Friday I had the opportunity to photograph Charlotte from the roof of Hearst Tower, 201 N Tryon, and 1 Independence Center.
Being on top of Hearst Tower was particularly unnerving, but I managed to grab a few keepers.
As soon as I can I’m going back to Hearst Tower for a longer shoot.
I guess having a wife in property management has some advantages.
Below is a sample of the results.
It was a simple project. Take one picture, pass the camera to someone else, and return to me when finished.
Everyone did great, thanks for all your effort.
Link to the gallery of images.
Learn to take pictures that most people will think look good, most pros will think suck.
Most photographers know that Photoshop CS2 has a HDR plug in that isn’t really HDR.
True HDR images require a higher number of bits per color channel than traditional images; HDR images have a much wider exposure latitude than traditional images. The images have the same latitude as wide exposure latitude film. For this reason most HDR images are represented as 32-bit.
How this is done in CS2
1. What you do is bracket your shot.
Take 3 shots of one scene. One under exposed, one expose correctly, and one over exposed.
2. The HDR plug in uses the information in the three pictures to build one picture. The highlights are through the roof, so are the shadows, and the grays are flat as a pancake.
What does this mean? The Photoshop cs2 HRR plugin isn’t really HDR, but can give you an idea of what an HDR image looks like. Unfortunatly people seem to be going to the next level of the HDR range and boosting the saturation when they boost the exposure.
This is pretty cool to the unicorn-loving novice. “Hey, man that there sure is a good picture.” But it’s easily recognizable to pros and prosumers, and most serious photographers don’t like the overused HDR plugin in the hands of a novice. The HDR tool is great if you know what you are doing. There are just too many people producing over saturated trapper keeper cover art pictures with it. For example see the HDR Flickr group. The resulting images are made by the computer not the artist, excuse me, in this case the photographer.
These HDR plugin pictures usually aren’t true to the real environment the picture was taken. Instead of learning how to take a real picture the correct way some people would rather be lazy and produce eye catching, yet fake looking photographs. These HDR pictures remind me of those horrible moving pictures you see in Mexican restaurants. Click picture for link.
What shocked me most of all was that some people would actually want to build this feature into the camera. They want to give up creative control of the shot to the camera.
All the more reason to hire someone that knows what he or she is doing to shoot your wedding or special event.
Long story short. Keep you hands of the saturation throttle when making HDR images in photoshop. If you don’t your pictures will look like crap.
On my way to the bank today I ran into a Peta protest in front of Christine’s building. I was disappointed. There were only about 8 peta members, somehow I expected something bigger.
Speaking of bigger, the Circus is coming to town! You can get discounted tickets at http://www.ringling.com/ .
