HDR is Back

You know when you drive by a place several times that seems intriguing, each time vowing the next time you're going to stop? Well, that was my attitude to a new HDR function in PhotoShop CS5, and I finally stopped and played with it. It takes experimenting, but I'm a little excited that you can take an absolutely boring picture and turn it into something interesting. If you want to get into even more, try listening to a train song while you're working on it.

Chew After Meal

I had a lot to get done this weekend, and I did, actually. (I haven't solved my car problem yet.) But when my husband said to me this morning, "Grab you camera." I was ready to put my list aside. We needed an adventure on a small scale, so we drove to Utica and Roscoe, Ohio. Now, if you've ever been, you might agree with me that they could be renamed Charming, Ohio. They are. They love their history and their architecture. Just be warned that any shop you walk into, you will be expected to engage in a conversation impossible to extract yourself from for at least thirty minutes. Fair warning. But worth the trip anyway.

Aside: you think I shot these pictures in HDR, right? Nope. I fully intended to, but I shot them in RAW, my new best photography friend.

Happy Daylight Savings!

If you want to see more pictures from this adventure, please go here.

I'll be seeing you around, HDR

This is my last HDR shot for a while. We've had our ups and downs, but in the end, I think we'll remain good friends, perhaps even go for a walk together now and then. I broke up with HDR twice this summer. He can be so difficult at times; leaving extra files just laying around everywhere, taking up all kinds of space on my external hard drive, and demanding so much of my time and energy. But when things were good between us, they were really good. His dark side is so very dark, but he can be almost manic with color and light at other times.

Oh, HDR, you know me too well, don't you? You know I like a challenge ... there's supposed to be a glorious sunset tonight. Want to go for a walk?

Diamond in the rough

If you travel southeast from Columbus on 70 (or US Historic Road 40), you will eventually come to this building. It must have suffered a fire at some point, blowing the roof off, which accounts for the trees, vines and shrubs growing within. It exudes a strange cheerfulness, despite its dilapidated condition. And the owners must have some sense of humor since they planted flowers in the flower boxes on the sides. US 40 is littered with such buildings; forgotten but somehow not important enough to tear down. A gem, isn't it?

If you would like to see more shots of this place, as well as the panorama I built from several pictures of it, please go here.

HDR Fantasy

I've been working on an assignment for "fantasy" HDR photography, and to be honest, if you look at it for too long, you begin to suffer from what the Victorians might have called 'nervous exhaustion.' It's a bit like living in a Disney movie, which no one can do for long stretches at a time. Not me, at least. That being said, these are two treatments of the same scene of one of the Piatt Castles. Which do you think achieves 'fantasy' better?

Texture and Pattern

It seems everywhere I go these days, I spot opportunities to capture texture and pattern in HDR. The problem is that you can't just stop your car in the middle of a highway where there is no place to pull off, whip out your camera and tripod and set up the perfect shot. So I try to take advantage of the few spots that do allow this behavior. And since HDR requires a bit of compulsiveness, I often visit these spots more than once like an old friend. Though unlike an old friend, it seems the conversation changes little from one visit to another.

Decay and HDR

I've been visiting some pretty interesting places to capture HDR-worthy shots this week. I know that some people like to use HDR to capture shiny post-modern buildings or exotic landscapes, but that's just not my thing. I like to go under bridges and to industrial parts of town where you meet interesting people and their pets. (My artist/photographer friend, Darrin, seems to find all the best places) Yesterday, I was approached - no rushed at - by a dog barking, "I want to eat you alive, starting with your face." while the owner told me, "Don't worry, he's friendly." No he's not. Friendly dogs wear bandannas, everybody knows that.

Anyway, there are many ways to achieve an HDR shot, some more complicated than others. I arrived at these shots by using 'the poor man's HDR' which means that I took two shots at different exposures, put one layer over the other and masked out over- or under-exposed elements to make a more uniformly focused and exposed image. I confess, I rather like the saturation and detail you get with these techniques. Did I really just say that? 

Beauty

I remember, as a first year art student, taking a break from my oil painting class to have a cup of coffee with my advisor. Drinking bad coffee from styrofoam cups in a warehouse that smelled of turpentine and linseed oil, he asked me, "Do you want to make 'beautiful' paintings all your life?" I blinked, and being young and naive, answered, "Well, yes ..." I could see nothing wrong with wanting to bring beauty into people's lives, even if my idea of beauty needed stretching a bit. I knew that the painting I'd seen that morning with a Special K logo and a hanger wasn't beautiful, and I knew that I wasn't destined to make art from household goods and breakfast cereals to emphasize the banality of contemporary life. Rather, if I were to make art from household goods and breakfast cereals, I wouldn't use them to point out how pathetic people's lives were, a category of art that was already being well populated at the time.

My ideas of beauty are quite changed now; some of the most ordinary things strike me with the memories they conjure, their colors and textures and lines. As Beethoven once said, "Yes, I know it's ugly, but is it beautiful?" I can't define beauty, but I know that it changes the lives of people that it touches.

How would you define beauty?

Pairing Pictures IV

I just love taking pictures of flora behind glass. The first I snuck at a baby shower a few weeks ago, and the second was from my kitchen window after a light rain.

Meanwhile, I'm still working on a few HDR pictures to share with you. This is proving to be a little more involved than I originally thought.

Pairing Pictures III

I like the way these pictures work together chromatically, and share certain textures as well. They were shot on different days, and I wasn't looking for the same color scheme, yet ...

Today starts a new class in for me HDR Photography. In case you are unfamiliar with the term, it means High Dynamic Range, or digital photography on steroids. I'm a little nervous because it means going in the very opposite direction of what I've been doing lately; looking for magical moments of color, line and texture; shooting things just as they are. This new class means photoshop heroics, which I can do blindfolded, but it feels a little like cheating, and the end result is often just a little too fantastic for my taste. 

In a nutshell, the technique involves shooting the same static image in three or four different ISO/f-stop settings, then pulling them into PhotoShop and grabbing the best detail from each to merge into one shot. It also involves using all three shots to have the final image in complete focus. But wait (I'm protesting), I love bokeh. I love that silky blurred background you get with a short depth of field.

Well, discomfort is the mother of growth, and perhaps I can explore some of the same themes I've been enjoying with a new angle. Isn't that what it's all about?