Dallas Skyline

I tried something a little different for me last night -- shooting the Dallas skyline at sunset. It was supposed to be a group event, organized by Adventures In Photography of North Texas. But the threat of severe thunderstorms in the forecast convinced the organizer to postpone. Because I'm apparently an idiot with no regard for my own well-being, I went anyway.

Good news -- the forecast storms never materialized.  I found the spot where we hard agreed to meet fairly easily, but also found the Trinity River to be much lower than expected.  Since I wanted a reflection in my foreground, I had to move to where the water was and compose accordingly.  This was actually the clearest reflection of my entire shoot, as a persistent breeze picked up shortly after I arrived.

I arrived well before sunset to have ample time to experiment with position and composition.  A Great Egret thought this scene needed a foreground element.

As the egret moved on, I decided to try the same scene without my polarizer.  I don't like it nearly as much without the reflection of the buildings and with so much of the blue from the sky gone.

It wasn't an especially colorful sunset, but there was a brief window when the clouds picked up some pink.  The lights on the buildings were starting to come on and be more noticeable, too.

I wanted to get a good amount of both the clouds and the reflection in this shot, but the building to the left of Reunion Tower wasn't adding anything.  So I cropped this one as a 4x5 instead of a 4x6.

I shot everything with a two-stop bracket in each direction, but ended up not caring for most of the HDR blends.  Most of them sacrificed too much sharpness without adding enough additional detail.  This is the bracketed version of the previous shot, and actually seems to have less detail in the shadows.  Go figure.

The sky in the background kept getting darker (not surprisingly), but for a while I continued to pick up some nice reflection of the lighter sky to the west in some of the buildings.

I switched to a portrait orientation to get more of the clouds and longer reflections in the water for just one shot.

About an hour after I started I decided the sky was probably about as dark as it was going to get, took one last shot, and packed up for the night.

It felt great to get back out shooting for the first time since April in Ennis, and to try a different sort of landscape photography!

Cherry Creek North Night Photowalk

I've been wanting to attend one of Illuminate Workshops' monthly night photowalks for more than a year, but always had some sort of conflict or excuse. This past weekend I finally changed that, joining the group for a trek around Cherry Creek North.

And quite a group it was -- nearly 40 people in all with as wide a variety of cameras as I've ever seen in one place.  We started around 8:00, with no particular agenda or plan other than to look for eye-catching visuals like the reflections off the windows of this office building.

There was no way I could pass up shooting these fountains, though I wish I'd been able to shoot down on them even more to take out the slightly distracting background.

Some interesting neon lights in a salon.

I applied some of the zoom lens light painting techniques I'd learned at the Butterfly Pavilion workshop back in January to pleasing effect on this parking sign.

You may have to study this shot for a bit before the face becomes apparent.  It's the statue in front of the Wizard's Chest game/toy/magic/costume shop.

Another statue in a dramatic pose that I thought the sharply contrasting light accentuated nicely.

Streetlights cast shadows of tree branches on the sidewalk.

I settled for shooting the sign, but what I really wanted was to go in for a burger.

Traffic passes by the Cherry Creek Shopping Center on 1st Avenue.

More zoom lens light painting with a sign in front of a parking garage.

A canopy above a street glowed with lights of changing colors.

Spent 2 1/2 hours wandering around before about half of the hardy souls who hadn't yet turned into pumpkins gathered for a drink at Machete.  It was great to shoot something so completely different from my normal landscapes and wildlife, and I look forward to doing more urban nighttime photography soon!