Picked this up from a link posted by Michael Zelbel:
Genius. Now if only I had a couple of those cameras sitting about…
Peoples Photography Dublin 2010 is once again just around the corner. This will be my third year attending the event and once again I’ll be with Dermot and his family.
During lasts years event, Dermot and I got to talking about doing something with a space between the two of us as well as the usual individual displays.
We’ve no rules, hell we’re not even sure of the game, but the theme for this space is “Red”
Which leaves me in a pickle.
Anyway, while at the Games Fair today I took this.
I’m taking it as an omen.
Been a while since I posted something just because it’s Friday…
If you hate HDR, look away now…
(I kind of expect this to turn up on one of those 50 images that prove HDR is evil sites….)
One of my favourite hobbies these days is reviewing pictures I took a few weeks earlier to see if anything jumps out or if some new technique I learned about suddenly gives me a way to improve on something.
This photograph, taken a week or two ago at the tall ships didn’t really say much to me then, though I do quite like the fact it shows the modern shipyards through the rigging of the older boats bow.
I was just playing with some HDR stuff and suddenly it seems to get a nice life to it.
I know a lot of people curse HDR and I’ve had a bit of a love hate relationship with it over the last two years myself. But sometimes the photo cries out for it and sometimes, like this, you kind of half expect it when you’re shooting.
The apples are sitting on a piece of black Perspex (which I finally got round to picking up, thanks for the tip Paulo) and lighting is just natural window light.
Camera was on F/16 and shutter speeds were 0.3sec, 0.5sec and 0.8sec. HDR was performed in Photomatix Pro and then a bit of curves and shadow adjustments in Photoshop (yeah, I now at some point its not a photograph anymore…)
At some point in the process it’s lost the sharpness of the original images which is a little annoying. It was all shot on a tripod, but I’m not sure if that was enough, my three year old was bouncing about at the time!
OH, one question. Does anyone have good tips for getting dust particles of Perspex? It was a nightmare to get this shot without little flecks of dust!
Yesterdays picture caused a bit of discussion over breakfast with some friends.
It all centred around when is a photograph no longer a photograph. Now, this is something I’ve spoken about here and I’m still pretty undecided myself. My current thinking is, it’s a photograph for as long as the photographer wants to call it one. There may be a better definition of it out there.
The question arose if the HDR was better than the original, or if its artificial adjustments made it something different but that it lost the appeal of the original.
I thought it might be interesting to share the three original images and let people make their own mind up. These are as imported from the camera.
I might come back to this at some point myself and see if I can produce something I like more using only one of these images.
I’ve been sitting on this picture for a while now. I knew I wanted to try and process it through HDR – even when taking it I took three exposures to give me the capacity.
I find shooting into a sunset like this incredibly difficult. The last rays of the sun either cause the shot to under-expose or leave the sky a horrid washed out white mess. Taking this as three exposures allowed me to find the best of each world, and whilst I normally wouldn’t go this extreme with HDR, I do like the finished result quite a bit.
The last three pictures I’ve posted have been processed in HDR and I think this is my favourite. It does give images a nice feel, although I’ll be the first to admit they do drift away from “what the eye saw”.
It’s typical that now the competition season is over in the club, I start producing pictures I’d like to use. Still, there’s always next year.
I feel I should confess my problem.
No. Not that I can’t take photographs – you know this already.
I feel I should confess my love for cheese.
Not the yellow, made from milk, type cheese, but the big hair retro “Disco Stu” cheese.
Which is why, even though this should have been consigned to the recycle bin as a drunken mistake, I decided to let you all see it.
I can’t help but feel it should be stitched or stencilled onto a T-Shirt or the back of a motorcycle jacket and sent back in time to the 1980’s.
I really need to try harder to manage my depth of field issues.
This is just a little shallow for me. Though I love the effect pushing it through an HDR process has had on it.
Original image was parsed through Dynamic-Photo HDR then had some small curves adjustments and a little sharpening applied to it.
The original image was shot at f/5.6 1/250 at 250mm. The wide aperture at such a zoom has left it a little too shallow. On review, it’s an issue I have with a few birds of prey pictures I took over the weekend.
I swear, I will not start randomly posting images on a Friday for no reason. I just liked the gold colours of the sunset…
Built from three exposures using HDR and then some additional tweaks, it lost all semblance of “natural picture” a while back, but I took a shine to the gold colours.