The shot above shows a portion of the north east coast of Oahu, Hawaii. My family and I recently visited Hawaii and one day while the rest of the family was off on a kayaking trip, I rented a car and took a drive around the island. It’s hard to get good landscape images when you are on vacation with others simply because schedules don’t always allow you to be in the right place at the right time to capture the best light. Instead, you just have to shoot what you are given. On my drive around the island I stopped at this small beach park. It was very windy that day and it made for some really nice surf. I took several pictures at this beach and when I was leaving I walked over to this area which was located underneath some trees. I liked the way the foreground plants and the tree framed the surf and the distant hills. Unfortunately the light was rather strong and created some haze in the distance, but I still liked the view so I took the picture.

This image shows a couple of gas meters located on the side of a building next to the office where I work. I’ve always liked the way these meters look in strong light. I like the look of the yellow pipe agains the gray metal siding and I like the shadow patterns created by the sidelight. I’ve seen this image in my head for months but I never bothered to take a picture of it until just recently.

>I was going through my Lightroom catalog spending some time adding keywords and looking at images that I had ignored in the past when I came across this shot I took of a 1932 Lincoln. The car was part of the Classic Car Club of America show held at the Gilmore Car Museum. I really like the look of some of these old cars, especially the swooping lines of the fenders over the wheels. When I saw the image in the catalog, I immediately thought it would look good with a more painted look. The way the clouds were reflecting on the fender already had a sort of painted look so I enhanced it by applying some Topaz Simplify to the entire image. Just for kicks I wondered how the image might look with a bit more contrast, so I took the image into Silver Efex Pro2 and choose one of the darker presets which added just the contrast that I wanted. The black and white conversion made the tail light too dark, so I masked out the conversion, and applied a separate black and white layer which made the red color lighter, not darker.

I’ve been finding it difficult to get out and shoot new material for a variety of reasons, but today was such a nice day I decided to make an effort to get out and at least shoot something. I decided to take a short drive into Detroit to check out the progress on the Michigan Central Station. The owners are finally doing something to at least stabilize the building. Mostly this involves tightening security around the station to keep people out, removing the broken windows and putting in new windows, and working on the roof. Progress is slow, but they have definitely made some progress at least regarding the windows on the lower level. They haven’t actually replaced any that I could see, but they have removed the broken glass.

I’ve been posting a lot of grungy, dark images the past few days and I decided it was time to do something a little more colorful. I took this shot in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 2009 and its been sitting in my ‘blog possibilities’ collection for a while so I decided to trot it out. The image shows the Acme Mercantile store on Liberty Street. The store has all sorts of interesting items for sale. I took this shot on a walk I took around town focusing primarily on using my ultra-wide angle lens (7-14 Digital Zuiko 2x crop factor). The image was produced as an HDR from 5 exposures, with some additional processing.