An accidental discovery

[johnske]

I'm new to digital photography and got myself a GE X5 "Superzoom" to get started and this is also my first post here ...

Anyway, I was down at the park standing under the rain-trees early one very cloudy morning recently and was trying to get a completely different shot altogether, but everywhere I pointed was showing as very heavy 'fog'.

As it had rained, I thought the lens may have fogged up because of the very high humidity and checked it - nope. I tried many different settings and nothing did any good at all so I ended up putting it on auto and shot at random in several different directions just to see what happened.

The only one that wasn't foggy was the 1st one below, problem was that the most of the scene was way under-exposed so I just gave up and went home.



When I got home I pulled out the GE manual and was re-reading it when I saw something about 'HDR', this was something I'd never heard about so thought I'd give it a try on this stuffed-up photo just to see what happened - lo and behold, it removed some of the shadows ... not enough though, so I thought I'd do it once again to see what happened and the under-exposed parts of the shot then became almost exactly as I had seen it with my eyes (next shot below)


Exposure: 1/100 second
Aperture: F 4.59
Focal Length: 4.90 mm
ISO Speed: 64
GE post production HDR (times 2)

What a pleasant surprise this was, a completely stuffed shot was now quite useable. I have tried to duplicate this in photoshop but had no luck so far - I don't doubt it could be done in photoshop but I think there would be a lot of tweaking involved.

Anyway, this stimulated my interest in HDR and have since read quite a bit about it, it seems to me this opens whole new avenues for creativity (provided it's not overdone like some HDR pics I've seen).


EDIT: The camera specs say 90% humidity is the limit - it sometimes get higher than that here and I guess that's why I was seeing 'fog' thru the camera when there was no fog around ...

[zona5101]

Hi and welcome.
That is a good story and even made better by giving you something new to experiment with...

[ganesh_bbr]

Thanks for sharing. Very practical and helpfull.

[icuc]

HDR: is that something the camera shoots or something you do with software? (new to HDR in AZ.)

[johnske]

Hi icuc,

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. I found a fairly comprehensive tutorial/explanation on HDR here > High Dynamic Range (HDR) Photography in Photoshop

There is also some Pseudo (fake) HDR software around ...

John

[theosus]

Originally Posted by icuc

HDR: is that something the camera shoots or something you do with software? (new to HDR in AZ.)

My sister-in-law has the iPhone 4. It has an HDR "mode" on it's built-in camera. I tried it with some backlit subjects and the results were very nice, exposure-wise, without looking like a cartoon (which, evidently, is what a lot of people think HDR should look like). I tried it side-by-side with my canon t1i, and it was hard to replicate the effect (but I got close) just checking the difference between the two displays.
Im wondering if the camera's HDR "mode" is simply a strong lighting optimization, or something else? I have seen HDR faked on photoshop, where you take one image, artificially darken and lighten it, and combine the three images. Its not as good as taking three seperate images, but it will work better than nothing. I wonder if that's what the iphone is doing? If so, it does it FAST, because within a second of hitting the button, it throws up the HDR picture.

[icuc]

thanks johnskee
since you wrote i've been researching all about HDR and find it fascinating. i yet have to decide on which trial s/w to dL to play with some of my images.

[johnske]

Try the trial version of Dynamic Photo HDR from mediachance >> Creative tools for Creative minds it seems quite good, you can do either 'fake' (1 image) or 'real' (> 1 image) HDR with it and there lots of things to play round with to give either realistic or surrealistic pics.

[Christhephotoguy]

Thanks for the posting... I've been racking my brain trying to figure out how to make an HDR photo... I did one myself using 3 images and photoshot, and got 'ok' results... I've now been searching for the software that will best suit my needs.
I love the samples that you posted!
I'm looking to be able to do the 'real looking' pictures AND the 'dark grungy' AND the 'cartoon look'.

I'll have to give Dynamic Photo HDR a try, but I'm hoping that it's not too over my head to figure out.

Thanks again for your post.

[johnske]

Hi Chris,

Dynamic Photo HDR is not hard to figure out ...

Here's another example I shot late yesterday afternoon (another murky cloudy day) using the GE HDR.

Original (basically, it's just a silhouette)



Then I ran it through the GE internal HDR post production four times (it's pretty subtle) to restore the colours of the birds plumage and cropped it to get this...

GE X5 digital camera
Exposure: 1/588 sec
Aperture: F 6.5
Focal length: 74mm (15X optical zoom)
ISO Speed: 64
Tripod: Used
GE post production HDR (4 times)
Cropped and blown up to 3X original size