Terry Cordes' Daily Photo Blog

I really enjoy shooting sports. Athletes have emotion and show it. They concentrate intensely and forget you are there. They do their thing while I do mine.

Kids sports is especially fun for me because of images like this one. Its a good picture, but if this were professional baseball (or even high school, college or minor leagues) the batter would be focused on the ball hitting the bat (which he/she should). Not with kids. You never really know what they are concentrating on, thinking about, or about to do for that matter.

Last weekend a coworker mentioned HDR photography to me. At the time I knew nothing about it. This week he forwarded a link to a tutorial on HDR photography using a program called Photomatix by HDR Software.

HDR In a Nutshell

I'll let those of you who are really interested, do the research on HDR. For the rest, I'll give you a brief description. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. In short HDR is an attempt to properly represent the tonal range of the human eye in a digital image. To do this, a range of photographs is combined into a single image. The range of original images are usually bracketed frames of the same picture.


My First HDR Attemp
Here's one of my first attempts at HDR photography. This particular image is a combination of five images.



Conclusions

All in all I am pretty impressed with what Photomatix can do. I'll probably by the pro license, but for now I am still experimenting, hence the Photomatix watermarks in the image (Photomatix provides a fully functional trial, but each generated image has the watermark). Essentially, this is a digital (software) means of doing what a combination of filters would do to film.

Brief Tutorial

This was a pretty basic trial. I took five bracketed images. The images were shot in Nikon Raw (NEF) format. Unlike many HDR processes, I used Nikon CaptureNX to convert to 8 bit TIFs first. This seemed to ensure the best colors from the NEF. I then processed the TIFs through Photomatix. Processing through Photomatix was done with little customization other than some temperature and saturation adjustments. The resulting file was then saved as a TIF.

I'm hoping that in the next few days I'll be able to do some more thorough playing with this, but for now this should suffice.

Let me know what you think....

Terry

A friend showing off his new regulator necklace at happy hour.

Sometimes sitting in a cube can do things to you. It distorts your perception. I don't think my perception is as distorted as theirs...



The funniest part was watching people walk by. Everyone can see the projector pointing at the ceiling. As they would walk by, nearly everyone would look directly into the projector and then kind of "Ouch". I wish I could have gotten a picture of that, but it just wasn't practical.

One thing about the software engineering profession is that it requires dedication. It seems silly, but many times you are left alone in an empty office late at night trying to fix a problem. When its a problem that you created its one thing, but when it a problem primarily created by someone else it takes true dedication to work through it.

I was driving from an assignment today to Wal-Mart (had to pick up a Christmas present) through Chesterfield. As I progressed down Wildhorse Creek Road, I discovered really striking scene. The broken, snow covered fence really struck me.




I like this picture because of the texture created by the barren branches covered by snow, the wood fence and the grass creeping through the snow in the foreground. Discovering this on the side of the road in the middle of a snow storm was a real delight.

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Many people - especially newspaper editors - will tell you an image of a person is useless without showing the subject's eyes. Like many rules, this is one that is meant to be broken.

I've always liked these POV (point of view) shots. I think they are exceptional at capturing a verb - ironically what a photojournalist should be doing (see Mark Hancock's blog about "What is a Photojournalist?"). There is no question what the subject of this picture is... its playing the drums.

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Well, the ice is letting up but the cold is not. The ice that has fallen over the last few days has hung around as the temperatures have stayed low. Thankfully, this has lead to some interesting photo opportunities later in the evening. When light would usually be too low for hand held shooting, all the ice on the ground reflecting light brightens things up enough to take some interesting pictures.





I really liked this picture because it was back lit causing a very contrasty image and making the ice stand out on the branches. I shot it much like you would shoot an underwater shot - looking up. Something land photographers tend not to do because of back lighting. Obviously it can work if you have the right scene.

I also really like the texture of this type of picture. Thankfully depth of field is of little concern in images like this because there is no depth to the image :) I was able to shoot this image at a very large aperture - I think f2.

The back light sparkling through the ice on the branches makes me think of a winter wonderland. Just in time for Christmas.

Enjoy!

Terry

One of my favorite aspects of digital photography is that it removes inhibitions about taking images. This in turn makes you more likely to take unusual pictures that you may not have been willing to taken with file.

Today was the beginning of the first ice storm of 2007/2008 here in St. Louis. If I was still shooting film, I would probably not have taken as many pictures as I did of the Yakima rack on the jeep. Without taking several pictures I would most likely not have gotten this image...





The Jeep sat out over night in the freezing rain and as you can see, ice storms in St. Louis can be pretty impressive. Equally impressive - to me anyway - is how well my D300 handled the situation. Like most of my images this was shot in an automatic exposure mode, Aperture priority I think. White balance was cloudy A3. I won't bore you with any more of my subjective observations about the D300 and instead refer you to a more thorough review - www.dpreview.com or www.kenrockwell.com.

As a side note, I like Ken Rockwell's reviews because it is more level headed, more practical and less technical in every little aspect. That having been said, www.dpreview.com is very thorough.

Just be forwarned a lot that is written on the internet about the D300 is from previews.

I've never been a big fan of flash photography. Well not as the primary lighting source. Harsh lights and shadows are hard to control and more times than not look unnatural. Because of that I've always liked shooting slow/rear curtain sync to stop the action but still provide a dynamic element to my images. I'm not alone, however, shooting events its often difficult to individuals to appreciate these types of images. Editors like them, but parents are kind of hit or miss.





Still, I always capture a few in slow/rear curtain sync. Like the picture above, I always find them some of the most interesting images from an assignment. This particular one was taken at a bowling alley (Thank you Mr. Obvious) during a birthday party.

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