Day 29 – Playing with HDR

I’ve been hearing a lot about HDR and wondering if I might start incorporating it into some of my photography. From what I can see, HDR is an effective tool when you are dealing with wildly different exposed areas in a photograph. In northern Nevada it is quite easy to blow out the sky when trying to shoot a landscape. Anyway, I experimented a bit today. First I did a quick bit of research on the intertubes, just to figure out the mechanics of it in Photoshop, and then I went out into the front yard and took photos. Using a tripod, I set my f-stop to 22, ISO to 100 and took multiple shots adjusting shutter speed each time to properly expose for the sky, the mountains, foreground, etc. I also did the same thing looking out through our front door. Here are the results.

A view of the mountains from our front yard. © Carissa Snedeker

Normally to get this kind of definition in the colorless landscape I would have to blow out the sky, so I kind of like how the sky looks here.

Looking toward the mountains through the leafless windbreak. © Carissa Snedeker

I really like the sky in this one.

Finally, I shot this in our living room looking out on our front yard through our storm door (I live in the desert…we only have lawn in the backyard). Shots like this are really where HDR appears to provide the greatest assist. In order to get any blue from the sky and still properly expose the interior of the house, HDR is a nice tool. I am not that happy with this particular photo, but I wanted to share it anyway.

Looking out the front door. © Carissa Snedeker

I have much to learn if I want to use this tool more effectively.

I’m making a switch

I decided to switch out two photographs of the six I chose for my lighting class. Instead of Buddy and the Christmas tree photo, I went back to my Intro to Digital Photography class and pulled one photo each from Project 3 (Narrative) and my final project, Day and Night (you can see the series here). The first is my husband and me (Project 3), and the second is the Tracy Clark hydroelectric power station on I-80 (Final Project).

Six Photographs

I’m starting a new photography class at UNR on Tuesday. This is the Photographic Lighting class and I’m really looking forward to it. The instructor sent us an email today telling us to bring six of our best photographs to our first session to share with the class. Here is what I’ve chosen. Regular readers will recognize that four of them come from my 365 project.

Cross-posted at Blue Lyon

Day 8 – Sunrise

I took this shot about three times adjusting the f-stop and shutter speed each time. I liked this one the best as it caught the foreground nicely and still kept most of the detail of the sunrise.

After the sun was fully above the horizon I shot a bit more trying to catch some interesting color and shadow that quickly washes away as the sun rises in the sky.

I’m off. Much to do today!

Day 7

I played with light today. I grabbed some sherry glasses out of the hutch and placed them on a table in the living room. I played with placement, focal length, aperture, shutter speed and on and on. I finally settled on this one.

Nina danced around a lot, but she finally gave up and fell asleep in the sun streaming through the storm door.

Day 2

Two again today, because it’s a non-work day. Besides, I couldn’t let the sunrise go to waste. (Don’t expect this every day.)

And later in the day I wanted to experiment with turning off the automatic stabilizer so I set about shooting the coat rack and kept moving in closer and closer until I got here.