Ron Hunt Photography

I had the pleasure of  going on a cruise last February, and simply didn’t do much at all with my pictures.  I found this shot and loved the simplicity and lines.  Of course as always someone is in the way!!

I liked the puffy little clouds and managed to keep decent detail in the shadows using the HDR (ish) mode on my p300 Nikon (point and shoot).  I was very impressed  with how well it did.  I popped into photoshop CS6 to hack away the people.  Ok..  side note.   PHOTOSHOP IS AMAZING.  The changes from CS4 to CS6 are WELL worth the money.  I broke down and joined the Adobe Creative Cloud and now have all they offer.  The healing brushes alone are simply jaw dropping.

I digress..  after removing the unwanted guests (sorry Pam!) I popped back into Lightroom 4 to tweak contrast, slight boost to color and lens correction.

San Juan Fort

I did a lot of riding last summer, and I mean a LOT!!  So much in fact that I am just now beginning to dig through pictures from the last few years.  On one ride we found this view from an over look.  We are along the river on the Minnesota side, but I’m afraid I can’t recall exactly where 🙂   It was another of those views that you know a picture will not do justice.  After finding the perfect shot with gods own frame, I tried some regular shots which turned out to flat.   I also attempted a panorama that is nice, but not what I was looking for.

I decided to do a multiple exposure and hope for a decent HDR to punch the killer clouds and bring back some depth to the image.   I did a 3 shot manual exposure with my Nikon p300 (point and shoot) trying not to move much.   YEA RIGHT!!  I’m just glad modern software does well with aligning and ghosting!!   I exported the shots direct from camera into Nik HDR Efex 2.  I am literally brand new to this software and was excited to play.  After merging I was relatively happy and added a bit of punch.  I found the foreground was a bit distracting, so used Focalpoint 2.1 to add a bit of blur to soften things up a bit.  Added a little edge darkening and am happy with the result.

It was a balancing act with the clouds and the town.  I warmed up the town a bit, and cooled down the sky to give better definition.

I had the pleasure of hanging with a group of good friends.  We spent a cold fall day hiking in the woods near Carver, MN.  It was a bit slippery that day so I played it safe and only brought my Nikon d90, leaving the “good gear” safe at home.  I got a number of nice shots, but found that I was really struggling with finding any color.  My mind switched to “black and white mode” since that was mostly all I would come up with.

As we were hiking our way out, I came across this tree.  I don’t know why, but it jumped at me and literally SCREAMED to take a shot.  Of course we have to listen to the voices in our head, so I obliged and captured an image.

I wanted to get a nice sky with the tree mostly blacked out in silhouette.  Well I got that, but the sky was just boring.  I played around a bit and nothing I could do would give it the feeling that I had when I first saw it.  I tried Black and White, but it was even more bland.   Finally I decided to use Perfect Mask 5.2 (OnOne Software) to cut out the sky and insert something with more “wow”.  I’m not well versed in the software, so it took some playing before I managed to figure out the best way.  Don’t get me wrong, the software is very simple to use, but this was a bit of a struggle due to the harsh light creating a lot of color contamination on the edges.   I grabbed a nice sky from some that are included as part of Layers 3(OnOne software).  Everything worked as advertised, and with a quick pass through Lightroom 4 I got an nice image.

I like to occasionally try and shoot this awesome park in new and different ways.  This day I was lucky with only a few people around, but the light wasn’t great and it was a boring sky.  To excite things even more I had some remaining piles of old snow.. and LOTS of shadows.  I like a challenge so I took a basic exposure.

It was ok, but understandably boring with to much brown.  I wanted to drag the shutter, but didn’t have a ND filter with me and the sun was way to bright.  I decided to do a basic HDR shot with 5 exposures.  I only had Photoshop CS4 at the time, so thats what I used to merge them.  The rest of the work was done in Lightroom and some Nik plug ins.

Minnehaha Falls

I love the way the greens popped from the water, and the reds came out of the landscape.  I went a bit far with the sky and some haloing appeared, but over all I like it a lot.