Sea World San Antonio - Bay of Play

Welcome back to my continuing my "Sea World Week" series! These photos are of the newest attraction at Sea World San Antonio, the Sesame Street themed "Bay of Play". I thought it was just a large playground area, but it turns out it is that..and a small water park...and a performing theater...and a carousel. It is primarily geared toward young children, but I saw plenty of "kids of all ages" playing in the water while I was switching to the wide angle lens to get a better shot of the water area!

The first photo is one of the entrances to the new area, I would guess that it is supposed to be the "main entrance". It is quite possibly the largest and most exquisite playground that I have ever seen. There are nets to climb, walkways to travel on, slides, a little bit of everything. It looks like it would be a lot of fun and I am sure that the Bay of Play is going to be a huge hit! (in fact, one of the Sea World employees near the climbing nets had a broken arm...I wonder how that happened? Haha!)

Bay of Play Entrance

The next shot is of the new carousel located in the Bay of Play. It is right next to the "Shamu Express", a very small roller coaster for young guests to the park (and anyone that is afraid to ride the Steel Eel or Great White). I honestly thought that the carousel was going to be a little larger than it was, but I did not expect it to be Sesame Street themed. I took several shots of this trying to determine which was the best mix of riders and characters on the top and ultimately decided on this shot, featuring Ernie and his rubber ducky and Grover (I admittedly do not know the names of the two female characters that you can see in the shot)

Carousel

The last photo came as a bit of a surprise to me. One would think with an area being called the "Bay of Play" that there would be water, but I didn't put two and two together until we walked around the playground area to get a shot of the carousel. This is probably going to be the most popular part of the attraction, especially as the temperature increases. It was almost 90 degrees yesterday, but it was still mostly overcast and a little chilly (comparatively speaking) when I took this shot. The hardest part about the shot was finding a spot where I could capture a lot of the water, but ensure my camera would stay dry. Thankfully it wasn't windy so once I found a spot all that I had to be concerned about was just getting the perspective that I wanted.

Water Park

Please feel free to leave any comments or feedback, and remember clicking on the photo takes you to my online gallery hosted over at smugmug where you can view this (and my other photos) in various sizes. Please stop back again tomorrow as the series continues, this time focusing on the Sea Lion show "Cannery Row Caper"! Thanks for stopping by!

Sea World San Antonio - Animal Introductions

Welcome to the first in a several part series where I will be discussing photos that I took during our trip yesterday to Sea World San Antonio. It was a fairly busy day of shooting (1241 images to be exact!) and a lot of the photos came out much better than I expected, especially shots of the show "Cannery Row Caper" which I will be starting possibly tomorrow (likely on Wednesday though). This series is meant to give you a small taste of what it is like to visit the park. I have repeatedly said that the park is one of my favorite places to visit here in San Antonio, as there is so much to see and so much to do. I really don't think that you can take a bad shot in the park!

All of my posts this week will contain photos from yesterday's trip to Sea World, so if you are a fan of the park or know someone that is, please feel free to let them know about my blog series. It is going to be a fun week!

The first photo in today's series is a shot of one of the killer whales leaping from the water to touch the suspended "Believe" ball during the Believe show. Sea World offers several different shows every day and all of them are outstanding. I need to arrive at the stadium earlier to get a better seat so that I have better angles for shots the next time I visit. This is probably the only shot that I will post from "Believe" that we attended yesterday just because I am not totally happy with the angle that most of the shots were taken from.

Jumping Orca

The next photo is one of the last shots that I took yesterday, it is a closeup of a lorikeet inside of the lorikeet exhibit near Rocky Point Preserve (the sea lion interaction area). Yesterday was the first time that we had the opportunity to go inside of the feeding area (you can purchase a small cup of nectar to enter the area. Once inside the birds will land on you and eat right out of the cup, it is pretty interesting!). During our previous trips we arrived after the window of opportunity for feeding the lorikeets had closed, so it was nice to encounter something new that we had previously not encountered before. The area is kind of small, but all of the birds were very colorful and I am looking forward to getting higher quality shots the next time that I have the opportunity to take part in the interactive exhibit.

Lorikeet

Please feel free to leave any comments or feedback, and remember clicking on the photo takes you to my online gallery hosted over at smugmug where you can view this (and my other photos) in various sizes. Thanks for stopping by!

An Example of Silver Efex Pro 2

When Nik Software released Silver Efex Pro 2 to the general public a few days ago, I posted a photo from the Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy center which I processed using the "Selective Color" feature to my Facebook fan page (if you stop by, feel free to become a "fan"!). Yesterday's photo of the Steel Eeel coming down the first hill at Sea World San Antonio was also processed using Silver Efex Pro 2.

I wanted to work on a photo that I had not previously posted to demonstrate how wonderfully amazing Silver Efex Pro 2 is if anyone is debating purchasing this product or not. I took this photo back in December of the penguin exhibit which is sponsored by Southwest Airlines. There is not much lighting in the exhibit and I did not have my tripod with me, so the ISO is very high in this shot (6400 actually). I used the Tamron 28-300mm lens (focal length for this shot being 238mm) to get a good bit of zoom to capture just the two penguins and some of the background.

But the real "pop" from this shot comes from the post processing, mainly using Silver Efex Pro 2. I used a couple of presets (which I did not modify at all) and blended the results together to form this photo. There is also a very nice "border" feature in SEP2 which allows more flexibility for creating photos (for example, my Old-Fashioned Friday posts are going to benefit from the borders!). The Selective Color feature is great too, it does a good job processing color(s) in as small or as large of an area as you want. While you will sometimes get some bleeding, it is much easier to clean up a small portion manually than trying to do it all by hand. The total time to get the coloring in this shot took about 3 minutes, the other 12 or so minutes of processing was just trying to get the background and bordering exactly how I wanted it.

I am planning to visit Sea World today for several shots as soon as the rainy misty weather burns off (which should be around 11 or 12). I did not plan for this photo to be today's post, but I am so happy with the result it just ended up that way that it became the topic of today's blog post!

Pair of Penguins

Please feel free to leave comments/feedback, and remember clicking on the photo takes you to my online gallery hosted over at smugmug where you can view this (and my other photos!) in various sizes. Thanks for stopping by!

Sea World San Antonio Opening Day 2011

Today's post is in honor of the opening day for the 2011 season of Sea World San Antonio. I modified the shot of the Steel Eel descending down the first hill, I ended up working on it using Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 to isolate the color of the Steel Eel and passengers. The second shot is of the ride Journey to Atlantis that I posted about two months ago, through processing I was actually able to get a "3D" look from the shot. I consider the "Splashdown" shot to be one of the best that I have ever done, I am hoping to get a similar shot with more passengers on the ride but I am going to have to be really lucky to get the timing exactly right again!

I hope that you enjoy the photos today and if you are in the San Antonio area in the next year, stop by Sea World if you get a chance. In my opinion it is the best theme park in Texas!

Black and White Highlighted - Long Way Down!

Splashdown!

Please feel free to leave any comments and/or feedback, and remember clicking on the photos takes you to my online gallery at smugmug where you can view these (and my other photos) in various sizes. Thanks for stopping by!

Old-Fashioned Friday - Japanese Tea Garden Pagoda

Today's edition of Old-Fashioned Friday brings a shot from a place I visited back in September, the Japanese Tea Garden in San Antonio, Texas. I did a small write-up on the Japanese Tea Garden in a post from September. I don't want to recover much of the same topic that I wrote about back then, so I will talk a little about the processing of this shot. This is the first Old-Fashioned Friday post that I included a noticeable amount of coloring in the final shot. I did this because I wasn't quite satisfied with the coloring in the bushes in front until I added a little bit of color to them. I am looking forward to using Silver Efex Pro 2 in my future Old-Fashioned Friday posts. I experimented with the program a little bit last night (I posted a small entry on my Facebook fan page about it, located here) and am quite looking forward to using it in my future photo processing.

Old Fashioned Friday - Japanese Pagoda

Please feel free to leave any comments or feedback, and remember clicking on the photo takes you to my online gallery hosted over at smugmug where you can view this (and my other photos) in various sizes. Thanks for stopping by!