Evening HDR
Just a test shot that I thought I’d post. I may be putting up a couple more over this evening. Testing CS5′s “Merge to HDR Pro” function, comparing it to Photomatix Pro. This one is an excercise in rescuing a screwed up frame: I had the color balance set to tungsten when I took this, so everything was hyper-blue. Arguably still is, but that’s the HDR saturation effect. Click to continue »
Oh, so subjective. I’ve been watching comments on flickr and Stuck in Customs picking aport one of Trey’s newer pics. It’s not among his technical best, but I’m a bit… amused, I suppose, at the vehemence that people are showing. Like the “If you’re going to post rubbish like this” comment – I guess I just don’t get it, what purpose does that serve?
I suppose I see it from multiple perspectives: first, the whole concept of taste in art – it’s entirely subjective. You may be a highly discerning photographer, so you don’t like this one. That’s you.
Second, what purpose does such a statement make? It’s not like he owes people anything. In fact, I would argue that a large part of the world owes him: he’s effectively introduced the majority of us to HDR.
Fortunately for us, Trey is apparently handling it well. Bigger man than I.
A view along the Seward Highway
No, not a typo: Hand-Held HDR. Most tutorials recommend that you use a tripod. I’m no different – you’ll see that some of my previous HDRs (and easily my sharpest) are all taken on a tripod. But I suffer from a problem: I’m lazy. I don’t want to lug around a tripod, especially when I have to keep up with a four-year-old.
So what I do is take an HHHDR image (apologies to Katrin Eisman, who I originally heard the term from). Basically, I follow the same steps as I did in my 8-steps post. However, I set the shutter to high-speed continuous, and try to prop myself against something to keep from moving.
What you end up is something like you see with this post – it’s pretty nice, but sometimes blur creeps in (look to the bottom). It’s not as sharp as I’d normally like, but some features (the clouds & mountains) come across extremely well.
Give it a try & let me know how it works!
A view from the Johnson Lake trailhead
I wrote yesterday’s post knowing that there would be a great opportunity for me to find motivation. Yesterday we took a nice, long trip down to Seward – that’s 120 miles (more or less) each way. Ostensibly, our goal was to visit the Seward Sea Life Center, which was great in its own right.
One thing I was hoping for, however, was to get that strike of inspiration back. It kinda struck a few times – the pic to the right is a good example. The clouds and sun creating something of a chiarascuro effect. Look at it closer up (click on it) – it’s a fairly neat photo. All the more impressive if you consider that it’s a 9-frame HDR. The technique was similar to the one outlined here, except that it was completely hand-held.
After getting home and starting processing, I now realize that I let my sensor get beyond dirty. It’ll take hours to recover most of the pics – this one is a lucky pic – the dirt is mostly obscured by the tones in the photo.
As you can guess, I’ll be writing about sensor cleaning soon enough.
Someone asked me, after my JPG vs RAW posts (1, 2, and 3), why I kicked my camera over to save images in JPG mode for doing the 9-shot bracketed HDR. My thought process is like this: I usually shoot RAW because I like the flexability that it gives me to… well, save my photo. I take a lot of pictures of a rapidly moving daughter, so I need that flexability.
For HDRs, though, I don’t really need the flexability. Think of it like this: a normal RAW image gives you between one and two stops to either side of the center. If you’ve mildly over- or under-exposed, then this will be easy to fix. A 9-shot HDR gives you four stops to either side. It’s already way ahead of the game.
If that were a 9-shot RAW pic? That might push the overall range to 5 stops on either side. We’re already wide enough in range at that point, that the extra stop doesn’t really mean much to me.
So I usually skip it.
A 9-frame HDR image of my neighborhood
The picture to the left I originally posted to Flickr on Sunday. It’s had an interesting response: not overly popular, in fact. The stretching of the angles (due to extreme wide angle) and the evening out of the extremes makes it almost look like a model instead of real life.
Well, this is most definately a photo of the neighborhood, but from an unusual angle: my roof. And despite it not getting the love that other photos get (abstracts or B&W images seem more popular, unless the HDR has a ton of contrast), it has triggered more people to ask how I did it.
So here’s how to take the shot, from a technical point of view (I’ll gloss over the software details, but if you want a good example of that, then check out Trey’s Stuck In Customs tutorial). Steps:
DVD).So that’s it as far as taking the photo. There’s still some software work, but that will be saved for another day.
View from our roof - doing repairs
Yesterday I posted about “frame within a frame” and metioned that it was a topic going around a while ago. Well, it’s apparently back – I noticed in on Digital Photo School a post named “Crop and Chop.” A slightly different point than I was trying to make yesterday, but the same concept.
Another meme going around these days is “shoot in your own backyard.” As several pros have stated, there are thousands of photos of foreign places, sunsets, and exotic things. Where are the common things? Where is the spectacular in the ordinary?
I’m not so sure I’m all that big on shooting in my own back yard. But it beats not shooting at all, and from the correct vantage point I can find fairly impressive views.
Take the shot to the right, for example. I had some repairs I needed to do on the roof, so up I went. Started looking around, and after a few days of rainy weather, noticed that the not only was it sunny, but it was a well saturated sunny!
So I did the logical thing: set my hammer & nails down, scrambled for my SLR (sorry, love that far more than my P&S – but the P&S is much, much more portable), and fired of a series of 9 photos. Spent another 20 minutes shooting up there, so you’ll see a few more pics this week.
This shot: an HDR from 9 photos, all at maximum aperture (f/25). Fired off on a tripod. Much fun.
HDR of clouds and trees
I read a lot on photography. One of the more common themes a year or two ago were about finding the “fram within a frame.” That is to say, find a new composition an existing photo. For example, take a look to the right. An HDR from last weekend, which has some incredible light in the clouds, but sorta loses the feel in the trees. This was hand-held, mind you, so that might have contributed to the trees being off, but it was also slightly windy.
Nonetheless, the light in the clouds was great! Wanting to capture this, I dinked around for a few minutes in photoshop, until I came out with the photo below.
There I go again with abstracts…
HDR Clouds, from cropping in the previous pic
Or rather, never forget to turn off auto bracketing.
A few years ago a friend of mine had to return his Nikon D2 (H? Don’t remember.). The internal metering was going batty – you could focus on a flower and it would fluctuation, without moving the camera, from 1/8000 sec to 5 secs. Quickly, too.
Yesterday, I was afraid that my SLR was starting to go down the same path. Crappy over- and under-exposed pics. Lousy results. I’m getting depressed.
Today I noticed that it was set for a 9-picture bracket, for HDR photos.