Meet and greet

So yesterday I had the chance to meet some of the Pittsburgh Penguins at an autograph session at one of our local malls.  You donate to charity and then get to stand in line for a few hours to get some autographs.  It’s the third year that I’ve done it, but it is still pretty cool!  I know I’m not a little kid, but it’s hard still not to be a little star struck around these guys.  I mean here there are, world class, Stanley Cup champion athletes, sitting right in front of you!  You see people getting jerseys, pennants, flags, shirts, hats, pucks signed, which is all well and good, but for me, one of the most exciting parts is having them sign a picture that I took.  Then I know that no one else has an autograph like mine!  Just wanted to say thanks to the Pittsburgh Penguins for putting the event on and of course Pascal Dupuis, Eric Godard and Tyler Kennedy for taking the time out of their day to sit down and sign autographs for their fans!

Today’s shot is a bit different than my last couple weeks worth of posts, because it is not an HDR and it is not a busy New York scene (though it kinda still is); it’s me!  This is a shot that my wife too on our last day in the city when we were on the Brooklyn Bridge.  She has a nice eye for taking pictures and I keep trying to get her to come out shooting with me, but she won’t!  One of these days I’ll get her out!  Anyways, every once and a while she will ask for my S95 and say “Let me get a picture of you.”  On this occasion I thought sure, why not, struck my best action pose, and this is what she got!

Now, just because she takes good pictures doesn’t mean she edits them.  I wanted to do something a bit different with this one and not just a tonemapped single exposure HDR.  So, I plopped it in Photoshop and the first thing I did was recover some of the blown out sky.  And this point in the day it was a bit overcast, so the sky was a little “Eh”.  Then I thought, “Why don’t I just do the whole thing in B&W?”  So I did!  Ran it through Nik’s Silver Efex, used a veryyyyyyyyyyyyy slight sepia color filter, a bit more structure and the vignette and was feeling pretty good about it!  Back to CS5, blurred the background a bit as I was taking a movie before this shot and forgot to switch back to Aperture Priority and f2 (I think she just used Auto) to give a nice depth of field.  Added a bit of grain for a film effect too.  So there ya go!  That’s me!

Look at that, you got to meet three professional hockey players and a very amateur photographer today…we’ll work on the greet another time!