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.

One of the usual stops was of course the National Mall, and the Korean War Veterans Memorial was as touching as ever. The following is a picture of one of the statues at the memorial:

One of the many nice experiences was a walk through a bamboo forest, which was amazingly dark with just some sun rays shining through.

This picture of my wonderful wife was made in the coastal region while hiking up to a waterfall. I like the dreamy feel of this picture, so I also entered it into my gallery at the Sierra Club.

Duke Kahanamoku, full name “Duke Paoa Kahinu Mokoe Hulikohola Kahanamoku”, is usually credited as the creator of the sport of surfing as we know it today. He has a statue at Waikiki Beach on the Island of O’ahu:

I made those images during the start of one of the races. They are some experiments with longer shutter speeds, those pictures are straight out of the camera (except some adjustments to color and contrast). No fancy Photoshop effects, just movement of the camera during exposure.

Great fun, even though we had some heavy rains during the afternoon – but that just makes for a more muddy course, which in turn again adds to the fun of photography!

The National Arts Program has been around for a while (since 1983), and it’s mission is to “identify, showcase, and reward the visual artistic talent in America”. I feel very honored to be involved with this program.

This picture, entitled “Blue Fence”, is a piece I created while traveling in the Ukraine last year. My wife was working in the Ukraine for a few months, and I had the great opportunity to visit her.

While travelling I was stranded in a very desolate place for a couple of hours, a place next to a highway with absolutely nothing to see or do. To add to the misery it was also raining, windy and cold. So I took my camera with the self-assigned project to make lemonade out of lemons and create one picture despite the hopeless environment.

I found this little piece of old fence with rain drops hanging from some old spider web, and in the end I was quite happy with the result of my little project.