Floating Imitations
Intense hydrant
A fire hydrant across the street from a church parking lot in Calgary.
This is my first use of HDR (DRI) techniques to obtain hyperrealistic colors while preserving image details. Layer masks in Linux Gimp were used to select various elements for contrast and saturation enhancement. The masks were gradient filled and blurred to smoothly merge the layers for output.
Ideally HDR uses two or more exposures blended together. I shot multiple exposures at different EV settings with that in mind. Later white balancing revealed the shot overexposed for the sky had excellent dynamic range (contrast and color) for everything else. Since this scene has minimal sky, that one shot was sufficient to make this image. I only lose one cloud by not using a second exposure.
The original scene did not look like this. The early evening sky was overcast after raining and most colors were dull from this angle. But this is very close to the effect I imagined when shooting.
Intense hydrant
A fire hydrant across the street from a church parking lot in Calgary.
This is my first use of HDR (DRI) techniques to obtain hyperrealistic colors while preserving image details. Layer masks in Linux Gimp were used to select various elements for contrast and saturation enhancement. The masks were gradient filled and blurred to smoothly merge the layers for output.
Ideally HDR uses two or more exposures blended together. I shot multiple exposures at different EV settings with that in mind. Later white balancing revealed the shot overexposed for the sky had excellent dynamic range (contrast and color) for everything else. Since this scene has minimal sky, that one shot was sufficient to make this image. I only lose one cloud by not using a second exposure.
The original scene did not look like this. The early evening sky was overcast after raining and most colors were dull from this angle. But this is very close to the effect I imagined when shooting.