Day 9 - Monday, April 30, 2012

An acquaintance of mine had a tip for my photoblog this week:  "have a weekly theme."  So yesterday, being the start of my week, was a picture of a very angry robin.  I thought I would go with wildlife photographs--which can be difficult.  In order to get a good picture, you need to have decent light, and get close enough to to the subject so you don't have to crop the heck out of it.  I did manage to take a picture, you can find it here.  I had to crop quite a bit on this picture.  Light wasn't ideal, so there wasn't a lot of dynamic of light.  I had to use Lightroom to enhance the ducks head, to get more color out of it.  Not to mention, that I've got a water grey background and nothing really interesting in the picture besides the boring duck.  Short story:  I thought the picture stunk.  I'm still going to try for wildlife photographs for the remainder of this week--just I couldn't use it as todays.

This leads me back to my photograph.  As I was driving down to the lake, I drove past this and I thought that it was interesting.  Perhaps it is because I have a certain affinity to trees that are canopied over the road.  It just makes me think not in the city sort of feeling.  I still had the same problems with lighting, however.  An overcast day does not leave you a lot to work with, (which isn't to say that light at noon leaves you much either.)  So what to do in this situation?  I cheated.  I liked the image that was in my head, so I bracketed my photo, taking 3 shots quickly with a 2 stop exposure value difference (0, +2, -2).  I then dumped them into Nik Softwares HDR (High Dynamic Range) program, fiddled with it a bit, and then cranked this image out.  I liked how it looked for screen.  If I were to print this on large format, I would definitely have to fix some of the issues there are (purple lines around the trees where it merges, etc.)

I was reluctant to put this up, for todays photograph mostly because I feel like shooting images for HDR isn't as helpful for my photography skills.  It is sort of cheating.  You usually cannot get this level of detail from a regular photograph taken digitally.  (Shooting 4x5" format, you might.)  I used three photographs, that by themselves, didn't do much for me.  But when combining them into one photograph--it was pretty good.  Still, I'm going to try to not shoot for HDR unless I absolutely need to.

Exposure Information:

1/30, 1/125, 1/500 sec, ISO 100. f/9.0, 11mm.

No original, as this was a HDR shot.