David Savoie

HDR and a recent trip.

2011-08-17T10:59:00.000-07:00

This photo is the finished product from a recent adventure in the wilds of philly:

First off we'll take a look at the scene, and how I went about shooting it.
The room has a wide range of lighting levels, from the bright skylight on top, to the much more prevelent shadows that filled most of the room (about 95% of the light was coming from those windows above). No test shot was needed here; a wide range of exposures would be used to capture the full tonal range, as a standard 2-3 exposure set would simply leave out too much data to be useful (my end goal was to create a more video-game like image than exact photo replica and thus i would need a more even exposure vs a lot of light and shadow).
i settled on a set of 7 images taken at 1.7 stops apart that game me the range I was looking for. The first of these started at 4 stops under the metered reading.
All images were shot at ISO100, tripod, nikon D80, 12-24mm tokina lens at 12mm.
Here are the base 7:

I probably could have got away with taking a few out of the set, but again with the effect I wanted this was a widly enough spaced set that they would not pile on un-needed data and kill the image. The batch was loaded into photomatixpro for the first round of work. Right off the bat the highlights were too strong/too much of the image, so the white point was pulled almost all the way down, the black point raised, gama brought down a tad, and shadows smoothed out a bit. Light smoothing was set on med. From there it was just a few minor tweaks to get the working HDR image.
Here is the photo before heading into CS5:

Once into photoshop, the steps were simple and fast. I've got an action that I use on a lot of photos like this. It is a set of curves that desaturate and shift the color balance a bit older looking. That layer is set on soft light to bring back the colors and pop contrast a bit (you can do this by hand simply be strengthening the blacks/whites and working on saturation). From there an unsharp mask was applied, and here we are:

DPS, Summer- 2011

2011-06-30T13:59:00.000-07:00

2011-06-30T13:33:00.001-07:00

2011-06-06T10:23:00.000-07:00

2011-05-31T11:02:00.000-07:00

2011-05-25T11:01:00.000-07:00

2011-05-14T20:53:00.000-07:00

2011-05-12T09:28:00.000-07:00

2011-05-08T16:49:00.000-07:00

2011-05-07T21:03:00.000-07:00

2011-04-27T10:12:00.000-07:00

2011-04-22T12:46:00.000-07:00

2011-04-16T12:30:00.000-07:00

2011-04-13T12:16:00.000-07:00

2011-04-09T20:25:00.000-07:00

2011-04-05T10:49:00.000-07:00

2011-03-30T19:40:00.000-07:00

2011-03-26T15:10:00.001-07:00

2011-03-23T21:09:00.000-07:00

2011-03-16T23:31:00.000-07:00

2011-03-14T20:05:00.000-07:00

2011-03-14T12:03:00.000-07:00

2011-03-07T20:31:00.000-08:00

2011-02-11T20:32:00.001-08:00

2011-01-16T19:10:00.000-08:00

2011-01-13T00:22:00.000-08:00

2011-01-12T22:54:00.000-08:00

Sanibel Island, FL- 2010-2011

2011-01-07T19:22:00.000-08:00

Weather was a bit colder/darker the one day i really went out to shoot and i decided to try things a bit differently than i normally shoot, getting down close to the water and seeing what i could come up with this way. Because of this some of the wave and water shots have sand/water on the lens, but i was fairly happy with most and put up some of the ones that caught my eye.

Enjoy.

2010-09-06T22:25:00.000-07:00

2010-04-03T18:00:00.000-07:00

2010-04-01T19:06:00.000-07:00

2010-01-25T19:29:00.000-08:00

2010-01-14T12:03:00.002-08:00

2010-01-14T12:03:00.001-08:00

2010-01-14T11:21:00.000-08:00

2010-01-14T00:56:00.000-08:00

Little bit of everything

2009-11-23T19:49:00.000-08:00

2009-10-19T20:52:00.000-07:00

2009-10-19T20:49:00.000-07:00

2009-10-19T20:45:00.000-07:00

2009-10-18T13:56:00.000-07:00

2009-09-20T21:09:00.001-07:00

2009-09-09T22:27:00.000-07:00

Some photos from my time out in boulder, more to come i am sure.

2009-08-08T18:57:00.000-07:00

dates???

2009-04-12T19:51:00.000-07:00

forwhatever reason the dates on these posts are all over the place, not reflecting the correct post times (the 6 newest posts for example are all completly off). No idea whats up.

2009-03-18T16:40:00.000-07:00

2009-01-27T11:45:00.001-08:00

2008-07-01T22:26:00.000-07:00

2008-03-03T20:14:00.000-08:00

2008-02-29T22:15:00.000-08:00

2007-10-24T22:16:00.000-07:00

2007-09-17T19:50:00.000-07:00

2007-05-24T22:17:00.000-07:00

2007-04-01T21:39:00.000-07:00

2007-03-13T20:12:00.000-07:00

2007-03-01T20:17:00.001-08:00

2007-03-01T20:11:00.000-08:00

2007-02-23T12:38:00.000-08:00

2007-01-23T10:45:00.000-08:00

2007-01-18T16:28:00.000-08:00