At least, that's what Trey Ratcliff thinks. Probably the best, insanely great take away from the talk tonight. He was back in town to give a presentation on HDR for the Austin Photography Group at Book People. It was fun and interesting listening to him talk. He's far more subdued and quiet than I expected, in all honesty. Well, really, I wasn't sure what to expect. Definitely fun and approachable.
I think the two other "most dramatic" things I pulled away from the discussion was the idea of blending an HDR image back with one of the originals. It wasn't obvious to me when I saw some of his images how he was doing things such as capturing the streak of a taxi through a scene that contained quite a bit of HDR detail in it. Now I know. It probably would help if I got the book and read through some of his tutorials online. It'd certainly make the HDR learning curve a bit shallower.
And second, the difference in his style is quite obvious from three years ago when he first started with his photography and today. It's much more finessed and subtle. Painterly, if you will.
Oh yeah ... the tripod thing. I realized this evening how right he was about needing a tripod. Not because I needed to fend of hoards of wild Austinites at the capitol grounds, but because hand-holding the camera at 1/20th of a second to try and get a stable HDR series just ... doesn't ... work. But, I was too lazy to go back to the car, so I made due. The more I get into the HDR style of shooting, the more I realize I need to get a much better tripod ... sooner rather than later.
The photo above is what I ended up with. Mostly, I wanted to play for a few minutes in the quiet and brightly lit solitude of the capitol shadow. Well, it certainly looked bright to my eye. Not so much on the camera. Still need to get into the habit of carrying around the tripod, no matter how craptastical it is.
Though, with my luck, my fingers would have frozen to the aluminum. It's still too damned cold in Austin. We need some warmth. Soon.
3 comments:
Nice shot sir! I've taken hundreds of shots of the capitol, and that angle never occurred to me. I'll be copying that shot soon I'm sure... :)
Fantastic clarity and color. I love the composition of this shot.
@Wookie: haha, thanks! copying must be the sincerest form of flattery ;-)
@Evil Pixie: Thank you! Amazing what you can do with HDR and a shutterspeed that shouldn't be done by handholding at night. :-)
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