Harleys and HDR

This week I took a trip out to the Salton Sea to try and find a place I had been to 10 or 12 years ago, where the sea had encroached on a small town and partially gobbled up several of the buildings. I thought this would be a great place to make some more images and practice my new found HDR techniques.

Unfortunately (or fortunately for the folks who live there) the interesting place I was looking for no longer exists. Some years ago they had built a berm around the town to hold the water back and destroyed all the buildings that had been eaten away by the extremely salty water.

Jakob on the berm at Bombay Beach

That’s the thing about adventures, you have to expect them to be disappointing sometimes. But the bright side is that I got some more pretty cool images, like the one above of my friend from Copenhagen, Jakob, standing atop the berm.

As I learn more about HDR I think my images will get better. I knew enough to look for the high contrast scene like the one above which, using typical photography would have been a blue sky with silhouettes of the berm and Jakob.

” alt=”” border=”0″ />Two Harleys on Rt 78

I have some more images from this trip to work on, but I’ve got to get to work, so more later…

First shot at High Dynamic Range

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Bits. That is what it all comes down to: bits of color information. The more bits per pixel, the closer an image gets to the range we can see by eye. These days that number is 32, and generally requires several exposures from a digital camera to reach that depth. I remember the first High Dynamic Range (HDR) image I saw. It was a spectacular photo of a crane in a Japanese shipping yard, with hyper-real colors and a sharpness that made it look pretty much like an illustration.

Technically though, that wasn’t the first HDR image I had seen. This may sound like an unfair comparison but most of Ansel Adams photos were HDR. Sure it’s analog and can’t be measured in bits but the tonal range thatPier
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he managed to squeeze out of the process was at least as spectacular; more so when you consider his methods were blindly based on notions of zones, a complete understanding of the chemistry involved, and all the darkroom skills it took in getting the image from negative to paper. But that is not what this is about… yet. I just took my first step into the world of HDR today, on a beautifully crisp day in southern California, and came up with a couple images without too much hassle at all.

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