The trip back

I had a good visit with my Mom and family back in the Homeland. And if anyone doesn't think I was in the Homeland, get a load of this:

And a half block away:

These shots were taken in Rosthern, Saskatchewan, the town closest to the villages that my parents grew up in.

The trip back was great. Sister Marian and I drove from Saskatoon to Edmonton listening to several episodes of This American Life. I spent the night there, drinking beer and playing dominos with the Dukovacs, including  Sarah and Alvin who recently moved to the wilds of Alberta from the wilds of Zambia. It was good to see them all.

I had a good drive back to Seattle, leaving St. Albert at 5:30AM and arriving back in Seattle at six in the evening. The drive through the mountains was fabulous, with lots of sunshine and lots of deer, elk, and even a couple of black bears.

I took a few shots of Mount Robson, which more often than not is shrouded in cloud. I tried something different this time, taking multiple exposures of the same shots, and then manipulating them in a program to get high dynamic range (HDR) photos. Here's the normally exposed original photo:

Here are the underexposed and overexposed shots.

With the magic of computer manipulation, here a couple of the results:

Here's another variation:

I'll have to play with this program some more, but it looks pretty cool. You can get anything from almost comic book to painting effects. I've meant to play with this style of photography ever since I did the Left Five Dead photoshoot. You might remember this photo from that series. It was done in the same HDR style.