Wednesday, August 20, 2008

HDR - Across the Mississippi

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I'm learning how to make high dynamic range or HDR digital photographs. The idea is that you shoot a scene that has a lot of variation between light and dark, take 3, 5 or 7 images with bracketed exposures from very dark to very light and use software to blend them into one hyper-real image that preserves the whole range. Photoshop can do it. However, a program called Photomatix gives you much greater control of the picture merge. Then you can twiddle the details in Photoshop. My thanks to Greg of View From the Tundra, a Minneapolis daily photo blog, for giving me some guidance in this and telling me about Photomatix. Greg posts a lot of great HDR pix and he's an excellent photographer. So, this is an early attempt, showing a railroad bridge over the Mississippi not far south of the Arch. It reminds me of the kind of color and tonal range in old Technicolor movies.

Here's a good, simple tutorial for making HDRs. There's even a discount code to get a break if you buy Photomatix online.

WHAT I NEED:
some down time. Work hours have been just plain stupid lately. Again, I apologize for so few comments on others' blogs. I get seven days relief starting a week from now.


TOMORROW:
Thursday Arch Series in HDR

5 comments:

Virginia said...

As my third graders use to say on a daily basis, " I don't get it!". Well neither do I but that's ok. I can be happy enjoying yours. Can't wait to see what it does to the Arch tomorrow. Nice shot of the mighty Mississippi today.

Corey Templeton said...

very cool shot

Knoxville Girl said...

The colors, at least on my browser, look like those in a postcard from the 1940s. Is that a train making its way across the bridge on the right? How do you compensate for any time lapse when you have moving objects and you are bracketing shots?

PJ said...

Strangetastes,
You are going to love photographing The Blessing of the Animals. Everyone gets together and there aren't any yowls or growls. I imagine that it is partly because it is a neutral spot. And don't be surprised if the majority of the participants are adults. If you want to see something spectacular, check out the Blessing of the Animals at St John the Divine in NYC. They bring everything into the church, including camels and elephants!

Olivier said...

le HDR cela rend vraiment très bien, j'aime beaucoup.

the HDR makes it very well, I like very much.