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Captivated by HDR
When I was a teenager, I used to take pictures for my school newspaper. I really liked it: getting into games for free, getting a lot of attention from fans, players, and cheerleaders. I even got to learn how to do darkroom work.
My instruction in the dark room came from a senior named Wayne Joness. To my mind at the time, Wayne was kind of a hippie version of William F. Buckley, Jr. I'm not saying that Wayne was part of the counter-culture or anything, he just seemed a mix of eclectic skills and preferences. He also knew a lot of big words. Wayne taught me how to develop B&W film and pictures in a very ad-hoc manner. Something must have took, because I did okay in school.
Later, I wrote freelance for the local town newspaper, my County weekly, and the regional daily. I met some serious photo-heads at those places -- guys with more money hanging around their neck than some people have in their cars. I got to really love a good picture: composition, tone, range. Back then, and especially once the newspapers started going digital, we had to make sure we controlled our picture's dynamic range.
To see what that means, and a really great picture, let me continue.
When you take a picture with a digital camera, the little dots in the picture, the pixels, are all different colors, of course. But there's not an equal distribution of colors. Maybe a lot of pixels are really bright, and not many are dark, like in a picture of an artic landscape. Or maybe the reverse is true: you have a lot of dark pixels but not many bright ones.
Take this picture of my aunt and her kids. Hi Guys!
Good looks must run in my family
When I go to Photoshop and take a look at how the pixels are distributed (the histogram) I see something like this:
Looks like good distribution
Actually, this isn't a great example because the pixels look fairly distributed.
The problem is that different instruments can "see" pixels that are farther apart. Your eye can see one range, a printer can print another, and your display can print another range! For example
- A natural scene exposed in the sunlight -- dynamic range of about 50,000:1
- Negative black and white film -- dynamic range of about 4096:1
- Color slide film -- dynamic range of 64:1
- Color printer -- 64:1
- CRT computer monitor -- 1000:1 (varies some)
- Plasma monitor/TV -- 10,000:1 (but the numbers are rigged somewhat)
- Bright Side Technologies HDR Monitor -- around 60,000:1 (in a pitch black room)
- Digital camras -- limited
This means that pictures have to be "dumbed down" from reality to print or display for you to see them. Most of the time, you are unaware of this dumbing down of the picture.
Recently, however, photographers like my friend Bob have started taking multiple exposures of an image using different exposure settings on their cameras. Then they take a tool like Photoshop and combine the images. The results are truly outstanding. While you'll need one of those fancy monitors and a dark room to get the entire effect, it's also obvious just using your regular old monitor.
Take a look:
I've seen a few of these pictures, and they are simply outstanding. It's started to re-awaken that old photography bug that I had for many years. When combined with aviation, I bet you can do some really awesome things. How about an HDR picture of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Fall? Or some snowscape scenes this Winter?
It's neat stuff. And that's what we all need, right? More neat stuff to spend our money on. Right now i'm holding off on the bug, but if Bob keeps taking gorgeous pictures like that one I don't think I'm going to be able to resist. What an incredible hobby.
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That's a great HDR image. Here's a good tutorial for creating HDR in Photomatix, not CS2. They are different animals! http://www.johninjapan.com/blog/show,creating-hdr-images.html/
Thanks for the link! I have Photomatix now and use it on almost all of my HDR.