Days 19, 20 and 21: Farm Pond Park

I had the bad luck on Friday the 13th to be too busy/sick to go running around taking pictures, and on Sunday, it was raining entirely too hard to risk going outside with my K100D (which was a shame, I was planning on taking some pictures of the Boston skyline), so those 3 pics of the day are from Saturday. Hey, at least I did all the post-processing on the one I'm counting for Sunday on Sunday...

Neck and neck - 4/13/07

Ah, the joys of the 70-210mm zoom lens. On Farm Pond in Framingham, MA, there was a plethora of swans, lazily swimming around. They weren't spooked at all by Kevin or me; they must be used to people coming around. Every so often, for no apparent reason, they'd all just take off run-flying across the pond and settle down about 100 yards away. I managed to snap this picture while one of these mass migrations was occurring, panning as I took the picture.

Across the field - 4/14/07

Yes, this photo is boring. It was so darn cloudy on Saturday, but I noticed some neat patterns in the clouds. I knew, however, that just taking one photo of the scene wouldn't have captured all the cloud detail, so I:

• Auto-bracketed -2.0, 0.0 and +2.0 EV shots, trying to stay as still as possible
• Merged the 3 shots to HDR in Photoshop CS2
• Played around with the Photomatix tone-mapping plugin until I got something I liked
• Converted to an 8-bit image; using the Exposure and Gamma method, I bumped up the exposure because it was too dark
• Rotated the picture to level the horizon
  

Lo and behold, from the ashes, emerged the true picture of the day:



Across the field: Lomo - 4/15/07

The HDR version of the field was much more pleasing, but I wondered if I could make it even more interesting. Since the colors were already were leaning towards the yellowy, slightly faded tones of Lomo photography, I followed the DPS blog's Lomo tutorial pretty much to the letter, using the HDR photo as the base.

I'm still not sure which of the post-processing effects for this picture I like better. The HDR rendering is more realistic, but the Lomo version is more eye-catching. I want to print it out and see how it looks.