Wednesday, May 16, 2007

When does it end?

My latest venture and craze is HDR, ie. high dynamic range. You can read up on HDR by following THIS link.

I bought a program called PHOTOMATIX PRO
This program allows me to convert either a single RAW file or a bracketed image into HDR.
I was a bit confused and excited about this new program and just jumped in head first not caring how it was going to look. But the more I play, the more I learn and the more I like my final images. I am beginning to be able to control the amount of effects on the image. Some call for less play while others want lots. In order, here are images from the first 24 hours of owning this amazing program.


Kevin Talma and his kids chilling out on the beach with Dereck, Kane and Bob (the dog) on Long Beach, Barbados early one April morning.

Bathsheba rocks.
An old building that sits on top of a rock at Bathsheba. It was built initially as a men's changing room. It never had a roof till an American soap opera decided to use it in one of their episodes and so a roof was added.

Dereck standing outside Earthworks in the middle of Barbados. Earthworks is a local pottery place that also sells sweet treats, batik, locally made clothing and other local art in Barbados.

Monday, May 14, 2007

Smoking

No, I don't smoke, never have, never will, but I lit some incense and photographed the smoke. I read an article on photographing smoke in Popular Photography magazine as I subscribe to it. There are also a lot of smoke photos on flickr that inspired me and I tried and my first attempt failed miserably. Someone told me to light the smoke from the side. I did that, but my light was too far away from the smoke, so I finally brought it really close.......... like inches from the smoke and used the borrowed macro to shoot these. To get the colour smoke shots, I inverted the original shots in Photoshop and then played with the hue/saturation and colour balance. The fun part is in Photoshop.