Comments on: Extremadura Skies

By: jane

jane — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 02:09:24 +0000

I agree that done right HDR is helpful. Mostly I see it done badly and it makes my eyes bleed.

By: simon

simon — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 07:40:45 +0000

1, 9 and 22.

By: sgazzetti

sgazzetti — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:03:27 +0000

‘you’re’. Boys climbing my knees.

By: sgazzetti

sgazzetti — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:02:30 +0000

Popular Photography just had an article about stitching pictures together exactly as you did in #14 in order to get good exposures of sky and foreground. And before there was digital, there were graduated neutral density filters. I would say that you a prime candidate for a set of them. Best part: they are (relatively) dirt cheap. See also:

Oh, and I vote for the beautiful failure. But you knew that.

By: Erik R.

Erik R. — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:00:50 +0000

I knew it! Props on your mad pshop skillz, tho.

By: aquariumdrinker

aquariumdrinker — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:57:05 +0000

Truth be told, I don’t have a daughter. That’s some girl I scanned from a diaper commercial and keep pasting into our “family” pictures.

By: Erik R.

Erik R. — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:34:14 +0000

But your daughter is still the most beautiful blond toddler angel ever, right, ‘drinker? Don’t burst my bubble here, man.

I briefly considered trying to edit out some of the power lines in the above photos, but I ~~thought it might be a little dishonest~~ am too lazy. But I totally understand your photoshopping philosophy.

By: aquariumdrinker

aquariumdrinker — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:13:49 +0000

I second Erik’s comments, and would add that when HDR is done right (by my lights), it is invisible. HDR at its best is a workaround for dealing with the limitations of the capture and display technologies.

I’ve been meaning to write a post on this for a while. I edit my subjects in Photoshop quite a bit, removing zits, bug bites, bags under eyes, drool… Mostly because I think that accuracy consists not of being faithful to what my CMOS captured at at a particular time (at a particular aperture and a particular shutter speed), but of getting that data as close as I can to what I remember of the moment and the ones around it. Stopping at the rays of light that hit my retina (or the camera’s sensor) almost always misses the point.

(Except when the drool is part of the point.)

By: Erik R.

Erik R. — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 12:32:36 +0000

That’s because most HDR is done horribly wrong. The point is to more accurately capture what the human eye sees. Most HDRers (?) don’t understand that. But when it’s done right, it can be amazing.

I look to be practicing some HDR in the future.

By: jane

jane — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 12:13:57 +0000

14 (even though I mostly cannot stand HDR) and 17.