Beitou library on a winter's day.

Things have been quiet here the last few days as life winds down for the end of the year. Winding down however doesn’t mean stopping completely. Before I get into the main part of this post, I want to quickly touch on the photograph above. It’s from Beitou Library and was hailed as East Asia’s most eco-friendly building when it was opened a few years ago. I was in the area a couple of days ago with one of my photography students and grabbed a few pictures. The weather was gray and cold so I set my camera for a 2-stop bracket and fired off three frames. They were combined in Nik HDR Efex Pro using one of its presets, and then the resulting image was opened in On One’s Perfect Photo Suite 6 where an effects layer was added to smooth out the sky and add a slight glow to the rest of the photograph. Normally we’d only use one plugin out of Lightroom for an image but there’s no rule that says you can’t use a couple.

As the title says, it’s time to wind down but there is still a bit to come in 2011. The biggest bit of news that’s on the way will be the announcement of a new workshop to take place in 2012. Details of that should hopefully be announced in the next couple of days. Also in the cards over the next couple of weeks are

• A review of Mitchell Kaneshkevich’s latest eBook for Light Stalking.
• A round up of my favorite photographs from 2011
• A reposting of my annual guide to fireworks photography just in time for new year.

There may be a couple more posts depending on how things go. I’m currently in pre-production mode for an upcoming project that’s scheduled for early January. I’m pretty excited about it but there’s a lot of work to be done to pull things together as it involves 6-7 different people working in a few different locations and we only have half a day to shoot it all.