Real HDR_Before and After

My son received a new camera for Christmas and we are in the process of learning its various functions and operations. Our first images were taken the other day and it was a miserable day for photography. The day was windy and very foggy, foggy to the point where we probably should have stayed home. But we came up with a plan and stuck with it. Because of the fog we already knew our pictures were going to turn out pretty bland, we would have no highlights and no darks, no contrast... just a lot of gray. So we came up with a plan to try some true HDR imaging to build contrast back into our images. We shot 5 images of each of the three shots and used photoshop's HDR pro to combine them. I was very impressed with the results and the easy use of photoshops HDR pro. The images look great and using up to five different exposures cut through the fog nicely. We shot both jpg and raw images, the jpg images did produce some color artifacting, the raw image did not, it was clean and sharp. I would only shoot raw images for HDR. After selecting images from photoshop's bridge, you go to tools > photoshop > merge to HDR, make your adjustments, (the "DETAIL", and the "EDGE GLOW" which includes Radius and strength are you most important adjustments) and then open in photoshop, at this point you have an HDR image, you now can treat that image like any other, opening this image in raw and making additional adjustments to fine tune your image before you output to a tiff. Our plan of learning the functions of a new camera actually turned into a lesson of thinking about your situational awareness and responding in an appropriate way to produce the best possible image. As you can see from these before and after examples it was a combination of camera technique and photoshop manipulation that that lead to a successful result.

Photoshop Tutorial

Is This Photography, or Not

My friend Jim emailed me with this question,"Hey John, what did you think of this guy's gallery? At what point is it no
longer photography, just computer generated art? I look at this way, it is photography and the computer is one of our tools to use in the process of making images, just as the camera itself is a tool for making images. I have seen this technique before and it is kind of cool when used with the right kind of images. As you can tell from the gallery some images work better than others with this technique. The top two images are from Alexandre Duret-Lutz, a French photographer creating what he calls "wee planets" using a technique of stitching together and bending many photographs of a particular scene, see his gallery HERE. The bottom photo, done by photographer Chris Kling is called a globe, it has some of the same characteristics but is done with photoshop and only one photo, see photographer Chris Kling blog HERE. See the technique for the single image version in photoshop HERE and try it yourself.