Comments (0) I wasn’t sure how this picture would turn out. Right as you begin to walk down towards the underwater tube you come across this waterfall. The colors they used for the design were gorgeous – I like the fall colors a lot.
I had the opportunity on Saturday to go down to the Mall of America’s Underwater Adventures attraction and watch my cousin’s wife, Sarah, and her brother dive with the sharks. It was a fantastic experience being able to watch them. I’ve been to the mall lots of times but had never done the aquarium before. Let’s face it, you spend eleven years in California and you do the aquarium thing many, many times. But I still enjoyed myself there.
Unfortunately it was much too dark for my camera to take a lot of photos that I would want to frame or post on here, but I did manage to get one. We were walking down the underwater tube and there was a point where the light above the water shown down through the surface and you got those neat light rays that you see frequently in underwater photography. Luckily there was enough light for a hand held shot.
Apparently I didn’t tag all the photos on my hard drive that I thought. I came across this picture I took earlier last year, one of the gazillion photos I have at Quarry Park.
Taken at our annual pumpkin-picking event in South Haven back in October. The farm has some of the most delicious apples, too, and I couldn’t resist snapping a couple. 
I keep going back to the photos that Jacob and I took at the abandoned farm last year and wishing that we could go back and retake them but, alas, that will not happen. Yes, the farm is still there – it hasn’t been demolished yet. But there are “No Trespassing” signs all over the place so I think that any hope of going back and getting better shots is gone. It’s too bad because I’d driven by there tons of times and it’s a photographer’s dream, whether you’re into HDR or the normal stuff.
When you shoot photos for HDR you have to make sure that there is a lot of contrast. That’s how HDR works and when the contrast isn’t there then you have problems. That’s how it was when we went shooting there. There was enough contrast in the buildings and the overgrown brush but the sky was another story. All the fog had burned off and so all you had was a partially sunny sky. All of my pictures that included sky were horrible.
So, I did a simple little work-around. I simply converted the photo to a sepia tint and added some film grain. It works. It gives it that nostalgic, turn-of-the-century look. The sky still isn’t what I’d like it to be, but I think I like it. It’s much better this way than my original shot.
My daughter, Isa, and one of her best friends, Danielle, and the bait that she caught. Just like the picture that I took this summer of the abandoned farm, this picture is a case of an extreme-textured HDR, but in the end, I like it.
So, my wife has made it home, I have my camera and am free to putz with it as I wish but alas, it is not the weekend so picture-taking isn’t going to happen. I’m hoping to get out on Saturday and get some sunrise or sunset photos but we’ll see.
One thing I did manage to do was to finish going through the thousands of photos stored on my computer and tag the ones that needed tagging and fixing the dates in Windows Live Photo Gallery. While going through this process I managed to actually look at all the HDR photos that I had taken, even all of the ones that I did wrong, and the photos that I’ve taken at Quarry Park.
I must say, I really do like going there and it’s amazing that I’ve managed to live here this long before I got over there for the first time. It kind of makes me wonder what I’ve been doing all this time that I completely overlooked such a wonderful place. I especially cannot wait until my friend, Jacob, comes up here with his new Nikon D90 (of which I am extremely jealous, let me tell you) so that I can see the improved quality of his photos. He doesn’t handle the cold too well so I’ve only got about five months before we can start taking photos there together.
I found the photo below while going through my Quarry Park shots. The photo itself isn’t really all that spectacular, it’s just a mound of moss. I must say, I keep going back and forth on this whole HDR thing and I keep wondering just how far I want to take this format. I usually make it a point of shooting HDR photos whenever I’m shooting in general but I don’t always keep the shots. What amazes me about this technique is just how much detail it brings out. I’ve taken the normal shot below and I can’t get the detail to pop, such as the individual grass, as much as you see below, even in Photoshop. I think I’m amazed at just the amount of detail that a camera can capture and how robbed a lot of us are at the amount of detail that gets lost in normal photos.
So, I’m sitting here on a Saturday night after getting the kids down to bed wondering what I should do next. Becky is in Idaho for the weekend so I’m all alone at this point. I know that I have to get up for church tomorrow but I just don’t have the desire to go to bed just yet nor do I have the desire to clean the house any more at this point. I’m kind of enjoying the peace and quiet and I don’t want it to disappear.
It never fails that whenever Becky goes away and takes the camera I get the urge to do some photography but since I lack the funds to get another camera (especially the one I’d really like to get) I have no choice but to forget the idea to get a babysitter and go and try and shoot. I cannot wait til she gets back and I have a chance to look at her photos – she’s really taken some great photos when she travels.
So, while I putz with an idea for the night I thought I’d share one that I took earlier in the year and completely forgot about – one of those hidden gems that I’d spoken of earlier. This is the Sauk River taken from a bridge on Veterans Drive. It’s one of those places that I see on my delivery route but I just never took the time to really admire it. I’m kind of glad I got this, though, because it reminds me of a postcard and there is enough foliage that you cannot see the street so it takes the “suburbia” effect out of the picture.
I had a great weekend. Thanks to my wife, Becky, and my brother-in-law and his wife, I got to go see the Minnesota Wild host the St. Louis Blues and it was a great game. I had not been to an NHL game in a couple of years and I missed it dearly. The drive down wasn’t the greatest as we are coming out of a winter storm but we did alright. And, to make matters better, it wasn’t bone-chilling cold either. I got to wear my jersey down, which I hadn’t done yet.
After the game we stayed overnight in the Cities and today went and had a nice breakfast then walked around the Mall of America. I had never been at the mall near Christmas time before and I have to say it was very pleasant. There weren’t a lot of people there at all. We got to walk around and just window shop, Becky tried on some pants, we looked in the college stores, got some hot chocolate. All in all, it was just a very pleasant weekend.
The rotunda was decorated for Christmas and so I took the opportunity to snap some pictures, since I can’t imagine I’ll be at the mall near another Christmas again. They did a nice job decorating it. I didn’t have my tripod so I couldn’t take true HDR pictures, and it probably wouldn’t have mattered anyways since people were walking in and out of frame. I had taken a picture inside Crossroads mall and converted them to HDR but they didn’t turn out as good as this one did. I really like the trees.
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