I ran across Trey Ratcliff’s blog recently. Trey Ratcliff does spectacular photography using a technique called HDR. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range; essentially it’s a method of combining several exposures to reproduce a wider range of contrast values than can be captured with a single exposure. Trey’s apparently something of a photoblogging celebrity; he’s won a number of awards and his work has been (is?) exhibited in the Smithsonian. I found the blog because I’m interested in HDR photos and he has a good tutorial on his site.
Nice Photography Blog
Hey Adam,
The HD tutorial was excellent, thank you for the link. I wish I had the time to do this with my 4×5.
I know this is unrelated, but curious if you’ve had and quality time with your Omega 8. Any feedback, likes, dislikes, wish lists, sound quality ……
Thanks again.
Robert
Cool site, thanks for the tip. Have you done any shots like this? I do a lot of underwater photography, I wonder if this technique would work for that. It’s hard to keep stationary underwater, let alone convince the fish to do the same.
Robert: I’m not sure how much you’d gain trying to do HDR with a 4×5. I mean, isn’t the dynamic range of film much greater than that of digital sensors already?
Regarding the Omega: I wish I’d spent more time with it than I have, but I haven’t had a lot of time for music lately. The quickie summary of my impressions so far is that it sounds gorgeous, it’s fairly easy to get around in the user interface, and the manual completely, totally, absolutely sucks. I’d say it’s sort of a “boutique” instrument in that the tonal palette of a fixed-architecture analog synth is necessarily narrower than that of a digital synth, but OTOH the sound quality is head and shoulders better than any “virtual analog” synth I’ve heard.
Jeff: I haven’t yet tried any HDR. I’m not sure whether my little point-and-shoot Canon can do the bracketed exposure. However, I just found out about a really cool firmware enhancement for Canon cameras (which will be the subject of another blog post) which can do it. I also found out that Photoshop CS2, which I have, has a utility for doing the image merging. So apparently I have the tools on hand; now I just need to find time to try them. (I spent the weekend doing home-handyman stuff and tinkering with an ARM7 protoboard.)
I wouldn’t think that it would work well under water. Chris tried it and came to the conclusion that his tripod wasn’t stable enough for the task. This leads me to suspect that the shifting nature of underwater photography would be an even greater obstacle than a wobbly tripod.