I posted a picture back in May called The Great Greening. This is another picture from the same series, but I’ve played quite a bit with the colours. I spent hours playing with black clipping, curves, exposure, temperature, split toning and vignettes, all the while checking with Jenna (does this look nice? I lose objectivity when I work for too long on my own pictures). Most of the effect was achieved by applying a yellow filter to the highlights and a blue filter to the shadows. Hope you like it.

…and I don’t know what they’re called. But they’re pretty.

Umm, not much more to say about this picture. Perhaps not the best framed picture of all times, but it’s so vibrant!

Our cats are normally indoor cats, but Morph has had a yearning to explore the world beyond the big glass panes and those pieces of wall that tend to magically swing open. The other one, Helios, is terrified of the outside. But Morph got his wish not that long ago… this was his first major adventure outside.

I took this picture of the mall nearby the other day. The sky really was this vibrant, no fakery involved!

• Nikon D70, two second exposure to capture the light streaks.

Shot of the Chicago River (is that its name?) from a bridge, facing upriver (west-ish).

Sunset shot from Port Dalhousie in St Catharines, Ontario. I was taking pictures of the sailboat (which I thought would make a nice pictures), when this flock of Canda geese came paddling past, almost as if on cue…

Taken down by Port Weller, the entrance to the Welland Canal in St Catharines, Ontario, in June this year.

This is my second HDR picture, also of Niagara Falls. Hope you like it! I spent an hour tweaking and pushing sliders around in PhotoMatix, a programme that makes HDR pictures, to optimise the result, and then some more time doing post-processing in Lightroom. This one was composed of three different pictures, but unfortunately, they too were JPEGs.

I wanted to try out making High Dynamic Range (HDR) images, which seems to be all the range these days. HDR imaging is characterised by capturing a wider rage of colours. In other words, the HDR picture I have made here is able to show details in both the highlights and the shadows. Normally, of course, there would far more clipping in both the highlight and shadow areas – they would be either completely white or completely black. If you are interested, you can read more about what HDR is here; you can see examples of HDR pictures here; and you can find a lot of HDR resources here.

This HDR is my first try, so it is far from perfect. It was made of only two pictures that I had lying around from my last visit to Niagara Falls – JPEGs at that, which contain less colour information than camera raw. For optimal results, I gather you should use at least three raw files with three different exposures to capture both the highlights, midtones and shadows. More HDR pictures will follow.

The steps up to the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago offers this stunning panorama of the city skyline. I took this without a tripod (actually, I’ve done all my panoramas so far without a tripod :S), so it’s not perfect, but the view more than compensates for that. The Shedd Aquarium itself was pretty cool too.

Ay carambo, this butterfly (the Blue Morpho, or Morpho granadensis in Latin) was not selling itself short. Always on the move, never sitting down, and when on rare occasion it did sit down it would fold its wings up — and the underside was not as pretty. Took a lot of patience waiting to find one sitting down and spreading its wings out. But what a reward.