HDRI Experiment

Been away from Blogger a while for no good reason, and although I'm still not up for any fancy writin' stuff, I thought I'd post a picture.

I have been experimenting a little with HDRI photography (which stands for High Dynamic Range Imagery). The idea is that you take a photo (on the tripod) of a scene with the exposure artificially reduced such that the foreground subjects will tend to be quite dark, while the sky and its associated textures will be well exposed. You then take another picture of the exact same scene except with the exposure increased such that the foreground subjects are well exposed. This will, of course cause the sky to be more or less overexposed and any textures will be lost.

Using fancy (freeware) software you then combine the two images to create a single image that has both the foreground and background exposures well compensated yielding some pretty cool effects. For some examples of HDRI photography done well visit this guy's page (you might also want to visit his reviews of oddball Japanese food items).

For a less well done example please click a gander at this image


I'm still fooling with the settings so I'm not getting any "natural" looking images yet, but I thought this reject looked pretty cool anyway. I hope you enjoyed it too.

Don