Posted on Apr.19, 2009, under Michigan

(Olympus E-3, 7-14mm at 7mm (2x crop factor), ISO 100, exposure various @ f/11)
This is a shot of the State Street area in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This part of town is right on the edge of Central Campus at the University of Michigan. This image was created from an HDR image that I had created from 3 different exposures. I didn’t have my tripod handy so I took the shots hand-held. I processed the images using Photomatix Pro, but the end result wasn’t as sharp as I would have liked, most likely due to the lack of a tripod. Even though the image wasn’t sharp, I liked the overall composition and color quality.
I shot this with my Zuiko 7-14mm lens, which has a 35mm effective focal length of 14 – 28mm. I shot this at 7mm and from a point low to the ground. I captured a large expanse of brick before getting to the main street scape. I liked the look of the brick, particularly after the HDR processing, but I felt that the image was more suited to a panoramic framing, hence the long crop. Since I liked the basic look of the image, I decided to play around in Photoshop CS4 to see what creative things I might be able to do to the image. In the past I’ve used the Cutout filter to create a posterized/wood block looking image. I tried that with this image and I was pleased with the results. I’ll probably go back to this spot again, probably with a tripod, and see if I can get a better HDR image, but for the meantime, I’ll settle for this image.
Comments and feedback welcome.
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