Yellow Garage

This posting is late because my internet connection has been down for a couple of days. I'm back up, but the connection is limping rather than running. On Saturday, I had the pleasure of taking the fam plus one on my daughters friends to the "big city" of Anchorage so the teenagers could buy clothes for a semi-formal event. Their school team won a statewide science competition, so they're due to go to the national competition in May. So the girls wanted something more formal than jeans for the social events at the competition. Hence the 40 mile road trip to Anchorage. We go about once or twice a month, but some folks do that commute daily. It would drive me crazy, particularly in the winter. It is one of the most scenic drives in the country though. Whenever we go, we feel a little like the Clampetts because we're used to a quasi rural existence. Anchorage is somewhat podunk in it's own right having a population around 275-300k, but its as good as it gets in Alaska.

I spotted a nice blipable scene on the way down as we crossed a branch of the mouth of the Matanuska river as it empties into the Knik Arm of the Cook Inlet. I couldn't stop because the girls were single minded in their shopping mission, and by the time my brain processed it as a good site, we were 1/4 mile down the road. Fear not, I went back on Sunday and photographed it for that day's blip. Besides, I figured I would get some pictures of the quasi-urban landscape of Anchorage (the shopping mall).

I was keeping an eye on the girls from a distance in Nordstroms, and there were some colorful designer t-shirt displays that I wanted to capture. As I was taking a white balance reading, a floor manager made it clear that photography was not allowed in their store. It never occurred to me that they wouldn't allow such a thing, but I guess there are some proprietary displays, and there is the 911 factor that puts folks on edge.

I thought the architecture of the common area food court was interesting and I got thisshot before a security guard informed me that photography was not permitted anywhere in the mall. I was ready to abandon my mall blip project, but I figured they couldn't bother me on the city street. JC Penny's parking garage is kind of interesting, and I decided to use it as a subject for an HDR imaging experiment. I recently upgraded to Photoshop CS3 and it has a feature where you can merge multiple photos with different ranges of exposures so the highlight and shadows don't get blown out. Here is a collage of the three exposures and the final result. The merged result shows the clouds as well as the detail about the close lamp. Note that in this picture I did capture a guy walking in the scene who showed up as three people in the final, and the is a blurred car as well. Technically, this should be a "still" subject to work. Also, this was hand held, and Photoshop matched them up based on the subject which is pretty cool. I'm sure I'll find all kinds of fun features with this new version. The good third party Photoshop cs3 books should be hitting Barnes and Noble soon which I'll surely snap up.