photographers and curious bystanders a new vantage point to see their familiar landmark in a new way.

This shot was taken on November 11, 2009. I was standing knee deep in the freezing river just to make sure I got the shot I wanted…

Never again! Although, I’m pretty sure I would do it again

This shot was also taken while the bridge was lit up. It was done multiple times between September and January, giving a wide variety of people a chance to see it. This one was taken on Dec 11, 2009. The combination of entirely overcast skies, along with freezing sub-zero temperatures, made the bright white halogens look like green sheets of light across the sky. From a distance, they almost resembled the Northern Lights. The thick cloud cover mixed with the light pollution from the city streetlights, gave the rest of the sky a noticeably orange hue.

Taken at sunrise on Jan 1, 2010 in Canmore, Alberta, this was not only the earliest I’ve ever been up on New Years Day, but also my quickest photographic start to a new year.  The way the ice was weathered around the trees looked like someone had planted the tree in a giant curling rock. The rings were so smooth and symmetrical it was unreal.

Murphy’s Law states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. This is exactly why I gave up on sunrises for quite a long time. A typical sunrise photo-shoot for me used to involve waking up before dawn on a 30 below day, spending an hour or two with my tripod frozen to hands, just to see a sunrise that may as well have been monochromatic.

I was ecstatic when I actually observed real color! At first I thought that maybe I needed glasses…

This was taken just after sunrise on New Years Day. The sun was just above the frame on this shot, but it’s fiery ambiance still made it presence known in the reflection of the quiet stream. I really liked this little piece of jagged iced protruding from the frozen ground. The exposure itself was 4 seconds long.

This picture was taken at the same location as the last two, but a day earlier. Instead of early morning, it was about 3pm and the cloud cover gave this scenic landscape a mildly dry, yet pleasing atmosphere.

This spillway is also located in Canmore. It is right below a power plant, very close to the location of the previous three photos. At first glance, it wasn’t much to look at, but setting the Law of Conservation of Energy aside, I was determined to make something out of nothing. This is an 8 second exposure taken in broad daylight. I stacked up an ND8 filter combined with a circular polarizer to give the fast moving water a glassy, almost ice-like texture.

Here is a little collection of some of the shots I’ve done since July, 2009. There will be more on the way

Anyways, this picture was taken on May 2 (2009 ofcourse, I’m not that far behind). It was around midnight and a couple of friends and I were out and about messing around with our cameras and flashes. We stumbled (drove by is probably more appropriate) across this crazy looking tree, so we stopped and set up our gear and snapped a few shots. The light pollution from the CP Rail gave the horizon a hazy purple-ish glow and the flash that I held above my head gave the foreground a nice colorful daytime look.

As soon as I saw this particular tree, it reminded me of a fantasy world; something out of a J.R.R Tolkien book, a dramatic/surreal atmosphere you would only find in a fantasy movie, computer game or painting. Needless to say, I thought i’d make it even more interesting by spicing up the color and various other aspects of the photo. Normally, I am a minimalist when it comes to post-processing, but I thought it would be fun to see what it would look like as a “Fantasy Tree”.  :)

I am behind and have quite a few more photos to work on, so expect to see some “Noobs” in the very near future.

P.S. Thanks Jaime for letting me use your wizard and flash!

Jaime Vedres is a friend of mine and an amazing Lethbridge photographer, so if you haven’t checked out his work yet, I highly recommend it!

http://www.jaimevedres.com/

Or

http://www.jaimevedres.blogspot.com/

The first gallery is called HDR. It is a small compilation of my post-processed HDR photos. HDR (High Dynamic Range) images are made by taking multiple exposures of the exact same subject and then merging them together. Usually, one (or more) shot will be underexposed, one (or more) will be overexposed, and one (or more) will be correctly exposed. By combining them all together, one can work with the shadows, the highlights, and the midtones to extend the overall dynamic range of the photo. Since there is so much more information to work with, one can create a shockingly accurate (or even surreal) representation of what the human eye sees at the time. Unfortunately, I don’t a have vast repertoire of HDR images…yet, but like many people who try HDR, I too have found out how addicting it can be. You can expect to see more HDR images in the near future.

The other new gallery is called “Reflections”. I think this one is pretty self explanatory, but just be sure I will explain. This gallery is a collection of me when I was a kid; frolicking on the sandy beaches of the unsanitary playgrounds, watching in horror as my dad fell down the slide, eating watermelon. All of the good times we all enjoyed in our childhood…

By the way, I was lying.  It is actually just “Reflections”. Plain and simple reflections. Unfortunately, when I made this gallery I thought I had a lot more to display than only four images. Look for more reflections in the future, as I will probably be shooting them until I have enough to feel satisfied classifying them as a gallery…atleast five…

Last night at 12:00AM, the wind was howling almost as loud as the coyotes in the distance. A friend and I were blindly scything our way through the invisible brush of the river bottom with our tripods. Through the muddy darkness we wandered aimlessly, stopping every so often to snap a few shots that caught our eyes (since we are photographers, this could be translated more accurately as: “we stopped taking photos every so often to continue on our journey”).

Barely able to see in front of us, we made our way to the river, while managing to meander our way around of any rabid dear or truculent trees that may lie in our path. A small portion of the river was dried up, so we walked across it to an island on the old man river. 

I set up my tripod where I wanted it, but the view I wanted was so low that I was left sitting in the wet water of the shore, barely able to crouch my head enough to see through the viewfinder. The wind was so strong that it felt like my tripod was shaking in front of me. The moon was a waxing crescent and reflected radiantly off of the water.

I took a few shots ranging from 30 to 45 seconds.  I wanted a decent depth of field, so this shot (although a little unorthodox) ended up being a 45 second exposure at F8 and 3200 ISO. I was actually quite surprised at how clean the image turned out.