I tonemapped the image to bring out the wonderful smoke lit up in red all through the sky.

Leander Fireworks

I went to the parking garage at the Breckenridge hospital in downtown Austin last evening for another project I am working on and had a chance to photograph the downtown area from up at the top. What a view! The sky really has a dramatic feel to it and the colors of the lights in the buildings adds some cool accents to the scene.

This panoramic photograph is an HDR image composed from 24 photographs, with 8 sections of 3 images per section.

A very nice downtown park in Austin. I mixed a bit of long exposure with HDR to create a cool effect; the cars are moving but you can see all the colors. It’s impossible to take a photo downtown and not see a crane, and sure enough, this photo has one.

On my oldest son’s birthday, he had some friends and family gather together at Republic Square Park (5th and Guadalupe). Of course, there was no nearby parking, so I had to walk a bit, which was absolutely wonderful for finding things and enjoying the evening. Somewhere along the way I came across this really cool house, so I took a few photos. This is one of my favorites.

I have to say that I love to stumble across old equipment or machinery. Most of the time, the really good ones stump me as to what they actually did back when they were working; usually lots of parts are either missing or not in the right place anyway. So, I tend to photograph these things when I can. This is just someone’s yard adornment, and I think it’s pretty cool. I used Photoshop to make it into a B&W after teasing out some structure and texture in Photomatix.

Peninsula of Lake Travis, originally uploaded by wblj.

While out looking over Lake Travis from the St. Luke’s on the Lake I took this panoramic photograph. I’m amazed at the water levels still; hopefully they will continue to rise! This is a combined HDR photograph of 6 pan positions of 3 exposures each, stitched together in Photoshop CS4. One of my main goals in life is to keep making my computer sweat as often and for as long as possible …

East Texas Lake, originally uploaded by wblj.

I really like working with multiple images and creating a panorama. This is a fairly large pano (you can see the full sized image on flickr, so click through to get it) of a wonderful lake out near Canton, Texas. We roused ourselves up pretty early one morning and caught the morning mist rising from the surface of the very still lake. I took 3 images at each spot to create a series of 9 HDR images, then stitched them together to create this final image (1 image from 18 photographs!) Computers sure do make photography interesting…

While I was at the Texas School of Professional Photography this past Spring I stumbled upon this little guy eating an apple core. I’ve always been impressed with how “neat” and “combed” a squirrel looks! I’ve also wished I could spell squirrel without googling it