Here are a few high dynamic range (HDR) shots I took this weekend — click for bigger versions.
Sunset at the cemetery
Another view from Montjuïc
Sunset on a farm in MontsenyYes, you’re right — the skies are beautiful in Barcelona! These are my first experiments with HDR photography…the slightly “surreal” quality is due to the fact that you can see both the “overexposed” sky and the “underexposed” foreground quite clearly.
360-degree panorama from a viewpoint partway up the steep cemetary on Montjuïc, not long before sunset.
By the way (and speaking of death…?), I just realized the blog had its first birthday about a week and a half ago (Nov. 9)…and no one even noticed, not even me! Well, a belated feliz cumpleaños to you, Enlaces Ligeros! Long may your garden grow!
Gorgeous pictures! I had to ask someone (you know who) about HDR photography. At first I thought you had tweaked them in photoshop but I hear (from you know who) that this can be achieved with your camera. Please do tell if you have a new camera!
Oh… happy belated birthday Enlaces Ligeros!
Thanks! For those who don’t know and are curious (and don’t have a “you know who” to ask), there are several ways to produce a high dynamic range image using digital cameras. ["Analog" (i.e. film) cameras capture an extra stop or two of dynamic range relative to consumer digital cameras, which is obviously better but still not enough to produce the above images from a single shot.]
Basically, you need a way to capture the wide range of light intensity in the scene, so you can see colour detail both in (for example) the bright sky and the darker silhouetted foreground. In the above cases this was done with multiple exposures using different shutter speeds.
I didn’t have a tripod, so the shots were hand-held. Later, I aligned them and then turned them into HDR image files (OpenEXR file format).
Finally, I used a process called “tone mapping” to remap them back into a regular (low dynamic range, 8-bit) image file. The tone mapping process I used looks at intensity locally, more the way the human eye does, so that you can (for example) see both the sky and ground with similar “actual” intensity levels and yet get have impression the sky is brighter. It can give a sort of surreal look when viewed all at once! In fact, ironically — after all these years of trying to make computer-generated imagery look “real” — it makes real photos look, well, computer-generated. And that’s…cool? (-;
congrats on ye olde anniversary. Lovely photos.