I am feeling quite sluggish today, and I think that’s only natural since I’ve felt relatively insane all week. Of the past four nights, I think I’ve been sleeping by 9:30 p.m. (I stayed up until 10 p.m. to finish Harry Potter last night). I just have too much excitement in my brain. Tomorrow I’m photographing Areca’s wedding and Wednesday I’m moving to a new apartment (with the help of professional movers, hooray!). Hm. I guess that’s not a whole lot of excitement, but considering I haven’t started packing and I’ve never been a wedding photographer, I feel stress and worry and self-doubt.

I have also not yet uploaded my photos from British Columbia and Washington. I uploaded a few samples of images I made during my class with Ben Willmore during Image Explorations. I thought I’d show those to you since it may take me another week or so to get travel photos uploaded. (I may also unsubscribe to cable internet at home, which will make me even slower.)

First, let me give you the sense of how lovely the Shawnigan Lake School was (via a stitched image that I learned how to do during class):

Next, I’ll show you an HDR (high dynamic range) I created. I’m not sure that this sort of thing is really my style (I didn’t push it far as I probably should have), but it was interesting.

First, I took three photos of the same content. The first photo was underexposed, the next was normal exposure, and the final was overexposed:

Second, I used Photoshop (CS3) to combine them all into the HDR image:

Third, I used a program called Photomatix to play with the coloring and artistry of the image:

And that was only the first full day of class (Monday the 16th)!

On Tuesday, Ben shared a lot more general tips and tricks regarding Photoshop. He also gave us a few actions to help us on our way, which I applied to a self portrait for the photo contest.

Before:

After:

On Wednesday (the last full day of class), I borrowed a Wacom Intuos pen tablet. It was a beautiful thing (and I think about how I can get one every day). I drew you a photo of a weird one-armed angel thing: