I know I started out by saying “Boy, I don’t really like HDR’s”, but they really interest me. Kinda funny that I “don’t like them”, but yet this is my third try at them in about 48 hours. Anyway, here they are, and I promise I’ll get some more variety up on here soon.
I have lots of photos I *could* throw on here, but I told myself that I’d only post pictures I’ve taken since I’ve started this blog, to keep me motivated to shoot. Hope you like them!
-Dylan
So for the past 2 days, while wandering around trying my HDR stuff, it’s been raining on and off. I’ve had to choose my shots wisely, and did alot of running back and forth to shelter my gear from the rain. I did, however, get a nice shot of the aftermath of a rainstorm, the rainbow. This goose was very well behaved, and let me get quite close, giving me a good opportunity to frame the photo the way I wanted to. Bonus: the only photo on my blog so far that is not HDR.. hah.
-Dylan
I’ve been seeing alot of this HDR stuff lately, and its encouraged me to try some of my own. I’ve not been as awed as it seems some have by the appearance of the HDR image, but they’re unique enough I guess. Many of them (including my own, so far) just look too fake to me. They look like paintings or cartoons. Not to say that I haven’t encountered any that I didn’t like, I just usually aren’t a huge fan of the typical HDR image I’ve seen posted online.
HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. One of the very few downfalls to digital photography is the lack of dynamic range compared to film. When you get a scene with some dark and some light, it tends to lose the detail in one, and sometimes both, of the two. This loss of detail results in very blown out, or very dark ares in the picture, usually resulting in an ugly photo. The method of HDR photography I’ve bee trying for the past couple of days, in a nutshell, proceeds as follows: Take several different exposures of the same scene, with the camera on the tripod. You want at least 3 exposures, one on the recommended auto setting, and one at each stop brighter and darker compared to the automatic one. With these 3 exposures, you are underexposing and overexposing, so you are more likely to attain a better exposure overall, by using different parts of each exposure. I use a program called Photomatix Pro [v2.1] to combine the 3 exposures to what it thinks is an ideal middleground. It will judge the picture, and use different parts of each photo to fill in different pieces of the final product, it’s pretty neat.
I took these over the last 2 days, both of the shoots took place at about the same time in the evening, between 9:30 and 10:30 pm, just before/after sunset. It rained on and off both days, unfortunately, but these are the shots I managed to get during the off period. As I said, I’m usually not a big fan of HDR photos, and these ones didn’t change my opinion. They just look fake to me, they look too “touched up”, especially the ones of the church and of downtown.
Here are the photos from June 18:
These 3 were my first tries ever. They look heavily processed, as do most. The downtown one of my favorite of the three, the church ones are just way too out there for my tastes.
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Photos from June 19:
So there you have it, I did some HDR images, and they’re not horrible 
Anyway, let me know if you like them, and here’s to many more blog entries to come!
-Dylan
