Yep...  I was talking with Kay N last night and she convienced me to try HDR...  the guy that hates photoshop is asked to try it...  well OK... but if you think these suck...  blame them on Ms. N....   So...What ever floats your boat...

HDR 1
HDR 2

Smoooooooooch N...
 

 I went back to a construction project that I completed last year.

She wanted a custom built cherry kitchen with black honed granite counters
kitchen

kitchen 2

He wanted a room for his new TV, just in time for the big game.
living room

The stairs lead to the excercise room above.
stair

stair 2

Because of the high contrast lighting I combined five exposures per image to created these HDR photos.

They say if you don't like the weather in the Ozarks, just wait an hour... and it will change!  Never more true than here lately.  A few days ago we had a foot of snow.... today it was 75 degrees... expecting severe thunderstorms tonight, possibly tornados... then another snow tomorrow night.

Seems like the sky even changes rapidly during sunset... so tonight I give you

23 minutes of Sunset...

6:16

6:20

6:21

6:27

6:33

6:39

All shots of 3x HDR composites generated by Photomatix.  Thanks for lookin!  Enjoy!

This is a story about screwing up.  Back in October, I was rushing to put a bunch of stuff on ebay before my monthly poker night.  I had a brain wave, it said to me... "Reset your camera for 3 megapixels and shoot these in low resolution to save time having to compress them and save for web to put on the ebay listings."  I said to myself "Great idea, and I changed the settings on the camera."

I go off to Poker night, and all of a sudden, there is a double rainbow over my friends house, with the most spectacular red sky bringing in the storms... My camera was in the car, cause I never leave home without it, so I grabbed it and fired off about 50 or 60 shots of the miraculous happenings in the sky.  My hubby called me on my cell phone, and said, "Are you shooting this sky?  Well, of course I am!" I replied.

After poker, got home and downloaded the shots.  I thought, wow, these pictures are really crappy, what in the world happened here.... then a big brick hit me on my pea brain, and said... You shot the best sky of the year in 3 megapixels you idiot.  I have been so PO'd at myself for doing this, I waited until now to sit down and try to salvage these shots.  

So here is my little tutorial.... HDR can sometimes be used to TONE DOWN a shot, not just put it over the top!

Check out these exposures.  Aperture setting... Automatic exposure bracketing set at Minus 2... 0.... and Plus 2.
The sky is so red it doesn't even look real... but these are how they came straight out of the camera.

Minus 2

 Zero

Plus 2

I went ahead and generated a HDR out of these three shots on Photomatix Pro.  I DEsaturated the color 55% while tone mapping to get the sky toned down.  At least now I also have a little foreground in the HDR exposure.

Photomatrix 3X Composite

So two lessons learned here...

Always take a second to check your settings on your camera before you start to shoot....

And sometimes HDR can be used to tone down a photo instead of pumping it up!

PS  You don't have to critique the photos, I know they stink.

I really want your opinion on the first three.  

Fall 07  This is one that I really like.  I have it as the background on the computer.  The more I look at it, the more I think I want it on the wall.

Vacancy

GoneSouth ... has a little HDR going on

Extra for fun.....this is the best pic of them together that I have this year.
Brothers

Thanks for looking!

  Yesterday I got a last minute early morning call from the boy wanting me to watch Jaryd.  So we got an extra roadtrip this week.  It was real nice and foggy but with the late start the sun was already up pretty high.  Luckily the fog was pretty thick for awhile.
Glow.
Ghost tree.  B&w but not much color in the color version anyway.
Light in the forest.
Backlight.
Baclight-HDR This is an "over the top", in my opinion, HDR version of the previous shot.
Baclight -Mild This is more like the amount of effect I prefer.
  The first backlight shot is pretty much straight from the camera and the last is closer to what I saw but I've been shooting a lot of shots with the auto bracketing turned on so I could play with them later using the HDR software.  It's very easy to get a gaudy, unnatural look with the adjustments in Photomatix which I think I did in the middle shot. Of course, others may prefer it.  While I prefer the more natural look it is fun to play with.
Comments and criticism, hopefully constructive, are welcome.  Except for those mentioned all other shots are not HDR.

   One advantage of the setting the clocks back is that Jaryd and I don't have to wait for the sun to come up.  We can take off on the roadtrips as soon as we drop Barb off at work.  These are all HDR images, I've been playing with that for a while when I have a subject that warrants it and occasionally just to see what it does for a more normal range image like the country road below.  I try to get an image that looks to me like the actual scene did but you can go way past that and get surreal images if that's your fancy.  These are all three image, aperture priority, +-2 stop, auto exposure bracketed shots generated in Photomatix Pro. Normally, they would also be from a tripod but since this was a road trip, no leaving the car, so propped on the side window was as close as I could get.  At this size, it's hard to see any alignment problems.  These were all taken Friday morning at different times.
White Barn
Brick Barn
Country Road

   I know I said my last post was the last of the zoo pics but I lied. Here are a few more.  These are not HDR.
Don't mess with me!
Even the king needs rest.
Can ya see me now?

  Comments and criticism are best served cold.  What's your thoughts on HDR, love it, hate it, don't care, don't know what it is?  I know the activity here drops off on the weekend but what are your thoughts?

The following pictures were taken in San Diego last week. With all of the wild fires taking place the smoke presents some very unique opportunities. My prayers are with the families that have to endure these devastating fires.

The first was taken from Shelter Island looking towards San Diego in the morning.

The second is looking West towards the sunset taken the day before. It is a HDR composite in which the flag was processed to be brighter that what the background exposure would have allowed.

All comments and critiques are appreciated.

We were sitting on the cabin porch, and saw this rain coming across the lake.  I grabbed the camera and fired off a few quick ones... within minutes it had blown up here, and by the time I got in the house, it was raining so hard you couldn't even see the railing on the deck!  It lasted all of about 5 minutes... but hey... when you have been having a drought all summer, any rain is better than none!

Here It Comes!

I hope I am not burning you out on these HDR shots... but the sky just keeps throwing me more great clouds to shoot at!  It is just such a fun process, and the new hasn't worn off yet!  Comments and critiques always welcome... and yes I have one dust spot left on my sensor... so you can take a "raincheck" on commenting about that.  I just don't bother cloning it out unless I think I might print it.  Thanks for lookin!

We have been teased lately with cooler nights.  Fall is finally on the way.  I am ready.  So is the pampas grass. Due to the dry, hot summer, many trees are giving up early.

I reviewed some shots from last fall to get ready to shoot this year.  If we have any color, I want to do a better job of capturing it.  Since the shots were RAW I gave another go at the pics with a little HDR processing.  

Fall 1 HDR  It brought out a lot more detail in this shot.  I like the results.

Fall 2 HDR  I also managed to remove my neighbor's ugly storage shed from this shot.

Have a great weekend!

I was so ispired by Moose's post this morning, that I couldn't wait to try to make my own attempt at creating HDR.  The rain came pouring down buckets, and we need it so bad, I tried not to be ungrateful....then the rains stopped, the clouds were starting to roll out and I began my attempt at HDR.  And since Wilk has asked us to "Go Wide" I decided to show you my whole view, since usually I am focused on the lake or some hummingbird who is dancing for me.....

For the challenge.....
Looking West from Hummingbird Hill

Or do you like this one better?
The Thumb

And just because I couldn't resist...
The Cabin

Thanks for taking time to look at these, I would really appreciate your comments.... I love the look of HDR and really want to learn to do this!

I just got back to LA from Moscow and this was one of the first images off my drive.

Well three images to be exact. -1 stop 0 and +1 stop.

Hope everyone is well. Soon I'll be back in the studio shooting headshots.

Some people look at shooting headshots as a bad thing like they do with wedding photographers but I think that as long as you love what you do that passion shows through your work. I've seen some amazing wedding photographers who make art out of almost nothing.

While headshots are straight-forward I love working with all the different actors and hearing their stories.

As for this shot, I like it because that's how I remember the scene. It's a rare viewpoint that is definitely not publicly accessible.

This is about as wide as I can go at 18mm x1.6. I had the Tokina 12-24mm until it was stolen a while back. If you're looking for a great wide angle lens I recommend that one.
If you're interested in taking some pictures like this you can read up on HDR imaging http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging.

Before I sent all of the disposable stuff to the trash bin, I decided to fool around with some of the better ones and see what I could do to mangle them even further.  

Using some Lightroom presets and the Merge to HDR (high dynamic range) feature in Photoshop I came up with something...interesting...after a few tries.  

They were overexposed to start with (don't use ISO 800 film in afternoon sunlight!) and the final result was grainer than I would have liked, but I did figure out how to use the HDR feature in CS3 and these two sort of grew on me after a while.  

disposable hdr 1   and  disposable hdr 2

What do you think?

I use HDR for these photos. It was my first time using it. They almost loo like paintings. I and my husband had a contest to see who could take the best pictures. I think I did pretty good. Let me know what you thinkJOSHUA TREE LAKE JOSHUA TREE LAKE

Well, I haven't posted in a while so I decided to upload a few of my 'experiments' that I have taken over the past few weeks. The first photo looks at Light and Shadow. Everyday I trek up 48 stairs to my office and this contrast in light has always caught my attention. Next, I have Falling Up which experiments with speed, f/stops, and a small bit of color manipulation. Train and _Tracks, both taken at the same time on an overcast day, but from different positions. Gridiron for me, seems to capture a lot of elements, again taken on an overcast day. An finally, moving to something a little more vibrant, I just began experimenting with software that creates High Dymanic Range (HDR) images. This Flower is derived from 3 separate shots, taken in RAW format with different settings. None of the 3 came close to the vibrance of this single HDR photo.

My first try at the HDR process:

I took JPEG 1 , JPEG 2 , JPEG 3 , and JPEG 4  to make this High Dynamic Range image using the "Automate, Merge to HDR" command in photoshop.  

Tell me what you think.

Decided that I had wanted to do some movie-feel shots for my photoblog.  Here are the three images that I came up with.  The first two were stretched to the wide format, and the third one was cropped.  The first two are natural shots with color contrast and a vignette added.  The third shot is an HDR image with a tone-mapped, and then witha vignette added.  Hope you enjoy! ;)

Track
Caution
Recycling

I went to the park one evening while I was waiting for my girlfriend to eat dinner.  The sun was getting low in the sky.  Makes for some interesting, but a little tricky light to shoot in.  Anyways here's a couple of natural light shots from the park.

Childhood View 1
Childhood View 2

The first image is of a cement culvert that is set up at the park for kids to play in.  I should note that it is an HDR image.  Basically a composite of 3 exposures to get an image that has very high contrast features.

The second image is only color and level balanced.

I have also started doing a photoblog now.  I hope to post an image a day, but we'll see how dedicated I am.  Look for the link in my profile.