Playing with HDR

I've learned a trick using my camera and Photoshop. It's called HDR which is short for High Dynamic Range imaging. Using this trick you can combine a variety of color ranges and exposures into one image with some very dramatic results. I'm just starting out so I'm going to have fun playing with the potential of this process.

The first thing I did was to set my camera up on a tripod and shoot the same picture over and over again but changing the exposure with each shot. These shots ranged from under exposed to over exposed and here's the result.
Then I used the HDR merger to load them into Photoshop. This opens a series of slider tools that you can use to manipulate the pictures as they are stacked on top of each other. You can bring out the best parts of each exposure, including details that couldn't be seen in some of the shots. There's also a lot of other fun things that you can do to make the photo look surreal and fantastic. This is what I came up with at one point.
Some may consider this bad HDR or even HDR abuse, making weird looking pictures. That's because one of the interesting powers of HDR is that you can also make very realistic pictures. The trick is that you can create pictures that appear as the human eye views a scene in detail that the camera cannot. Cameras only pick up details at a certain exposure while people can see into shadows on a bright day.

In any case, this is a fun new toy that I plan on having lots of fun with.

Since I had a lot of exposures from my Jacksons Foodstores project, I decided to do an HDR of that too.

Family Portrait Session

A few months ago I did a really fun family portrait shoot. We all met up at Katheryn Albertson Park which is a beautiful place for such a taking pictures. It has rich greenery, winding paths and ponds filled with fish and water fowl. It's also a popular place for wedding ceremonies. There are literally hundreds of fun spots to explore. And aside from all the great vistas, the numerous trees also provide the right kind of diffuse lighting for some really great close up shots.

The other challenge is photographing toddlers. In my experience, the best approach is to put them down and just let them do their thing. Trying to get them to pose at best bores them and at worst they get annoyed after a while. However, if you let just them be themselves, then the child is happy and you get some great pictures that help the family remember what they were like at this age.
It's a lot of fun working with the customer to see what kinds of pictures they are looking for and encouraging them to experiment to what surprises may come up. If things go really well, they'll even want a picture with the photographer. :)

This summer we had our 30th high school reunion and I was asked if I could be the official photographer for the event. A great idea, since I always like to be accomplishing something this gave a focus to have fun with. Not to mention a great excuse to point my camera at any and everybody.

My plan was to upload the pictures from the reunion to a Flickr account and that we everyone else could download pictures from the event to their heart's content. However, before that, I wanted to create an establishing picture to act as a place marker in the Flickr album. After thinking about it a bit, since I still had all my old high school year books, I thought they would do the job.

Normally I'd do a shot like this in my studio but one of my first thoughts was that really liked the idea of having bookshelves in the background and having them lay on a wooden surface. So I did the set up in my office. Though after experimenting with composing the shot I scratched the background idea. Then I worked on lighting the set up. So it all looked like this.
I cut a hole in a sheet of construction paper to tighten the focus of my light and then used my wireless remote control to fire the camera so that it would stay steady in the low light and I wouldn't mess up my composition by touching the camera. Here's the final picture.

New Business Card

After showing my old business card to a business adviser, I finally decided that it was time to create a new one. In the past, I had emphasized bargain rates but suggested that I aim higher in the market and find a way to get my work to speak for me at the same time. So selected a picture from a family portrait shoot that I did a few months ago and then broadened my business model. I think the results are pretty good.
At least I'm getting a lot of "Oooh!" and "Ahhhh! when I show people my card.

Been busy but not writing

I've been doing so many things here lately that I haven't been keeping up with the blog. I've done a number of commercial shoots, portraits and lots of fun experiments. So I'm going to try to gradually catch up.

One of the most recent things I did was a sunrise shoot for Jacksons Foodstores. They wanted a sunrise shot of one of their stores that faces east. Also, they were looking for an golden hour effect so that the light inside the store is balanced with the light outside. That way you can see what's going on inside while viewing the outside as well. This involved me arriving at the store before sunrise and working out details with the store manager before setting up the shoot.

Then I set up my tripod, mounted the camera and set it to receive signals from my remote control. That way I could fire off pictures without worrying about camera vibrations since I didn't have to touch the camera.

In the end, I spent about and hour there and took 125 pictures as the sun slowly came up. I had a pretty wide window of opportunity to get the shots since we had cloud cover in the eastern sky.

Then back home I selected three different shots that pretty much covered all the possible light levels and sent them to the client. She selected the earliest shot but also requested that I remove the hose cart that sat below the store window. So I spent some time in Photoshop brushing it out and then re-texturing the wall behind it and drawing in the mortar lines. In the end, the customer was pretty happy.

Well, it seems that I've been neglecting the blog. Though not because there's nothing to report. If nothing else, I've been very busy. Most of the new ground I've been covering has been at work where we're breaking into doing instructional videos. The challenging part is to make them interesting. Going into this project, I've watched a lot of videos produced by other libraries and most of them are groan-worthy. They mean well but having been involved with community theater as I have, I found myself looking at the screen and thinking "no, no, don't do that!"

After an extended campaign I finally got us some editing software that had creative potential and started working with it. So far I've only scratched the surface on the cool things I can do. Here you can see my first experiment with a green screen and an inimation filter.

Then we had a brainstorming session with a handfull of librarian and they came up with the idea of me shooting them giving afirmative answers. Then we got a few of our student employees to pose common student question for the camera. Since this was off the cuff, we didn't give much thought to planning questions that matched the answers we already had. When it came time to edit the video together, I was lucky in that I was able to find reasonalble connections between all the questions and answers. Also, it was a matter of finding something appropriate to put behind the librarians since we shot them all in front of the green screen. I was able to do that will all but one of the librarian since by chance she happened to be wearing a green shirt the day we did this unplanned shoot and it totally freaked out the chroma key filter. You learn a dozen things every day. In any case, here's what we came out with in the end.

Getting the studio set up

Around the end of March the new equipment for my studio arrived. Two back drops (one white, one black) and a set of three radio controlled strobe lights. All very cool. The back drops are part of a portable system but their tripod feet were too large for the room. So I improvised and built a frame out of electrical conduit. And now I can use the portable system when I need to do a remote shoot.
Now it's just a matter of working out a few bugs to get the lights to work like I want them to.