View from the top

First off, happy belated Mother’s Day to all you moms out there.  I didn’t get a chance to post anything yesterday, so I missed the chance to actually send the wishes on the actual holiday.

I spent the afternoon yesterday with my family at my sister’s apartment on Mt. Washington, which is featured above and many other times on this blog and my flickr page.  I hadn’t planned on taking very many pictures, as it seems like I have every conceivable view from the various overlooks that watch over the city, but there is just something about being up there that you can’t help but take a few brackets.  I did try something a little different (which you will see in a few days), which was put the 70-200 2.8 on and get some HDRs at 200mm.  That is an incredible piece of glass, and I think that I may start using it more often.

I also tried to do something a little different with today’s shot in terms of composition.  Most of the time that a photographer is up there (myself included) they get so mesmerized by the skyline that they forget about Station Square, which is right below the far overlooks.  In the summer, the trees grow so thick that you can’t really see through them, but they aren’t quite at that point yet, so I thought that I would give a view both of the far end of Station Square as well as the skyline.  It was pretty cool how the entire city was glowing, even Station Square, and how the parking lot looked like some kind of spaceship ready to take off.

This is a seven exposure HDR processed with Photomatix with some touch up work done in CS5.  I masked in the entire +3 exposure, as there wasn’t a whole lot of noise in the sky, but I wanted to even it out a bit.  I also used the -3 exposure to mask in all the names you see on top of the buildings, as the HDR process really blew them out.  Adjusted the red tones down slightly, as they seemed to be too warm for the rest of the shot, and then ran it through both Color Efex (Tonal Contrast and Color Cast Removal) and onOne PhotoTools (sharpening) to give it more punch.

I was going to post the shots that I posted over the weekend, but I don’t think that they really fit the other shot.  You are more than welcome to head on over to my flickr site to check on my posts from Saturday and Sunday.

So for some reason last week, my e-mail address associated with my blog was not allowing me to comment on any other blog, no matter the host site.  I’ve since updated my e-mail so I should be back to commenting as normal.

Hope you all had a great weekend and have a happy Monday.