Going up

Well, this was a great weekend for me from a photography point of view, and I didn’t even take any pictures.  It was great for 2 reasons: my Aperture 3 upgrade arrived, and so did my NIK Software Complete Collection (including HDR Efex Pro!).  In other words,  I got a lot of new software toys.  I have been using Aperture 2 for a couple of years now, and finally just upgraded to v3 which is awesome!  The capabilities of this product continue to impress me, and there are a lot of great presets included which are fun and functional!  I haven’t had much time to play with the NIK Software collection yet, but I have run a couple of single frame photos through HDR Efex Pro (such as this one) and I am very impressed!  What a cool product!  As a result of now having these products, I can see that I will not be using Photomatix much any more (HDR Efex Pro is that good!) and who needs Photoshop anymore (Aperture 3 is that good!)?

This is one of those shots that is a result of just messing around with the camera.  I was in Tampa, FL last week for a couple of days, and though I took some shots, I was not finding anything that really inspired me.  I was back at my hotel, which was conveniently attached to the airport, so I just wandered over there one evening hoping to find it empty.  Bingo!  I find most touristy places are great to shoot really early, while the tourists are sleeping, but most airports are best to shoot late because no one sticks around any longer than they have to!  I basically had the airport to myself, which was kind of interesting.  I just started trying different camera tricks with the escalator, and finally settled on this one, which involved having my camera on the tripod, sitting on an escalator step, and going up.  It wasn’t a particularly long exposure - about 2 seconds - but it was enough to blur out the sides while I rode it up and back to my room.  It’s always fun to experiment!