Backend Deal
Shot in a parking lot behind a tattoo parlor in Worcester.
(I've just read this back and realized that this straightforward description could double as a headline in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. I shall leave it intact as a warning to other people who caption photos in haste.)
Second try with HDR imaging: five exposures from -2 to +2. I actually shot twice as many, but I'm sure that 5 is plenty for most HDR shots.
What you see here was actually my second try at building the image. I was experimenting with the demo version of Photomatix and I liked the fakey results I got initially, after twiddling the settings a bit.
(When the NEA grant money comes in, I'll refer to this style as "hyper-reality, evocative of the thought of being there and not the simplistic senses, in a modality that transcends simple documentation")
Fortunately, I couldn't reproduce it with the commercial edition of the app (the one that doesn't stamp PHOTOMATIX all over the image) so I went for something closer to reality. Neato!
I like Photomatix...it gives you many more sliders and buttons to play with. I like the honesty of the manual, too. It doesn't really outline a sensible process or clearly define what each of these sliders actually does. It just says "Look, just keep pushing buttons until what you see is what you want."
I'm not 100% sure that I love the deep saturation in the final pic, but that was my choice, not Photomatix's; I did some Photoshopping after the fact (chiefly to replace the entire sky to 86 a distracting tree and to restore some detail that Photomatix removed from the mural) and I could have tweaked it if I wanted to.
As usual, what it looks like depends on the screen. On the PowerBook, it looks fine. On the MacBook, with its sumptuous saturation, it's a little punchy. On the Ubuntu machine -- where color profiles are just another tool that The Man uses to keep the Movement down, apparently -- it's a bit washy.
Anyway. This shot really seals the deal for HDR, as far as I'm concerned. As you're walking past this site, the basic scene doesn't immediately insist on HDR the way that the diner shot does -- with the diner, you can't help but think "there's only one way to get a usable shot of this" -- but HDR is the difference between having sort of a nice photo and having something that would go up on my wall.
(Assuming that they weren't already covered by bookcases and racks of clinging technology, of course.)
Actually, it's more a case for using a tripod and bracketing your shots just as a matter of course. And so, I descend down into an even deeper level of Storage Hell. It was bad when I moved to a 10 megapixel camera, worse when Jack Davis convinced me to always shoot RAW no matter what...now I'm going to be shooting three to five frames of everything? Mother mercy.
No, no, of course not. But there's no telling what kinds of shots you'll miss out on unless you have a tripod in your backpack and many gigabytes of storage cards in your pocket.
Backend Deal
Shot in a parking lot behind a tattoo parlor in Worcester.
(I've just read this back and realized that this straightforward description could double as a headline in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. I shall leave it intact as a warning to other people who caption photos in haste.)
Second try with HDR imaging: five exposures from -2 to +2. I actually shot twice as many, but I'm sure that 5 is plenty for most HDR shots.
What you see here was actually my second try at building the image. I was experimenting with the demo version of Photomatix and I liked the fakey results I got initially, after twiddling the settings a bit.
(When the NEA grant money comes in, I'll refer to this style as "hyper-reality, evocative of the thought of being there and not the simplistic senses, in a modality that transcends simple documentation")
Fortunately, I couldn't reproduce it with the commercial edition of the app (the one that doesn't stamp PHOTOMATIX all over the image) so I went for something closer to reality. Neato!
I like Photomatix...it gives you many more sliders and buttons to play with. I like the honesty of the manual, too. It doesn't really outline a sensible process or clearly define what each of these sliders actually does. It just says "Look, just keep pushing buttons until what you see is what you want."
I'm not 100% sure that I love the deep saturation in the final pic, but that was my choice, not Photomatix's; I did some Photoshopping after the fact (chiefly to replace the entire sky to 86 a distracting tree and to restore some detail that Photomatix removed from the mural) and I could have tweaked it if I wanted to.
As usual, what it looks like depends on the screen. On the PowerBook, it looks fine. On the MacBook, with its sumptuous saturation, it's a little punchy. On the Ubuntu machine -- where color profiles are just another tool that The Man uses to keep the Movement down, apparently -- it's a bit washy.
Anyway. This shot really seals the deal for HDR, as far as I'm concerned. As you're walking past this site, the basic scene doesn't immediately insist on HDR the way that the diner shot does -- with the diner, you can't help but think "there's only one way to get a usable shot of this" -- but HDR is the difference between having sort of a nice photo and having something that would go up on my wall.
(Assuming that they weren't already covered by bookcases and racks of clinging technology, of course.)
Actually, it's more a case for using a tripod and bracketing your shots just as a matter of course. And so, I descend down into an even deeper level of Storage Hell. It was bad when I moved to a 10 megapixel camera, worse when Jack Davis convinced me to always shoot RAW no matter what...now I'm going to be shooting three to five frames of everything? Mother mercy.
No, no, of course not. But there's no telling what kinds of shots you'll miss out on unless you have a tripod in your backpack and many gigabytes of storage cards in your pocket.