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Pioneer Park at Westport & Broadway

Finishing up what I’m posting of new stuff I’ve conjured up to submit for the Green Exposures photo project with the KCMO Parks Department, I went to the small Pioneer Park in Westport right next to the busy intersection of Broadway and Westport Road. This sculpture group is called “The Pioneers” by Tom Beard. I assume it’s a tribute to the first settlers of Westport before it merged with the Town of Kansas, later to all become KCMO. I see there’s a beer bottle in one shot I’ll need to get rid of in Photoshop before sending it in.

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Garment District Place and Altering An Image

Another post covering some of my new shots for the KC Parks Department’s Green Exposures photo project, for this I stopped at Garment District Place at 8th and Broadway last week in the early evening. I later went and caught that night’s really good hour of lighting at Washington Square Park by Crown Center which I posted last week, so while at the Garment District I had to make due with less interesting lighting. So admittedly I got a little more free with the editing to manipulate the light as much as I could. First a couple fountain shots…

Then there was this one image that has a real estate sign in the upper left. Just for teh lulz let’s have a look at the stages this photo passes through.

1) Original

Above – this is the original RAW converted to JPG at zero exposure compensation. It’s fairly uninteresting as far as I’m concerned. So since I did bracketing and burst mode with this shot and I have two other versions with a +2 and a -2 exposure compensation I’ll then run them through Photomatix and get this with the sliders a certain way…

2) Three exposures tone mapped in Photomatix

Then I wanted to meddle a bit further in Photoshop now, sometimes you have to fix things that can go wrong when using HDR, but mainly for this I just wanted some color and tone adjustments.

3) Post-Photoshop.

At the end since it doesn’t matter one way or another, and it will make the photo look better, I decided to get rid of that For Sale sign by using the Content Aware Fill function and the clone stamp in Photoshop CS5 –

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2011 KC Dragon Boat Races

I stopped by the Dragon Boat Races on the Plaza for a few minutes on Saturday – it’s an event of rowing competitions in boats designed like dragons, organized by the KC Society for Friendship With China in partnership with KC Parks and Recreation.

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Washington Square Park in Downtown KC

Another few shots of KC parks for my work for the Parks Dept’s Green Exposures Project – this is from Washington Square Park between Grand and Main downtown. You really can’t help but notice a significant homeless presence in the park at sundown when you’re there.

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The View From Case Park

Three more shots of KC parks, this one being Case Park at 10th and Jefferson downtown, for the Green Exposures Project I’m working on for the KC Parks Department – taken Saturday night, June 18.

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The Colonnade in KC’s Old Northeast

As part of my work right now for the KCMO Parks Department’s Green Exposures project, I’m grabbing some new shots of places around the city overseen by the Parks Dept. that I don’t have much existing material on. For this post I have nine photos of the Colonnade at Gladstone Blvd and St. John Avenue, ending with a shot at Concourse Park. I’m posting ten images since the curvature of the Colonnade gives you a lot of material to work with when wielding wide-angle and fisheye lenses.

Concourse Park and Fountain

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West Bottoms seen from Case Park

I’m working on a photo project for the KCMO Parks Dept which entails gathering and collecting shots of KC parks and amenities, so Saturday evening I was at Case Park in Quality Hill downtown. At the end I brought out my telephoto lens and aimed it toward the West Bottoms trying to catch that tradeoff between natural light and artificial light. These two pics obviously won’t be submitted as part of my parks project but I wanted to include them in a photoblog posting nonetheless. The narrow aperture of f/18 for both pictures causes the starburst effect from the street lights as the aperture blades inside the lens refract the light onto the sensor.

From Case Park toward the West Bottoms at a focal length of 180 mm.

At the maximum 400 mm focal length on my telephoto lens toward part of the West Bottoms.

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