Palmer Events Center, Austin, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

I spent an hour on Wednesday evening catching great light at Auditorium Shores. I had been wanting to head down there to get some evening shots of the Austin skyline but ended up taking a lot more of the Long Center and the Palmer Events Center, both spectacular new landmarks and fabulous venues.

This image is a 3 exposure HDR taken from a low angle with a very wide angle lens to give a dramatic view of the wooden roof. In retrospect, I should have moved the camera slightly further to the right to get perfect left/right symmetry but this will have to do for now.

I’m posting this right after recording PhotoNetCast #27 in which I was invited to join a discussion on High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography. These notes are intended to provide a bit more information and a few pointers if you are interested in looking at the kinds of images we will be discussing and also learning how to produce tone-mapped HDR images for yourself.

Some Examples of Good HDR

Photographic tastes are very personal but, to get things started, I would recommend looking through the work of some of these folks who I think do a fantastic job of showing HDR techniques used extremely well. I would be foolish to suggest that these are the best HDR photographers on Flickr but they are certainly the ones whose work I follow closely and very much enjoy. These are in no particular order.

• Trey Ratcliff (stuckincustoms) is probably known by many as the king of HDR. He travels extensively and posts new photos daily. His blog is also well worth following and is a great place to start if you are looking for an HDR tutorial.
• ~EvidencE~ (who doesn’t provide a real name) posts wonderful examples of HDR depicting industrial scenes and decay, in addition to some superb landscapes.
• Roman Solowiej (shexbeer) also concentrates on images of decay and destruction where HDR techniques are used to great effect to accentuate texture.
• Karl Williams (Shuggie!!) takes wonderful urban and landscape images using HDR techniques for the majority of his pictures. Many of Karl’s images are taken around my old stamping grounds in Glasgow, Scotland.
• Erlend Robaye (Erroba) produces beautiful citiscapes and abstracts using HDR techniques.
• Jerry Hayes (JerryHayesAustin) is a local photographer with whom I have had the pleasure of shooting a few times. I’m linking to his set of Special Event Photography images since these are fabulous examples of how HDR can be used subtly to produce natural looking results in tricky lighting situations.
• Steve Sawford (Steel Steve) is another UK-based photographer whose urban HDRs taken in the industrial north of England are superb.
• Raul Pires Coelho (raul_pc) is based in Portugal but posts urban and cityscape HDRs from around Europe.
• Sarah Peters (sarah_peters1) is based in the town of Douglas in Scotland (9 miles from my home town, as it happens) and uses HDR techniques on many of her stunning landscape shots. Again, her images show wonderful use of HDR to produce natural-looking results.

Books

There are loads of web-based resources for learning HDR but I find having a good old fashioned book a great way to learn. Here are three that I particularly like.

• “The HDRI Handbook” – Christian Bloch. I found this book extremely helpful but it would probably be better read after having worked with HDR for a while since it covers a fair bit of theory. It does a great job of comparing software tools and also comes with a CD containing various images and evaluation copies of some of the tools.
• “The Complete Guide to High Dynamic Range Digital Photography” – Ferrell McCollough. I’ve just bought this book and have not yet had a chance to read it through. From what I have seen, however, it looks to be a very practical guide and probably a great book to read as someone wanting to start shooting HDR images.
• “Mastering HDR Photography” – Michael Freeman. I picked this book up and had a look through it in our local book store recently and was very impressed. It covers a lot of ground and has a very good mix of technical and practical information.

Software

I use a combination of Adobe Lightroom 2, Adobe Photoshop CS3 and HDRSoft Photomatix to produce my HDR images. You can do the vast majority of the work in Photomatix alone but I find that Photoshop does a better job of merging images if there is any movement between the exposures and I feel that I get better images if I use the Photomatix export filter for Lightroom rather than loading the raw NEF files directly into Photomatix . Regardless of which tool I use to generate the HDR file, I always use Photomatix for my tone mapping. HDRSoft offer an evaluation version of Photomatix which watermarks its output and also a useful tutorial to get you started. The tool itself costs $99 but if you use coupon code “DaveWilson” when you are checking out, you will get a 15% discount.

Another tool I have played with briefly is Ariea HDR Max. This has a more polished user interface than Photomatix and one feature that I really like – the ability to turn on and off the contribution of any single exposure to the final HDR. That said, I found the tone mapping settings less flexible than Photomatix and had trouble especially with the gamma slider which seemed to generate enormous changes in the image with tiny movements. This may be fixed now and I would encourage you to download this trial version too to see how you like it.

I also have FDRTools on my “must check this out” list. I’ve seen some superb images created using this software but have yet to download the trial and play with it. The package is very inexpensive and endorsed by some of the big names in the HDR world so it’s definitely worth a look too.

Many, many other freeware and commercial tools exist to generate HDRs and tone map them so try as many as you can and settle on whichever gives you results you are happiest with.

If you are new to photography and having problems getting your head around the different exposure modes your camera offers, and how changing shutter speed and aperture affect the final outcome, you may like to take a look at the cameraDemo web site by Craig Hickman. This site offers an interactive tool that lets you fiddle with all the relevant settings and see how they affect the final image. It’s very nicely done and shows settings, exposure and depth of field rather nicely.

The only problem I’ve found is that the “Auto” exposure mode shows the wrong depth of field when you select it but, if you are interested in the kinds of thing this tool is trying to teach you, you would never be using “Auto” anyway, would you?

Butterfly Face On, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

When taking macros of butterflies, I try to steer clear of the stereotypical angles if at all possible. One approach that I like and which I don’t see very often is to concentrate on the insect’s head and shoot directly towards them from the front. You lose the patterns on the wings in these shots but the effect can be really interesting (as long as the eyes are absolutely sharp).

This image uses the head-on technique. The shallow depth of field means that the only part of the image which is completely sharp is the insect head which draws your attention to the eyes.

Do you think this works? Click on the image and give it a rating to let me know.

Last night, I was fortunate enough to attend a wonderful lecture by Houston-based photographer Arthur Meyerson prior to the opening of his show, “The Color of Light” at Alpha & Omega Photography Gallery in Austin.

Meyerson’s impressive list of awards includes gold medals from the New York Art Directors Club and Photo/Design Magazine, a Stephen Kelly Award for his work on a Nike advertising campaign and being named by Nikon in their “Legends Behind the Lens” list. Looking at his photography, it is obvious that these (and many other) awards are merited – his images are simply stunning.

The exhibition comprises prints of around 75 images spanning a 30 year career and showing a diverse set of skills. They range from tightly cropped portraits through large prints from panoramic cameras all the way to some incorrectly processed Kodachrome which yielded surprisingly appealing, textured results. All the photographs show a superb grasp of shape and light. Most compositions include very strong geometric elements and saturated colours but, very effectively, most also include a human touch – a single small figure seen from above standing on a Japanese pedestrian crossing, a lone child looking out from a small balcony in a Hong Kong high rise, a runner silhouetted against a sunrise crossing a metal bridge.

Although many images feature bold shapes, saturated colours and strong light, several beautiful photographs featuring soft or low light are also included. One particularly memorable image is taken from the air over Los Angeles and features perpendicular rows of side-lit palm trees rising through a layer of smog. This description doesn’t do it justice but the effect is beautiful. Another similar aerial of Manhattan shows the silhouettes of midtown and downtown skyscrapers rising above a layer of fog.

If you are a photographer in the Austin area and in need of some inspiration, this is a show you can’t afford to miss. This is some of the most impressive photography I have seen. Meyerson’s images are the accomplishment of my own aspirations – his photographic taste and mine are very similar with the exception that he is showing prints of the shots that I only dream of!

The exhibition opens on April 4th and runs until the beginning of May.

Butterfly Drinking, originally uploaded by David A G Wilson.

Our main objective in going to Houston a couple of weekends ago was to visit the museums down there. One of the highlights for me was definitely the outstanding butterfly exhibit in the Houston Museum of Natural Science which is housed in a large, glass structure on one side of the building. The space contains a spectacular waterfall dropping about 40 feet from the roof down the center into a pool. This is surrounded by a large variety of rain forest plants with a huge number of butterflies flitting between them.

I spent an hour or so there (Nikki and the boys left for the gift shop well before me) and played with my Tamron 90mm f2.8 Macro lens. Lighting was a bit tricky but I managed to get several shots I’m very happy with, one of which you can see here.

My hit rate was pretty poor (about 4 to 5%, I reckon) but given how the insects flutter around and the tiny depth of field when you are that close (about 2 to 3 inches away in this case), I guess that’s reasonable. It all comes back to my firmly-rooted belief that to get a few good pictures you have to take a whole lot of bad ones.

I’ve sat through my share of airline safety announcements and, to be perfectly honest, I pretty much ignore them now. Southwest Airlines appears to have a somewhat different approach in allowing their attendants leeway to deliver it in non-standard ways. I mentioned this to a friend who is a retired 757 pilot for United the first time I flew Southwest and heard a humourous version of the spiel and he indicated that this would not be allowed on most airlines due to the fact that the announcement is federally mandated. Personally, I far prefer an amusing delivery and reckon that a whole lot more people actually listen to this kind of thing than the usual, dry announcement.

My wife stumbled upon this example yesterday. I give this guy full marks for excellent delivery!