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I know not everyone who reads this blog this is a hockey fan, but I just have to take a second to talk about the Pittsburgh Penguins game last night.  First off, we won, which is always positive, a 3-0 shutout of the lowly New York Islanders (sorry NY fans).  It was a bit of a scrappy game from the start, and it just so happened that our scrappy guys got our goals.  Tyler Kennedy opened the scoring in the first on a great power play goal from a sharp angle, Chris Kunitz banked one in off Rick DiPietro on a 2-1 with Pascal Dupuis.  DiPietro got caught cheating back to Dupuis’ side and Kunitz made him pay.

No scoring in the second, but things got a bit scrappy.  Mike Rupp won a fight, there were hard hits all around, with Matt Cooke and Max Talbot really flying around the ice.  Max, who was on a 25 game scoring drought, hit two goalposts, got robbed on a seemingly open net, and just couldn’t seem to buy a goal.  That was until 40 seconds left when Max, with the Islanders having vacated their net for a sixth attacker, took a backhand pass from Craig Adams and buried a 70 footer.  3-0, Pens up, game in the bag. 

But, this piece is called “Theatre like no other” for a reason.  Well, two actually.  The first reason is what happened next.  With 20 seconds left, Cooke raced down to try to beat an icing call.  Skating past the net, DiPietro, who had taken some hard shots from Cooke in the last meeting between these two teams, stepped out of his crease and through a blocker to Cooke’s face.  A scrum ensued in the corner, when all of a sudden, the coolest, most awesome, rarest, exciting things that can happen in a hockey game, happened.  Out of the corner of the screen you see DiPietro start skating away from the pile towards center ice.  Then you see a referee skate at full tilt after him.  Brent Johnson (pictured above), the backup for goalie Mar Andre Fleury, was at the Islanders blue line, gloves off, helmet off, ready to take on DiPietro.  The referee did everything he could to stop Johnson, but he was on a mission to repay the Islanders netminder for the cheap shot he had just delivered.  Both goalies grabbed the other one’s jersey, and Johnson, who is right handed, landed a left hook to DiPietro’s jaw, sending him to the ice in a heap.  Brent then knelt over to pof him, one had holding him down, the other raised in a fist, not ready to punch, just showing his vanquished foe that these Penguins are not who you want to mess with.

You don’t seen goalie fights hardly ever anymore, especially now since Patrick Roy is out of the league, who was famous for fights with both Chris Osgood and Dominik Hasek.  But to see the soft spoken Brent Johnson, drop the gloves against some like DiPietro, who deserved everything he got from Johnnie, it was just a sight to see.  I may have to get a Brent Johnson jersey.

Sorry for the recap, but it was just too awesome not to talk about!  Today we go back to New York and take a look at the Lunt Fontanne Theatre on West 46^th Street, right outside of Times Square.  This theatre was right next to our hotel, the Marriott Marquis, and I knew I had to get a picture of it at night.  The first night I took my five handheld brackets, but the last two were a bit blurry, something I discovered back in the room.  I didn’t want to lug my drop out for a night on the town, so I bumped up the ISO the next night and gave it another shot.  This time I got five crisp exposures.  Perfect!  We actually debated about maybe going to see the Addams Family, which you can see was playing there.  Maybe next time.

On to the processing.  Like I said, this is a five handheld bracketed shot that I processed with HDR Efex.  The lights on the front of the building were kind of throwing me off, as they make the front of the building different colors with different light sources.  I ended up just decreasing the saturation the oranges, and that did the trick!  I had to mask back in the people on the street and a bit of the blown out highlights from the Times Square signs as well.  Added a Tonal Contrast filter to everything but the sky and recovered some of the dark shadows, added a bit more color to the blue sky, saved, uploaded!

See you tomorrow!