Mike Peregrine
EF5
Thanks ... Union Station is wonderful. It seems to have more and more monetary setbacks and I wish it didn't, because I love that place. There's another new photographic hotspot that just opened back up here Ryan ... and I'm anxious to go check it out. The old President Hotel downtown reopened after a full restoration/renovation. It looks like quite a place. My next serious HDR project, though, is going to be to try this on a city skyline at dusk or dark. I think the result will be quite interesting. I'm also curious about trying it with a panorama.
There is a bit of a learning curve between reading about how it's done and actually doing it. But once it clicks, the process works well. It's very interesting anyway. You really do start running into a lot of temporal issues in a public venue. It's near impossible to avoid ghosts in the scene as long as people are strolling through the shot. If you look closely you'll also see the ones who stood still for the couple of seconds it took to expose the images. In a way, composites are a hybrid between still photography and video, retaining elements of each.
The images this process produces look rich ... the tonality that is perceived by the human eye is much closer to being duplicated with these. But the images are so rich that they appear contrived. As I said earlier in this thread, we aren't really accustomed to this type of photograph yet for the most part. The closest thing our mind associates it with is probably CGI, which is a completely contrived environment given parameters that mimic reality. In the case of HDR, we are looking at a new way of capturing a real environment ... we're just not used to seeing an image from a camera with a nearly full range of stops. Now if we could only get it to the several thousand range of stops our eyes actually perceive and we'll really have something wild. There's no doubt that someday it will be a real possibility. Our brains and eyes are incredibly precise instruments.
I've been thinking about your first image above, Ryan ... as to why the clouds on the sides appear as they do. The exposure level is there, but the clouds themselves look 'squashed'. This takes nothing away from the impact of the photo, IMO - but just an interesting by-product. I'm thinking this is actually something to do with the fact that the camera is 'pushing' these two walls into a two-dimensional frame. The actual walls and the clouds on the other side of them are three dimensional, of course. This effect is lost in the shot below, where you are exposing the clouds through the window at a 90 degree angle ... in effect, placing them closer to a 2D environment before the shots are taken. In the cathedral photo, this is impossible to achieve because the camera is seeing two walls at 45 degree angles or something against clouds at more complicated angles than that. Our brains are able to compensate for the scene if we were actually sitting there in the cathedral looking at it. But cameras cannot. This could be a limiting factor in several shots that we might have to take into consideration during composition. Still amazing, though.
One thing I really learned between the trip to SD and yesterday is to use a remote trigger. The composites yesterday were a big improvement ... almost zero shake this time and can be enlarged like crazy.
There is a bit of a learning curve between reading about how it's done and actually doing it. But once it clicks, the process works well. It's very interesting anyway. You really do start running into a lot of temporal issues in a public venue. It's near impossible to avoid ghosts in the scene as long as people are strolling through the shot. If you look closely you'll also see the ones who stood still for the couple of seconds it took to expose the images. In a way, composites are a hybrid between still photography and video, retaining elements of each.
The images this process produces look rich ... the tonality that is perceived by the human eye is much closer to being duplicated with these. But the images are so rich that they appear contrived. As I said earlier in this thread, we aren't really accustomed to this type of photograph yet for the most part. The closest thing our mind associates it with is probably CGI, which is a completely contrived environment given parameters that mimic reality. In the case of HDR, we are looking at a new way of capturing a real environment ... we're just not used to seeing an image from a camera with a nearly full range of stops. Now if we could only get it to the several thousand range of stops our eyes actually perceive and we'll really have something wild. There's no doubt that someday it will be a real possibility. Our brains and eyes are incredibly precise instruments.
I've been thinking about your first image above, Ryan ... as to why the clouds on the sides appear as they do. The exposure level is there, but the clouds themselves look 'squashed'. This takes nothing away from the impact of the photo, IMO - but just an interesting by-product. I'm thinking this is actually something to do with the fact that the camera is 'pushing' these two walls into a two-dimensional frame. The actual walls and the clouds on the other side of them are three dimensional, of course. This effect is lost in the shot below, where you are exposing the clouds through the window at a 90 degree angle ... in effect, placing them closer to a 2D environment before the shots are taken. In the cathedral photo, this is impossible to achieve because the camera is seeing two walls at 45 degree angles or something against clouds at more complicated angles than that. Our brains are able to compensate for the scene if we were actually sitting there in the cathedral looking at it. But cameras cannot. This could be a limiting factor in several shots that we might have to take into consideration during composition. Still amazing, though.
One thing I really learned between the trip to SD and yesterday is to use a remote trigger. The composites yesterday were a big improvement ... almost zero shake this time and can be enlarged like crazy.
That bottom shot's a keeper! A very, very dramatic example of what HDR can do. How well did the camera retain detail when shifting the aperature instead of the shutter speed? Darren & I were just chewing on this question the other day. I posited that changing the DOF that much and changing the lens sharpness that much and then blending the photos together would result in a weird HDR image. But I'd never tried it. It looks from your photo like this might work quite well! This is a big deal for storm photographers, because the sky moves quickly. If you're going to do an HDR of the sky, and the light is such that the exposure is 2 seconds at f/8, then with traditional shutter-speed-change HDR shots, you'd be shooting at least three exposures, one at 1/2 second and one at 8 seconds. Altogether, that's enough seconds for the storm to have moved some, which ruins the HDR composite. However, three images at two seconds might be quick enough to keep the sky from moving too much. 
