365/10 "Tripods make great weapons"

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.

Hoppin' the waterplug just for old HDR's sake.

Spent Thursday afternoon filling my camera with more sources of mediocre HDR down at the University. I have to admit: trying to see this stuff is much harder than I expected. You don't really know what you're going to get until you're staring at the tonemap and you're clicking on commit.

It's somewhat frustrating, I must confess. You think you have something good in camera and when you get it loaded it ... well. It's just utter crap. I like the look of HDR photography when, to the naked eye, it appears delicately painted on, brush stroke by brush stroke. I suppose it will get better with time, but we'll see.

I think my problem with the latest HDR trash was that I was photographing subjects that were in full sun so I didn't get the under-exposed part of the range that I wanted (or needed). It was just bright. The photos didn't look all that good. In fact, I ended up deleting a few hundred because they just didn't work out well.


But, we'll see how this goes. I need to read up more on the topic to see what I'm missing. This whole shooting blind idea is not very fruitful. I'd be better off throwing it all up against the wall and seeing what sticks. But, we'll see. The worst that happens is that I delete more photos. C'est la vie.

The photo above is the side entrance (well, the exit) of Garrison Hall on campus. This was the first (and probably the best) attempt I made on Thursday. I love the hint of detail on the windows. I need to work that more deeply whenever I photograph buildings this way. You can see the sky reflection if you look closely.

For this round of photos, I did 5-stop spreads (five photos, one stop apart). I don't know if that's enough. Or too much. And I don't yet know how the size of the stop really affects the final outcome. For all I know, I'm spinning my wheels because I've chosen to deal with too much data on my eye.

I seem to have a fetish for fire plugs. This is now the third that I've taken and added to my collection.



And, of course, we cannot forget to photograph the biggest balls of them all. I like the rusty bits. HDR really makes them pop out at you like a bad 3D b-movie.

HDR Playtime!

Last month when I flew up to Chicago, we got diverted to St. Louis because of the nightmare that was the storm front rolling through the area. The sunset was beautiful. It was just us, the plane, the tarmac, and our fellow stranded fliers in the other planes around us. We were all in the penalty box and no one knew if we'd get out alive.

I didn't have much else to do, so I popped over to the left side of our plane and just started playing with the bracketing on my d300. I had intended to play with HDR a bit, but never got around to touching the photos when I got back to Austin.

Until now.

It's not great. I'm definitely no StuckInCustoms, that's for sure. But hell, for a first attempt, it's pretty damn good. Check it out in
large on black.

This was created with 7 RAW images all at f8, ranging from 1/100th to 1/1600th and tonemapped in Photomatix. I had to let it re-align things because I was handholding the camera and shifted around a bit while the photos were being taken. I think it did an excellent job.

Definitely need to play with HDR some more and see what I can come up with.