Burst of energy

That’s all I need to get through this last day and a half of work before a big weekend in New York City.  Flight leaves tomorrow afternoon, really excited for the trip, should be a great picture opportunity.  For today though, we’ll stick with images from the ‘Burgh.

This is a shot of the old home of the Pittsburgh Penguins, the Civic Arena, taken with a fisheye while I was waiting for fellow photog Zach Frailey to join me downtown for a photowalk a few weeks back.  I know that this scene isn’t typically what you would use a fisheye for, but I wanted to test out the sun flares that I could get with the rented glass and I was quite pleased with the result.  It helped that the sun was partially obscured by the arena and a cloud to get those long, unbroken rays.

For the processing, I processed the seven RAW images in Photomatix and then shipped the tonemapped image off to CS5.  Overall desaturation and blue curves layers were added and dust spots were removed from the sky.  There was a little bit of weird ghosting from the clouds that I had to clone out, and I’m not sure if it was a result of one of the longer exposures or purely artifacts from the HDR process.  Added a Pro Contrast filter in Color Efex for the entire image and then a Tonal Contrast filter to the parking lot, trees and arena (100% opacity) and the sky (30% opacity).  Thought about correcting the distortion then though, nah, I like it this way.

See you all tomorrow, then off to NYC.