Night Photography – Downtown Houston

In spite of the overcast skies, the weather was nice for a photographic adventure with Dana Crocker Barnett and Kathy Adams Clark in downtown Houston.  We started by trying to photograph the almost full moon next to the Houston skyline. The moon really tried hard to cooperate, but the clouds were not playing nice at the right time for a good exposure. So, I just took an HDR shot of the scene. This image has been processed in Photoshop and in Google/Nik’s HDR and Color Efex programs.

Later, when the moon did peek out, I let the moon blow out (overexpose) and took a shot. It was blah. I took another and this time my camera decided to focus on “who knows what”, so all of the lights were out of focus. For some reason I liked it… Strange, I know. This image was tweaked in Photoshop and Google/Nik’s Color Efex program.

Next we went to the Hobby Center parking garage and took a few shots, met all of the rest of the students in the class and headed over to the Christmas decorations near City Hall. I took a few crazy blur/motion photos of the Christmas tree and one of the tree lined sidewalk.

We headed back up to the Hobby Center garage to get some photos of the Ferris wheel and traffic. I tried out some panning shots of the traffic below on the freeway. No special processing on these – just crops since I only had a very wide angle lens.

Kathy set up her crystal ball and we took a few shots of the downtown buildings. I still need to work at these types of shots. They are easy, but at the same time, you really have to pay attention to all of the details. I cropped off the glaring white building that was camera right. It is, however, in the refracted image in the crystal ball.

I edited this version by rotating the image in the ball to make it appear right-side-up and did considerable editing to put the fuzzy towel back on the bottom and paint in a fake sky where the towel was at the top.

It was a fun night!