Been a little busy but here goes...

This pic is the subject of a post I did for metblogs.  In short LA has such a gorgeous long summer fall and winter are compressed into a few weeks starting sometime around Thanksgiving, and thankfully, done with by the end of March.  As a result our autumn blends right with Christmas and few notice the fall color and focus on the yard art etc., for the holidays.  It didn't however skip my notice.

This image was shot 3 frames bracketed with photomatix generating the HDR file, as well as the tonemapping. The final image was post processed in Virtual Photographer to replicate the over saturated colors found on the old 'chromes printed on cibachrome print material

Surreality Check...get back to work
The holidays are over and I'm finally getting some free time and get back to working through what I shot the last few months. In early November I walked through Duarte meandering about and just shooting. Interesting community, very old and busily going about reinventing itself. Among the oddities is they used ficus trees, sculpted to all look the same instead of the traditional LA Icon...the Palm to line the main boulevards.

I was out shooting with HDR post processing in mind. The goal...old timey postcard looks and a little of the "predictors" where humans are moving about.

The bracketed photo's were post processed to start with using Photomatix Pro to do the HDR generation from the RAW files then tonemapped. From there I did the final clean up with CS2 and Virtual Photographer.

Enjoy "Old Chevy Life Support" and "Bug Found on Road Alive".