This is a HDR photo from the Dublin Castle in Dublin, Ireland. The Dublin Castle is free to visit however paid tours of the State Rooms are available either with a host or self guided. The rest of the grounds though are free for you to wander around. As we walked around the grounds I saw shot and knew it would look great with the three bracket HDR style I have been recently shooting. Unfortunately during our entire trip in Ireland it was overcast and even some times rainy so the top two-thirds of the photo are a bit grey and dreary but it also makes the colors of the plants, flowers and wall “pop”. I may go back later to create a second version of this shot by touching up the sky in Photoshop or Pixelmator.

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I attended FLBlogCon on September 20, 2014 in Orlando, FL. FLBlogCon was hosted at Full Sail University, a for-profit university. The school was founded in 1979 in Dayton, Ohio as Full Sail Recording Workshop. Full Sail relocated to Florida in 1980, adding video production and film production courses and, with the move in 1989 to its current campus, expanded its curriculum to include other entertainment and media-related areas of study. Full Sail began offering online degrees in 2007. [1]

FLBlogCon started four years ago by Bess Auer as Bess wanted to attend larger blog conferences but could not afford the time or cost to fly to locations such as Chicago or New York, so she started FLBlogCon. The event had 350 attendees this year, most from Florida but one attendee flew in from Spain! This year, FLBlogCon covered topics such as Blog Building, Content Creation, Social Media and something called Pecha Kucha Style?!?! I know I am already planning my topics to submit for next year’s event.

My blog is not a traditional blog. It is a photography blog. I do have copy and topics, but it is a little different. Still though I took away a lot from the conference, well worth the price of admission. The above photo is from what  I consider the “Main Stage”. Full Sail University has this awesome venue space, Full Sail Live, where the Opening Keynote, Ted Murphy CEO and Founder of IZEA, as well as the Closing Keynote, Eddie Selover from PechaKucha Orlando, was held. The conference came to a close and the bloggers started to head to the after party but I stuck behind to quickly grab some shots of the venue. I of course have fallen in love with HDR shots, as evident of my recent posts, so of course I had to shoot the venue in HDR. It was a challenge as the cleaning and tech crew were trying to do their job but I am very happy with my final shot. The full set of photos from FLBlogCon are below.

[1] Source: Wikipeida

[flickr_set id="72157648168241332"]

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It has been awhile since I have posted a photo from Walt Disney World. This is the Lobby and Check In area at Pop Century Resort. I decided to have a mini stay-cation for a weekend at Disney World and booked a room at Pop Century. I stayed at the parks late and when I finally arrived back to the resort most guests were sleeping so I ran around the resort property with my tripod capturing photos without any people in them. Despite being a value resort, I am a huge fan of Pop Century. Each building is themed to different decades and have oversized props such as Play-Doh, Rubik’s Cube, Sony Walkman, Eight Tracks and Duncan Yo-Yos. The rooms are small, but can’t go wrong choosing Pop Century if you want to stay on property to either save on parking at the parks or have the added benefits of Extra Magic Hours and being able to charge in park to your room.

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This is another HDR photo from my recent travels to the United Kingdom and Ireland. Dean’s Yard Sanctuary is a building next to Westminster Abbey. The middle archway leads to Dean’s Yard and the Westminster School, The Royal College of St. Peter in Westminster, founded in 1540 is also in the area. The pillar to the right of the frame is the Westminster Scholars Memorial and is dedicated to former scholars from Westminster School that lost their lives in two 19th century conflicts – the Russian War and the Indian War. Dean’s Yard is free to explore and known to the Westminster School students as Green. Many Westminster School students play football or relax on Green. Historically the Abbey was one of the last ecclesiastical sanctuaries to surrender its ancient rights, with the result that the precincts were largely occupied by most undesirable and dangerous inhabitants. ^[1]

[1] Source: Wikipedia

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This is a photo from the River Liffey in Dublin, Ireland. The Ha’penny and Millennium Bridge are in the background. The River Liffey is North of the Temple Bar Area, where the Croke Park Classic (UCF v Penn St College Football) activities were taking place. This photo was after the game ended and we were walking back to the Temple Bar area from where the bus dropped us off. The sun was setting so I quickly set my camera to shoot three brackets, -2, 0 and +2 and did a quick hand-held HDR shot. The clouds and colors are all natural, minus the tone-mapping for the HDR shot. You can see some traffic in the shot, but I wanted to compose the photo to minimize this traffic while focusing on the sunset. This is why there are more of the buildings to the right of the frame than to the left.

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In the summer of 2014 I traveled to the United Kingdom and Ireland for a personal trip and to attend the Croke Park Classic in Dublin. I stayed at the St Ermin’s Hotel which is a 4 Star Luxury Hotel in Central London. St Ermin’s is within walking distance of many tourist attractions, such as Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, Parliament, River Thames, London Eye and Buckingham Palace. It is also around the corner from New Scotland Yard, St. James Park and the Undergound, London’s subway. St Ermins also has an interesting history:

The St Ermin’s Hotel has a reputation for use by the UK’s secret intelligence agencies. During the 1930s the hotel and the building at 2 Caxton Street were used by officers of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) located close by at 54 Broadway to meet agents and is well documented from March 1938 as the headquarters first of SIS’s Section D, headed by Australian George Taylor and then as home of the SOE, working under “Statistical Research Department” cover. Among the more famous personnel known to have worked from offices in the building are Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Laurence Grand, H. Montgomery Hyde and Eric Maschwitz.

Source: Wikipedia

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This is a photo of the Cinderella Fountain in Magic Kingdom. This is found if you turn left right after you walk through the middle of Cinderella Castle. Cinderella Fountain is dual functioning, as a fountain with a sculpture of Cinderella and the mice, but also as water fountains for park guests. This is another HDR shot, taken the same night as my Cinderella Castle HDR photo. The Magic Kingdom was open late that night so by the time the park closed it was very easy to capture this photo, especially since it is right off the main exit path that any of the few other straggling guests could walk by without interrupting the shot. I love the colors and texture of the brick. This photo is a prime example of why I really do enjoy the Disney parks, especially being able to photograph the parks. Disney parks have two very different experiences, one during the day and one during the night.

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This is a photo from the archives. I shot Cinderella Castle with the Partner Statue months ago, but never got around to processing the photo. I wanted to try my skill at bracketed/HDR shot so I stayed at the Magic Kingdom until well after park close. It was so late it was even after the Kiss Goodnight and the managers were starting to congregate at the hub meaning I was one of the last, if not the last, person out of the park that night. I setup my tripod, aimed it at Cinderella Castle and changed my camera settings to shoot at -2, 0 and +2. I took a total of three shots, two groupings, with the other grouping as a closer crop. I recently found an online Cloud HDR service, now in beta and not open to the public, which allowed me to create multiple tone maps as well as combine layers into a composite image. After playing around with the service/software in the cloud I was very happy to have finally produce an image of Cinderella Castle which I have always seen shared by other photographers but I never thought I would every be able to recreate on my own.

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I took this photo from the same site as my last photo of the 4th of July Fireworks, which is the top of a 7 story parking garage. This photo is not a long exposure photo but is composed of three photos to produce high dynamic range imaging, commonly known as HDR. This is not my first time I have played with HDR but it is the first time I have posted a HDR image on my site. I like to keep my HDR compositions more natural looking, so if you stood in the same spot I captured the photo you would see the same image. There are many things I really like about this photo from the bridges on the left to the red, white and blue on the Sun Trust building.

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