Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Taking HDR further

From my previous post on HDR I talked about keeping things looking natural but still being able to bring out various tones and colours to counteract flat light. In these shots it's more about creating more vibrant and detailed images that stand out from regular exposures.

The street shot above, makes use of the various colours and textures. I tried to lead the eye into the scene when I set up the shot. I personally love the mixture of textures, from the worn paint on the railings to the bricks, cobbles and rendering on the buildings. To increase the tonal range of this shot and most of them in this blog, I increased the bracketing range from 0 to +1.3 & -1.3. The sky was pretty washed out but underexposing the shot by an extra .3 allowed a little cloud detail. .


In the image above of Durham Train station, I wanted to draw attention to the symmetry and repetitive pattern leading into perspective. Again +/-1.3ev and 0ev were used.


The shot above was, again, aimed at drawing the viewers attention to the dynamic shapes. The architecture of The Deep building in Hull is as impressive as the huge aquarium it holds. Sometimes it's all too obvious to stand 25m or so away from a building to capture it's design. The real architecture is sometimes best appreciated from up-close.


Tanfield railway above is a great place for photography in the North East. I love the station, complete with advertising and decoration from the old days of Steam. This image is the result of 5 shots -2, -1, 0, +1, +2ev and the details slider pushed all the way up in Photomatix. Not too much to worry about in terms of 'noise' (the speckles that can appear in digital images using high ISO settings) as the greenery does a good job of disguising it.