HDR

                                

In 2007 I went up to the Hat Creek area, like I do every year, to play golf and take pictures. A lot of pictures. I took well over 700 pictures that year and ended up with 599 that I kept. That's a lot of keepers and, in glancing at them the other night, I was struck by the high number of shots I kept on the computer. Usually I will delete almost half of any group of shots I take right off the bat ...so I went through them to see what was going on....

Evidently I was thinking of HDR photography during this trip.

HDR stands for high dynamic range. HDR photography entails making a series of photos with different exposures and combining them in software to create an image that displays all or most of the highlights and shadows of a given scene. The finished picture has detail in the shadow areas and in the brightest areas of the photo, something a camera can't do in one exposure given the limited dynamic range of today's digital cameras. Usually you take 3 to 6 pictures of a given scene changing the exposure for each one using a tripod to make sure the camera doesn't move between shots.

I had taken 3 to sometimes 7 shots of a bunch of individual scenes planning to combine them in Photoshop to create HDR images. I had done a few but I got distracted and there are about 30 to 35 groups of shots that have yet to be combined..... That's why I ended up with so many images.

Here is one I combined.  It has problems for sure .. the sky is overexposed and some of the dark areas are blocked up ... HDR also gives a photo an odd feel - there are halos around some areas but over all it's not too bad.  Any way it is the best I could do with Photoshop ... There are third party programs that do the same thing, maybe a little better...I might try one at some point. We'll see...