Exploring the capital in Austin, Texas

“Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves.” – Julia Morgan

HDR photography or High Dynamic Range to more accurate is really nothing new. The process and applications we have at our creative finger tips are reletively new, but the concept of extending this range of light that the camera captures is not. Take flash for example. Pros and amateurs alike have heavily relied on this tool to bring more light to a scene. The masters of this tool, like Joe McNally (who I link to on the bottom of this blog), creatively toss those lumens into the image to create their vision of what the scene should look like. There are all kind of ways to sculpt, wrap, and wash extra light into strategic places in the scene, and Joe is certainly one of the masters of this process.

Taking a full range of exposures of a scene and then grinding them through an HDR procesing app like photomatix is one of the ways I frequently pull more light into an image. Albeit not the best way to photograph people, it works great for landscapes, architecture,  and the special events environments that I illuminate.

Without these tools, to be honest with you, its pretty dificult to grab that extended range of light. I foresee a day, soon I can only imagine, that most of this extra range of light will be able to be captured with the camera sensor. Until then, I bracket away, and rely on my trusty HDR Photomatix program coupled with a few Photoshop tricks as well. Understanding this limitation of the sensor has certainly led me to a new found appreciation for my own eyes!

Now, of course, as with any process, its really up to the artist as to how far to take this creativity. Some of my earlier posts are a good example of this. By the way, I just realized that I forgot to crop this image after I straightened it! I guess I could have kept that to myself……or fixed it and uploaded it, geez.

I guess that just points out that this journey is one of continual learning, and isn’t that what its all about anyway?