St Thomas Episcopal Church in HDR

This photograph of St Thomas, Burnsville, NC is an example of a modified HDR (High Dynamic Range) technique that seems to be the rage in digital photography editing.

This photo consists of six stills taken on a tripod that are -2,0,+2 and -1,0,+1 exposures where the 0-snap is the correct exposure and the - and + exposures represents 2-stops above and below and the 1-stop represents 1-stop above and below the correct exposure.

The six photos are processed in Photomatix 3.0 to blend all six photos to produce the final HDR rendering.

To add additional punch the resulting HDR rendering was called up into Photoshop CS4 and a copy was added (Ctrl-J). The blend mode was then changed to Vivid Light. The resulting image is loved by about 80% of the population and dispised by the remaining 20%. Those that dispise should seek viewing the web in other places.

I just love the image!!

Raven and Jennifer Baptized

This is a photo of Raven, and her mother, Jennifer who were baptized at our beautiful church, St Thomas here in Burnsville, NC.

The service was conducted by Bishop Taylor of the Episcopal Diocese of Western North Carolina.

We welcome them to the commitment to Jesus Christ, the savior of all humanity.

Adobe PHotoshop CS4 Photomerg

This is a panorama consisting of two wide angle photos of a new home being constructed in Wildwood Acres, Burnsville, NC. The two photos were taken hand-held and were "photomerged" in Photoshop CS4. The photo depicts the beautiful stone work and the installation of pavers to form a finished deck below the first floor pressure treated wooden deck.

Catherine, Caroline and Charlie the Dragon

This is Catherine (on the left) and an unnamed dragon (I call Charlie) that was cropped from a larger image shown in all three types of slide shows in my previous post. The distracting background was blurred with the lens blur filter in Photoshop after making a selection of the distracting background. This image focuses on the two main characters - Catherine and Charlie. I have subsequently added Caroline and Charlie to this post. It was accomplished by making a selection of Caroline from another photo from the slide show shown in the previous post. I then copied the selection of Caroline and pasted it in to the photo of Catherine and Charlie. Minor resizing of Caroline's image was necessary to cover Catherine completely. Having fun with CS4.

Chinese New Year Celebration Plano, Texas

I have added three slide shows of the Chinese New Year Celebration held in Plano, TX this past week. Anita sent me four pictures of the event and I created three different types of slide shows: Postcard Slide Show, Simple Slide Show and Tilt Slide Show. Click on each one to see the different variations on the slide show theme.