More HDR

It's 7-7-08... and you know what that means, only one month to go to 8-8-08... and if you've watched NBC anytime in the past month or so... you know that means it's the start of Beijing Olympics... looking at my world clock, I see that even as I type this (it'll be posted slightly later)... we will hopefully be inside the Bird's Nest on the 3rd hour or so of the Opening Ceremonies.  Still having a tough time mentally processing that!

A bit easier to believe is that I have uploaded my pix from our holiday weekend in San Diego - you can check them out here.  I wasn't overly impressed with these set of photos on first review... but this trip has certainly getting the short end of the proverbial stick with it being sandwiched between these two international trips.  However, after picking out the better pix and doing a little cropping here and there, I ended up being pretty pleased. 

With my new-found HDR "knowledge" (still learning), I did take a handful of shots with the intent of using the technique/process of combining 3 photos into one. 

In my brief experience with HDR, I see it is pretty controversial.  Some people don't like it... saying that if you need to use it you are not taking good pictures (or pictures that "pop") in the first place... and I even received a comment on my first HDR post from someone likening it to "faking an orgasm"... which I certainly do not disagree with, but also was not something I was purporting it to be. Within the HDR community (and there is one!), there is also criticism of people over-doing the tone-mapping part or not doing it "right." 

My take is that it is a manipulation of photo... and it can take a so-so photo and make it into something greater.  But it is up to the individual that took the photo to apply the technique... and that's where it becomes more artistic and also subjective.  There is quite a bit of finessing (or fussing, as I mentioned in that first post) of the different settings... so it's not just a 1-click "auto-fix" type of process.  I see some great photos, I have seen some great HDR/tone-mapping, and sometimes there's both -- but I think they are three seperate things... and there's nothing wrong with that!

For the most part I have kept my HDR/tone-mapping more on the "realistic" end of the scale, but when playing around with one of my San Diego pix yesterday, I got a little more heavy on one of the settings (gamma, I believe) and I kind of liked what happened.

Here is the original shot (the normal exposure of the 3 shots)...

And here is the more heavy tone-mapped version of it...

I really liked how it morphed into a watercolor/impressionistic painting.  I will never have the skill or talent to paint... so it was cool to be able to do this via a few (dozen?!) clicks or glides of a scale.

You can see more of my "before and after" HDR experiments in my Flickr set that I have creatively enough called HDR - Before & After... or just cut to the chase and see my final products in this HDR "Only" set.