Learning Something New

Of late, I have been trading photography and Photoshop tips with a couple of coworkers who are very talented photographers.

Recently we put our heads together to gain some collective understanding of the techniques which seem to be the latest trend in photography: HDR (high dynamic range) photos and the usage of various tonemapping algorithms.

Although the effects have been used far too much and gotten overexposed (pardon the pun), it's hard to argue with the results when you see the amount of detail which becomes visible.

Since FedEx just dropped off my new tripod ($16.76 on Amazon), I figured I'd give it a try. Before knowing any of this, here's a picture I would have taken of Dakota:



Taking three simultaneous photos at different exposures, combining them into an HDR file, and then tonemapping the result gives me this:



Another picture from my backyard:



And then the same drill (three exposures, combined to HDR, tonemapped), only this one I selectively blurred the background:



It's a bit of work, but I'm pretty excited about the possibilities.