Worth a Second Look 6

Here's a couple of photos from the summer 2011 when, in case you haven't noticed, I discovered HDR processing and, like many of its early practitioners, pushed it to the max. I still like these photos (the top one actually won a prize in a local photo contest) but I'm happy that I now have learned to use HDR with a little more restraint. The top photo is of a friend's vintage restored truck and the photo below was taken on a trip to the beautiful nearby city of Seattle, Washington, in the USA.

Fisgard Friday 3

This week's Fisgard Friday features on the left an HDR version of the lighthouse directly from the camera. For side-by-side comparison a "normal" single exposure is posted on the right above. All I've done here with these photos is to shrink them to one third of their size so they don't take forever to load. In the HDR case the camera took three exposures rapidly with one click of the shutter button and then merged them into one final shot. On the right is a single exposure. In this case I think I prefer the "normal" shot on the right but I really like the way the HDR version brings out the lichen on the rock and tones down the blown out brilliance of the lighthouse tower. Ultimately I think I would prefer something midway between the two, so I merged the above two photos in Photomatix to produce the version below.

Reference Subject

Above is a subject I photograph almost every week so it seemed like a good reference subject for me to try out a new photo-processing technique. For those of you who don't recognize it, the above is an example of an HDR or High Dynamic Range image. The above is actually faux HDR since it is extracted from one RAW image rather than several images. However the effect is the very nearly the same. Below is the same image as it came from the camera without the HDR processing. Click on these to look at the large versions for comparison.