Hey, This Is A Pretty Neat Trick

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I subscribe to the daily email version of a very useful blog/web site called Digital Photography School. It's free. Every day they post some bit of instruction, lore or inspiration for shooters. At least two or three posts every week are interesting and helpful to me.

Yesterday's piece was about how to make a dull photo into something new and dramatic using Photomatix Pro3. Readers of this blog know that I'm fond of the HDR images you can create with this software, using three to seven shots at different exposures to create an entirely new whole. It never occurred to me that you could use Photomatix on a single image. The little tutorial in the link shows how much fun it can be.

So, this is something I shot about the same time as Monday's post at the Carl Milles fountain, The Meeting Of the Waters. The original was pretty awful. There was too much contrast between the statue and the building, I forgot my tripod, my manual focus was sloppy and, probably, the dog ate my homework. After reading the DPS piece I threw the single image into Photomatix, buffed it up a bit in Photoshop and, voilà, this is what we get.

FRIDAY AFTERNOON FOLLOW-UP: U "R" Us asked to see the original of this picture, before Photomatix and Photoshop. So, here it is.

Almost As Realistic As A Photograph

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Looking north on 6th Street from just south of the downtown core.

My style of HDR photos has vaguely reminded of the work of some painter but I couldn't place it. It finally came to me yesterday: Richard Estes. You can see a large sample of his work through Google Images here. He is a member of the 20th Century school of (mostly) American painting known as Photorealism. Other members of the movement include Ralph Goings and Chuck Close. Close is a personal favorite but his work has gone far beyond approximations of photographs. Again, Google Images provides many examples (click here).

The link I see between some HDR photographs and photorealist paintings is this: they sort of look like conventional photos but not completely. More like paintings of photographs with detail, color and tonality modulated to suit the artist. People often see the images as hyper-real. A photographer with software like Photomatix Pro, which I use (thanks to Minneapolis CDPBer Greg for the tip), doesn't have nearly the range of options of a painter but, still, we can lift a scene like this one to something above the mundane. Plus, it just looks cool. I will now get off my soap box.

WHAT I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO DO LAST NIGHT BUT DIDN'T: start an introductory yoga class. I'm 58 and have poor physical flexibility and balance - thought it might do me some good. But I left work late and was tired (whah) and didn't want another obligation. So I came home, had a bite and wrote this. And I'm happy.

TOMORROW: more HDR with the Thursday Arch Series, plus a new post on Gateway.

Soldiers Memorial - Full View In HDR

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So this is what the whole building looks like. The statues I've been posting pictures of are on pedestals towards the top of the outside stairs - you can just see one here.

One of the things I especially like about Photomatix is the way you can control the result. It's easy to achieve an image that's painterly as well as eye-catching. The color tones are often the bit-more-than-real typical of color postcards up to the 1960s. Lots of HDRs are screaming crazy (although there is a place for that). Search for HDRs on Flickr. Too many look like the backgrounds on futuristic blow-em-up computer games. I like a little more subtlety.

WHAT I DID YESTERDAY: attended a closing. See below and come back tomorrow.

TOMORROW:

A Courthouse That Glows

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Photomatix can do strange and wonderful things to your pictures, although it takes some experience to get comfortable with it. If you didn't know better, you might think that this image was a painting. I particularly like the way the software adds a light glow around large objects although I don't know the technical reasons why that happens. This image is made of three photos, shot at correct exposure, two stops underexposed and two stops overexposed. The variable is the shutter speed, not the f stop, because you need to keep the depth of field the same. Photomatix squishes everything together, preserving high and low tones. Then you can fiddle with it some more. This is another picture of the architecturally wacky Civil Courts Building, with the Arch lurking in the background.

BY THE WAY, you may begin to notice some changes in the blog starting today. For one thing, I'm now using my real name, not the old nickname. Something new is afoot, something exciting (well, depending on how somnolent you are), with a projected launch next Thursday, November 13. Watch the skies. And thanks, PJ.

WHAT'S ON FOR THE WEEKEND: very little (a relief!), made up of tons of paperwork at the office, photo shooting, photo editing, dinner with our daughter and son-in-law, and working on this hush-hush new project. That's what I call free time.

TOMORROW: all of Soldiers Memorial. The full view. More than meets the eye but not necessarily the lens.