A cold evening at Dream Forest

I was in need of some my-camera-and-me time so I went out to a nearby park, appropriately named Dream Forest

It's almost winter so everything's dead, but that still works for me. A 10min bus ride gets me to the beautiful Dream Forest; a vast park full of paths, trees, waterways and modern buildings. (The waterways were dried up though, for winter) This was actually my third time there, the second also being an attempt at taking photos but didn't really end up working. Here's a photo I took back in May but apparently never uploaded.

Obviously much livelier since it was spring back then... Now it looks more like this

You know, I should probably do one of those 'Four Seasons' photo sets here...

Anyway it was much darker than my photos show, and one thing they cannot portray are the intense cold. Even with gloves on my fingers were dead-frozen. I had a good time, but my, at one point I just had to pack up and head back because I was so cold! Still, had time enough to take some nice pics.

You know... taking portraits of yourself in the outdoors is VERY awkward... and doesn't always work.

Nice photo

Awkward photo

I thought this photo turned out really cool and creepy. Removed 2 lamp posts so that it looks older. This is the kind of photo you take, then look at later and find that there is a little girl in the background with her face covered by her hair. I could totally add that and make one of those annoying viral emails "FWD:fwd:Fwd:Re:Fw:FWD: GHOST GIRL APPEARS IN PHOTO, SHOCKING"
EMAIL THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW IN 7 MINS OR THE GHOST GIRL WILL EAT YOUR LEFT LEG TONIGHT.

shocking.

Anyway, all of these photos were taken with the new lens. Since it's, in terms you people would understand, "zoomy" it's not easy to take landscapes, which forced me to look at things with a different perspective, and I can say I'm satisfied. I also got sharper pictures allowing me to make the first HDR I am really happy with.

Don't know what HDR means? Ok. Geek time.
HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. Dynamic Range is the range of lights and darks your camera can see. A camera's sensor is not nearly as good as the human eye, thus it can not see as many details in light and dark areas at the same time as we can. The way around this, though, is to take 3 or more photographs of the same object: One normal, one extra bright, one extra dark. You then put these photos together in your computer so that you can compose a photograph that shows much more information in light and dark areas. While editing your photo you can then push parameters to achieve this surreal look like above. Cool eh?
(I hope that was understandable. Last time seems people didn't really know what I was talking about regarding my lens. *ahem*Poly*ahem*)

Now the only photos I took without my new lens were to make this panorama, since I needed a less "zoomy" lens to cover more area.

Click for optimal viewing experience.........

That's not the whole park either. I actually have to go there earlier one day and just explore the whole thing.

And that's the gist of what I did today. Fun!