I made my first trip to Skylands of the 2011 season this morning. Flowers are starting to bloom. Over the next two weeks the place should really come to life. I did get a few flowers and then did some experimental high dynamic range shots of some of the statues in the gardens. I am looking forward to another year of many trips to the gardens.
I photographed More HDR (High Dynamic Range) images today at one of my favorite places... Indian Brook Falls in Garrison, NY. I took these shots around two pm. Anyone who shoots waterfalls knows this is normally a useless time to photograph the falls because the strong light together with the white of the water makes for harsh lighting with blown out highlights in the water. HDR uses multiple exposures of the same scene (for example one taken as the meter in the camera suggests then one shot two stops over and a third two stops overexposed. This should give you enough information to capture the parts of the image that can't be recorded in a single image. It can have some very striking results. Here are my efforts for today. I am quite happy with them. Note the detail in the lights and the shadow areas you might not normally see. This effect can be too much and I would not suggest using it all the time, but I like these and really think the B&Ws are really quite stunning.
In her last post Victoria over at Photography Unscripted pondered over the value using HDR (High Dynamic Range) techniques on her images when she prefers them in B&W. She mentioned not having found color images of her own that looked great as HDR. I have struggled with the same thing. I have found in my own photos there are some color shots or exposure ranges that don't look good as HDR. I have found some that look stunning, but have decided it is not meant to be used all the time. In fact I lean towards a more natural look in my HDR than some of the over the top stuff I have seen. Victoria mentioned possibly doing a bracket series of infrared and turning them into HDR. I would be very interested to see how this turns out in both color and B&W infrared. I am going to file that away for infrared season this summer. I think this could be amazing. Considering how good Victoria's IR work is already I'd like to see what she can do when turned loose on HDR-Infrared!
Here are some Late afternoon High Dynamic Range shots of the Lafayette Theater in Suffern, NY. I really like how the one with the street sign turned out. I plan to shot the NY Skyline from Hoboken NJ in HDR. That should make for a really cool image.
After I posted my two posts of HDR (High Dynamic Range) images on Sunday my good friend Carl Skiba wrote to me and said hey that's cool I'd like to see the three images that went into making the HDR photo side by side so I can better understand what the HDR software did for the image.
I shot these images of Watkins Glen back in the late spring of 2010. I was fairly happy with the original shots, but struggled with capturing the whole contrast range of the scene. I found I had shadows and highlights that were off of the scale even shooting long exposures in the early (5:30am) light of a rainy day. I was able to capture the scene really feels like using HDR or High Dynamic Range software. Essentially you take a normal shot and then one over exposed and one under exposed of the exact same scene and the software uses the best parts of each file to compress the scene into a tonal range you can work with. These images are much closer to the magic you feel wandering the trail along the falls in Watkins Glen. The only trick is to always setup on a tripod and bracket the scene with one normal and one under and over exposed shot. There are a tone of shots I could have done this with as I always bracket my images... Alas as part of my work flow afterwards I decide which image of the three is best and delete the other two so I don't have a lot of shots I can do this too. I will however keep this in mind as I shoot new images because this can help me produce breathtaking images. Like any tool the trick is to know when to stop so you do not take it too far.
