I actually got out of the house before dawn and headed towards the east river.  The biggest problem was that the darned cat wants to follow me wherever I go and I can’t leave my front door open for that long – after all it is New York.  I usually let him hang out in the hallway at the top of the stairs, but to get out of the house without him following me is a chore.  I finally ended up doing something horrible – spritzing water at him to drive him back into the house but it took a while.  And by the time I made it to the river the sun hadn’t quite gotten above the horizon but the lights on the bridges were off.  Bummer.

Nevertheless, this was my first chance to shoot something with a high dynamic range, and bracket it properly.  We’ll see if I got anything out of it.

Now the fascinating thing was that by the time I got home, maybe an hour and a half later, the cat had forgotten all about his spritzing experience, and greeted me as if it had never happened – whereas I was still feeling guilty about it.  He comes up to the frozen tripod to sniff it, then rubs up against my leg, and when I sit down on the bed to turn on the news, he jumps up on my lap and purrs happily.

I don’t think dogs are like that.

Well, you might not care about that – so hang on a bit and I’ll post some pictures if I got anything good this morning…  But it was sort of funny, since it was fairly overcast, and I was just walking around looking for stuff with shadows or highlights, and everything was just flat, flat, flat.  It’s definitely a different head.  It’s a similar feeling to walking around with the infrared camera – i.e. you really are looking for specific tonal qualities and if you’re lucky, you may even get an interesting composition.  But these techniques, both force you back into trying to imagine what shots are going to look like, which is what I like about both techniques.  You’re shooting digital, but you’re thinking like there’s film in the camera.

Oh yeah, and if you are going to be shooting 3 or 6 shots of one subject at a time – uhm – better have a fair amount of digi-space with you (remember, I lost most of my CF cards, and only have one 4 GB CF card right now).  And if you are going to do this with 18 or 21mp – uhm – well you see where I’m going.

My plan is to go out tomorrow morning (pre-dawn) if I can wake up at that hour, and redo these shots with the 40D and more serious bracketing.  I’d like to see if I can get this done without too much bridge shaking.  I’ve never shot the bridge (also the Triborough) at sunrise, so that alone should be interesting, though if it’s enough to get me going in this cold weather, we’ll see. I also [more]

This needs more fine-tuning, it’s just an HDR with two (I almost called them negatives) Raw files that have a 1/2 stop difference.  But I can tell you, it has promise, and many of the files I’m choosing to work with are not particularly dramatic in b&w.  In other words, it’s the pinks and blues of the sky that I like. But the next version won’t have so much red chroma or glow around the [more]

Searching for images for J. I come across tons of stuff that I would like to try some of these new HDR and Exposure Fusion techniques on – though this isn’t one of them.

I really seem to have taken a detour down the HDR hole.  Especially the Photomatix tool which I absolutely do not fully understand yet.  This is one of those times that I think I should open the online manual.  I happened to have a number of night images from years back where I would do maybe one bracketed shot.  I still haven’t actually gone out with a full understanding of what I’m doing… and I [more]

Two images used.  1600 ASA.  Both with same EV (so this is really a faux sort of HDR) but with the Image Fusion and  ToneMapping tool in PhotoMatix (I keep wanting to call it PhotoMatrix). But I was able to pull very specific areas from the RAW 40D file.  I never saw those windows with their mosaic-like prints on them when looking at the image in Lightroom or Photoshop. Can’t wait for the weather to [more]

Last weekend, I annoyed the family (as usual) playing around with HDR.  I didn’t have a tripod with me, and the shots that follow were hand-held and auto-bracketed (AEB) with one stop over and one under.  Most of the light was from the window on the right. Now, on top of being hand-held, what I did was ask the unwilling participants to pretend that this was a hundred years ago, and to hold their breath [more]