Last week I went on a photo walk with a friend.

We walked around the Arboretum of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, took tons of pictures of beautiful flowers and majestic trees. Then, on the way back to the car, I discovered a dark alley with some trash cans:

What can I say – it must have something to do with my heritage. For some mysterious reason I find garbage, fire ladders and dark alleys a more interesting subjects than pretty flowers…

Last weekend was a longer weekend for me, I had some time off from work as compensation for the many weekends I spent working in the recent past.

My wife and I made a trip to Charleston (South Carolina) for some kayaking and just plain enjoying life in a new place. As things go – it’s all fun and games until She sees an opportunity to go shopping, which leaves me in turn with some extra time to take pictures.

One day I found myself with some spare time in front of this water fountain, and created an impromptu assignment for myself: HDR is the big rage, and people either love or hate it. Especially the kind of over-processed HDR images that have an unrealistic grunge look to them.

Now, I couldn’t care less about this discussion – if you like those kind of pictures you like them, if you don’t then you don’t. It’s up to you. At least that’s my take.

I still wanted to see if I can create such an HDR image, so here it is:

For full disclosure: I used the trial version of Photomatix Pro to create this image, hence the watermarks on the picture.